WAR COMES TO THE MAKERS OF WAR

That phrase comes from the old ‘Victory At Sea’ series. It referred to the American bombing of Japan starting in ’44 as the island airbases within range of the Home Islands became operational.
McClatchy reports that state and national pols from the great state of South Carolina are fixin’ to pass a law that if Guantanamo detainees come to the Charleston Navy Brig, why they’ll shut the electricity off to it (not to the entire Base, mind you, since the Yankee Navy employs a whole passel of red-blooded patriots in town, and the Yankee military is one of the State’s biggest employers).

Charleston, you may recall, fired the opening shots in the Civil War, cannonading Fort Sumter on a fine April morning in 1861 – and with great gusto. It later made a lesser – if less egregious – mark in history when General Sherman, fresh from the capture of Atlanta and his march through the great State of Georgia to Savannah, started making his way up the coast. The good citizens of Charleston had their remaining slaves take all their valuables, good furnishings, good silver and flatware up to Columbia, the State capitol, figuring to outfox ‘Uncle Billy’ and his bhoys, who were no doubt coming now to repay the compliment of 1861 with fire and iron. Alas, the bringer of war – kind of foxy himself – bypassed the makers of war and brought war inland up to Columbia, razing the place – and all the Charleston crockery to boot.

It’s that sort of place. A North Carolinian, in the brouhaha leading up to that terrible War, reflected morosely that his State was “a vale of humility, situated between two humps of pride”, the other hump being Virginia, home to Richmond and now bedroom to the Beltway. What evah is a body to do?

Now comes a sizable delegation of legislators in the matter of the great War on Terrah. Or Terr-er.

Having plumped for the whole thing, having cheered the Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act and all the other pomps and works for which History is fixin’ to hold somebody responsible, South Carolina is yet again faced with the prospect of a great War ‘coming home’. And again, they don’t much cotton to it. What evah shall they do?

They will legislate and pass a law. No gimlet-eyed stiff, upper lip for them. No sir! To the inkwells! To the touchpads! To the klieg lights! To the South Carolinians, as to their predecessors the Japanese, ‘war ‘ is something that happens to other people.

Nor are they alone. The good citizens of the great State of Kansas, specifically of the County of Leavenworth, situated therein and duly constituted, are equally shocked, shocked, at the thought that their ‘war’ might take up residence. They are home to a lucrative spread of military installations, not the least of which is the Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, where the Army goes to learn how to fight and win its wars (the curriculum is yet again in the process of revision, as we speak).

The good burghers also enjoy the employment opportunities afforded by several houses of incarceration within their jurisdiction. There is a county lock-up, a State lock-up, the big and semi-famous Federal lock-up known colloquially as “Leavenworth”, and a private-enterprise lock-up to handle inmates from States whose own zeal for righteousness and justice has overtaxed their brick-and-bar facilities.

And there is the military’s Disciplinary Barracks, a prison for all those caught in the quite possibly unconstitutional toils of the military justice system. That facility, recently moved into a Supermax complex when the old 19th century monstrosity was finally replaced a few years ago, was until 2001 proud of housing ‘the worst of the worst’, such as pudgy, soft-fingered Air Force Master Sergeants who, being ‘military’, were more dangerous than any other criminal in the country because ‘they knew how to use guns’. The thought of such personnel posing more of a danger than any 1st-year gang member can only bring a rueful smile to those who are familiar with military hyperbole, which to the military mind is almost indistinguishable from truth. Which is a trait the military now shares with the polarized Right and Left in the country.

But now, suddenly, the hapless inmates at the United States Disciplinary Barracks (its formal title) are demoted to just hapless-inmates; the ‘worst of the worst’ have suddenly been discovered to be a motley of teens, wandering Uighurs, and various bearded folk from what were supposed to remain far-distant battlefields – or, at least, ‘theaters of operation’.

Having demonstrated that it is utterly unable and unwilling to have to defend its actions in any civilian court, and faced with an increasingly restive military lawyer corps that is beginning to get fits of the vapours from thinking far too much about ‘abstractions’ and ‘concepts’ such as ‘Nuremberg’ and ‘war crimes’, the jailors are now in a quandary: How do you let go of a wolf you have not only trapped and shackled but have grabbed by the ears? How back away now? And who’s going to take the wolf off your hands and ‘home to their place’? Without your own pretty face getting bitten off in the process?

But if there’s one thing America has in abundance after 40 years of Left and Right demonizations, it’s prisons. And that’s why now the burghers and solons of these prison locales are looking out and up with about the same mixture of surprise, apprehension, and irritated confoundment as the Tokyo denizens who looked up to see Billy Mitchell’s B-25s coming in over the rooftops: This – is happening – to us? Do they know who we are? And the classic whine: Why usssss?

Suddenly the good patriotic folk are thinking of States’ rights and the heartless intrusions of a ‘fedril gummint’ which they had heretofore known only as a friendly and reliable cash-cow, delivering paychecks and subsidies with an inspiring regularity; an affable donkey, a mule faithfully schlepping the bounty of the public till to those shrewd enough to have gotten on the ‘good’ list.

Yea, these be strange times, and We shall see strange things.

In what has to be construed as a definitive proof of the existence of a God Who Laughs to Scorn, well-coiffed and well-shod solons known for their jingo, macho, kill-em-all-and-let-God-sort-it-out support of the frakkery on the Eastern Front are now buzzing about like overstuffed bees, essaying a stentorian bray to the effect that nobody is going to bring the war into their back yard. Harrrrrrumph!

It’s one thing to have a bunch of chained unfortunates safely warehoused in this or that well-walled facility, where their years of rot and vegetation can be made to manure the rich pastures of local emolument, and where their bedraggled and dispirited and disoriented families can come to visit and have to spread some cash at the local strip-malls and fleabags. It’s another thing to have folks who – if the stories about them be true – are connected to distant, very unhappy, and very resourceful associates and relatives, who might themselves decide to pay a visit.

And who knows whether such stories about them are indeed true? The fog of war, alas. The thing that gets kids in uniform killed and generals given a free pass to come up with further nebulous theories about the properties and dynamics of fog. But always over there. Somewhere. Somewhere else.

Curiously, in the august halls of the Senate, the execrable Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is not one of the pack, allowing his stable-mate, Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) to do that thing with the snorting and the stamping of the hooves and the flaring of wide nostrils and the shaking of antlers, horns, or large floppy ears.

And thereby hangs Graham’s tale, as it were. He is up to his own floppy ears in the equally execrable military justice system, being a general in its Reserve and a former Judge on what must be formally termed, and with a straight face, its ‘appeals’ court. The military’s attorneys, now combining the famous characteristics of that trade with all the worst elements of the professionals-in-the-military conundrum, are – as said previously – thinking very much of ‘Nuremberg’ and ‘war crimes’. And not in the abstract, but as something that may yet happen … to them.

With a few honorable exceptions who are trying to actually defend their clients, the JAGs are most solicitous of supporting this President as they were the prior specimen. And therefore at this point they would very much like someone to take the ‘wolves’ off their hands. The less the JAGs are seen near these folks, the less chance that people might start wondering just what the JAGs’ role has been in this whole dark and unholy mess. I’m waiting for DVD copies of ‘Judgment at Nuremberg’ to start disappearing from shelves and catalogs in the name of ‘national security’; my bet is that they have not been available at military PX’s and Exchanges for quite some time.

The war, if not yet Nuremberg, is coming home.

It is becoming repugnant, what is happening now. Although the war has been coming home in the form of dead and wrecked veterans for years, only now, and for this, are the pols rising up on their hind legs.

The dead can be buried. The wounded can be clucked ruefully about over coffee at the local diner. But the ‘enemy’, now the ‘enemy’ is coming. What do you do with them? What do you do with what you have done to them?

In a way, it’s like the national undercurrent of unfocused concern over what to do with the more-than-Soviet percentages of imprisoned citizens now starting to ‘come back’ into ‘polite society’? You can’t – yet, anyway – ‘civilly confine’ all of them because of what they ‘might do’. What now then?

There’s something of Cavafy in all of this, in all of this bustling and braying. But he saw, as We must sooner or later come to see, that “the barbarians were, somehow, a solution”. A solution to a vast national failure – not in war, but deeper than that.

Much, much deeper.

ADDENDUM

Daniel Nasaw reports that this has now broadened to a wider Republican Congressional groundswell.

SOUTHRONS BOTTOM OUT?

William Fisher reports on the most recent Republican candidates night ("Leading GOP Candidates Surge to Embrace Torture”, www.truthout.org/docs_2006/052307B.shtml).

The erstwhile frontrunners, he reports, “appeared to be competing for the machismo award”. It’s a rather sophomoric gambit – trying to be both macho and more macho than the next guy or than all the other guys – but this sophomoric quality is key to the “strangeness of our public discourse” noted candidly by Al Gore.

Still, this is a fashion-show and each of the guys has to impress his particular, unique, signature ‘english’.

The thing was rigged from the get-go by the initial premise-question, posed by the Fox flunkey, Brit Hume. It was the phantasmagoric ‘ticking bomb’ question: if you were the president and there was danger of an attack here on American lives, then would you authorize torture? This is an almost impossible scenario (a product of Fox Entertainment, not Fox … ummm … ‘News’); it hasn’t happened and if it ever were to happen it would be a once-only kinda thing, not the type of premise upon which to construct a policy (and deconstruct a Constitution). But ‘scenario’ is what Foxy Hume is going for here, not premise. And We wind up right back at the Gore-point: Our public discourse is becoming utterly weird.

If you were interviewing applicants for a trolley operator's position, would your sole inquiry be: What would you do if your brakes failed and you either had to slam into a platform full of commuters or run it onto a siding and kill a single track-worker? Just how much useful information would this question get you in relation to the responsibilities and tasks that the potential operator is expected to undertake? This characteristic of Our electoral discourse is beyond 'strange'. Of course, before this Republican version of the (useless) Big Question, there was the 'abortion' proof-question. Single-issue politics, single-issue political questions: We need to sober up; this nation is well on its way to becoming the world's largest - how to put it tastefully? - republica banannica.

One wonders if these were the type of shows Goebbels would have put on as the Eastern Front went south. If Goebby had TV, would the German volk have been treated to such panel discussions: a ratpack of Party wannabes, each eager to be the Alpha Ubermensch, scratching their heads at such a thorny if implausible a teaser as: If ze Fuhrer ordered you to torture, vood you follow ze order? The mind boggles at the enlightenment sure to be elicited from such a proposed situation.

Come to think of it, the answers elicited by Herr Hume could have fit right in with the above-proposed eidesis.

One mensch, a Rep. Tancredo (R-CO) went for laffs and said he’d be “looking for Jack Bauer at that time, let me tell you”. He got the laffs from the good burghers of South Carolina, inducing in the reader involuntary speculation as to just how successful loud prayer really is in maturing the human spirit.

But Tancredo does Us all a large service; he reveals the new Doctrine, the new Party line: “we are the last best hope of Western civilization … if we go under, then Western civilization goes under”. Ach! Shades of the Sportpalast! Those verr ze happy times! We are no doubt going to be seeing more of this type of assertion, first made when it became clear in Berlin that the Russians weren’t going to wait and apply for visitor-visas when they got to the borders of the Fatherland.

It was partly to inveigle FDR and Churchill to see the Third Reich as just another ‘Western’ nation, albeit one that had put itself on the line to combat the demonic malevolence of Communism. And partly to provide themselves with a new and more plausible identity (i.e. saviors and front-line defenders of Western civilization) now that their previous identity (all-victorious conquerors embodying the New World Order) had sorta kinda totally gone south. The Nazis became, overnight, the sore-bethumped front-line defenders of Western civilization (and was the rest of Western civilization going to stop quibbling about aggressive, invasive, pre-emptive war and join them … on the Eastern Front, as fast as possible, and bring fuel, ammo, chocolate and lotsa cigarettes?) Ja. Yah.

And as if he had read Goebbels’ own stuff and the German General Staff manuals of the First as well as the Second World War, Tancredo then asserts that “you better respond in a way that makes them fearful of you, because otherwise you guarantee something like this (“nuclear attacks”) will happen”. Ach ja! Using ‘terror’ as a force multiplier worked wonders in the Ukraine, and a war before that in Belgium. Using ‘terror’ to prevent folks from hating you enough to resist you worked well in France and Greece and the Balkans. And look how it cowed England and Churchill. Ja! Yo! Make them fear you … as if Robespierre’s observation that “nobody likes an armed missionary” hadn’t already undercut the Fundy hubris, Tancredo will go those whackjobs one better by channeling the Alte Kampfer and imply that Western Civilization will work just fine when it’s based on hate and fear. What the flok? Christianity does! Don’t it?

But to really repeat the performances of the Berlin Sportpalast in February of 1943, you need an audience as well. And the Party faithful – the ‘base’, they are called nowadays – can always be drummed up in South Carolina (the state that sent another Poison Dwarf – the JAG Lindsey Graham – to the Senate). South Carolina, that fine upstanding State-full of true-blue Americans, whose peccadillo of opening fire on the Stars and Stripes at Fort Sumter and over the course of the next few years killing thousands of US troops, was apparently paid for (and the case closed) when General Sherman, having completed his tour of the Great and Patriotic State of Jawja, came north on his way to keeping an appointment with General Grant in the vicinity of Richmond. But now We are to believe that they are the saviors of Western Civilization and why quibble over a few hundred thousand dead soldiers when Western Civilization and America is to be saved? ‘America’ … formerly known in South Carolina as ‘The Union’. They were against it. Even more than against likker. Even more than they were against emancipation. That South Carolina.

Mitt Romney will also save Western Civilization. He will not abide ‘torture’; he will support “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Ah, by any other name … Language comes easy to Mr. Romney, and concepts even more so. They’re like play-doh: as, for instance, that Mormons are Christians and Jesus was a reely reely nice guy. Ideas are like the parts you can put on Mr. Potato-head; mix and match. Mormons and Christianity, Nazis and Western Civilization, patriotism and secession … whatever. As long as you’re on the right side and you mean well. Oh, and he wants to double the size of Guantanamo. But that’s one prison that no State wants the federal contract for. Whatever. Moroni loves you!

Sam Brownback, a convert to Catholicism, has thereby a little more cred as a savior of Western Civilization. But he’s not into civilization; he won’t go down that road. He’s going to support the President (well, another one, anyway) because the job of the President is “to protect US lives” because “my standard is US lives”. Hmm. By that standard Lincoln was a colossal failure. Ditto FDR. But it’s a shrewd gambit, and one inherited from the Identities and maybe the Israeli PR folks: don’t focus on pesky questions of logic or legality, focus on the terror and the emergency that you should be fearful of. So no questions now about whether a President (or even this President) must uphold the Constitution and enforce the laws; this is an emergency … think of the US lives.

Well, scratch the President as being in it for Western Civilization. He’s in it for US lives. Minus the ones he’s lost in Iraq. Minus future losses in Iran. Minus … but why quibble?

And Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) brought Us about as close to Sam Ervin as this generation of pols will ever be able to take Us: he didn’t like the “Newspeak” of calling ‘torture’ by the name ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. “Nobody’s for torture” he then opined, kinda ambiguously. The Party faithful of the Great State of Carolina and formerly of the Confederacy weren’t sure they liked that: was he making light of them? Was he saying torture was not-good? (It is good – for other people … much as, in the pithy commentary of ‘The World At War’: “To the Japanese, bombing was something that happened to other people”).

He then had the nerve to think, out loud, in front of them, which in politics down South is the equivalent of the coach taking his pants down in front of the 8th-grade volleyball team. ‘We’ve given the President the power to go after Osama in Afghanistan, but now Osama’s in Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons, and we’re giving money to Pakistan. And we forgot about him and now we’re over in Iraq – that’s bogging us down – and we have forgotten about the people who attacked us.’

The response Paul got was a classic replay of any German general who suggested to The Leader that a two-front war was not a good thing.

And they say that there are no relevant lessons to be learned from World War Two! The neocons have been right all along, basically, about the relevance of World War Two. It’s just that they got the sides mixed up. But why quibble?

The article then nicely moves on to note that on the same day that this Party revival meeting was taking place, two retired Marine Corps Generals made a public statement about the dangerous use of “fear” as the driver of policy. General Krulak is a former Commandant and General Hoar commanded CentCom in Clinton’s day. Between them they have close to a century of experience and expertise.

It’s curious: as the actual generals themselves are starting to doubt the war, the Southrons, those uniform-happy military elitists, are now worshipping more reliable (i.e. reliably dead) generals like Stonewall Jackson (a man who was responsible for the deaths of more US troops than Admiral Yamamoto and Field Marshal Rommel). And they are deeply concerned for ‘the troops’. Forget the generals, they’ll support the troops. Perhaps to the tune of 800 tons a day? A few fresh divisions? A better war plan? Well, maybe not all that. But a new embassy compound in Baghdad. It will be no Stalingrad over there – no freezing in dirt trenches, exposed to the elements and starving. Our troops will be supported (and surrounded) in style. Festung Stalindhad. Fortress Baghdad. Potayto, potahto.

LBJ once gave some advice to Martin Luther King (on the afternoon of January 15, 1965, to be more specific). He didn’t want to “follow Hitler” the Great Texan said, but “Hitler had the right idea: Just take a simple thing and repeat it often enough, and even if it isn’t true, why, people accept it.” So Texas and Hitler go back a ways.

Here is the abominable legacy of Hitler. While he was militarily defeated, his (not unshrewd) observations about how to manipulate the citizenry of a large industrial state were spot on. Indeed, even if he got some of his own insights from American advertising techniques, he realized that while the people would buy a deceitfully advertised soap only once, they’d support ‘visions’ spun by their leadership to the very end (with a little help and inspiration from the government police power).

On the eve of his (and America’s) great civil rights victory of that Glorious ’65, with his appetite whetted for a Great Society that could go to the moon and defeat poverty and racism and so fulfill its historic destiny as a benefactor of humankind, LBJ was offering MLK the advice of Hitler.

He walks among Us still, Hitler. We must pray that Lincoln does as well. And that it will be the better – and not the demonic – angels of Our nature who prevail in the monstrous struggle now embroiling Us and Our Republic. But prayer must bear fruit in good works.

So shall We be known. So shall We be judged.