On Memorial Day

6 Replies to “On Memorial Day”

1. I’d like to offer a salute to the veterans and fallen south of the 49th.
   Non Nobis Sed Patriae

2. That’s a great piece by Helprin, almost strange to read in the present tense. His moral soundness makes him sound like a throwback to a time when individuals’ characters were different than they are now. When he writes “(The decision to go to war) requires in turn the kind of extraordinary, penetrating debate that can occur only among those wise enough to understand mortality and weigh it against principles that cannot be left undefended,” he’s absolutely right. I wonder if our society’s level of self-obsession and its twin partner, empty, self-aggrandizing sloganeering, hasn’t practically obviated our ability of leaders to make such critical decisions as he describes; I wonder if today’s population would have supported the war effort in World War II.
   In a republished Memorial Day post at AmericanDigest.org, Vanderleun writes:
   “In a way, (the mindset that the ‘War on Terror’ is but a bumper strip) is preferable to the the mind set that now, in increasing numbers among us, prefers to take refuge in the unbalanced belief that 9/11 was actually something planned and executed by the American government. Why many of my fellow Americans prefer this ‘explanation’ is something that I once felt was beyond comprehension. Now I see it is just another comfortable position taken up by those for whom the habits of automatic treason have become just another fashionable denigration of the country that has made their liberty to believe the worst of it not only possible but popular.
   “Like the graves in my local cemetery, these souls too bear within them a small flag, but that flag — unlike their souls — is white and, in its increasing rootedness in our body politic signals not sacrifice for the advancement of the American experiment, but the abject surrender of their lives to small spites and the tiny victories of lifestyle liberation. (emph.mine)
   “In the cemetery at the end of my street, there are a few small flags. There are many more graves with no flag at all, but they are the ones that the small flags made possible. Should the terrible forests of white crosses ever bloom across our landscape — as once they did during the Civil War — it will not be because we had too few of those small, three-colored flags, but because we became a nation with far too many white ones.”

3. EBD
   […..I wonder if today’s population would have supported the war effort in World War II.]
   Yeah I really wonder as well.
   I have noted that our Canadian November 11th observances at our local cenetaphs are better attended every year….so perhaps there is hope.
   Then there are those truly spontaneous crowds on overpasses between Trenton On and the GTA (coroners office) each time one of our Canadian soldiers comes home….in a casket.
   That’s MY Canada.

4. “I wonder if today’s population would have supported the war effort in World War II”
   It’s a question I have often considered as well. I honestly don’t know. I think military action may have been supported initially, as it was historically, but I think the bigger question is would the Allied countries’ citizenry have seen it through to the unconditional surrender of the Axis?
   We inhabit a strange world where overwhelming military capability can be undercut by the manipulation of information at home. Take for instance the classic example of this, the 1968 Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War. This is now regarded as the point at which the Americans “lost” the war, certainly the point at which its population turned against the war. The media gleefully broadcast footage of the unprecedented attacks on cities and military installations across South Vietnam, which to that time had been considered safely away from the fighting. Walter Cronkite then famously pronounced the war unwinnable. The glaring irony, which is still seldom acknowledged, is that the Tet Offensive was a decisive military victory for the US and South Vietnam. The Viet Cong were essentially destroyed as an effective fighting force. But it turned out to be a victory for North Vietnam because of the political and social winds it kicked up on the other side of the world.
   That’s why, getting to the original question, I wonder if a similar level of mass media penetration in the 1940s could have derailed the prosecution of WWII in similar ways. Imagine if every household was constantly presented with images of Allied forces suffering setbacks in North Africa or Italy, and respected “arbiters of truth” pronouncing victory impossible.
   When I consider the present timidity of the Western populace in the face of belligerent Islam, I’m no longer certain there is anything that would produce a unanimous willingness to fight – even self preservation. If one has no will for self-defense, then nature can accommodate you in any number of ways.

5. “When I consider the present timidity of the Western populace in the face of belligerent Islam, I’m no longer certain there is anything that would produce a unanimous willingness to fight – even self preservation.”
   Kevin, recall the timidity of Europe, Britain and North America in the face of Fascism in the 1930’s. Nobody did a damn thing until Hitler started invading countries wholesale. They let him build up the largest armed force in the world, and they let him USE IT for a while too. The Americans sat on their @sses until 1941, when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbour. Which was probably the -dumbest- strategic decision ever taken.
   I think on balance we’re doing a wee bit better than the 1930’s, even pin-head Paul Martin recognized the need to put a couple of guys in Afghanistan.
   The Western population is no different now than they were then. We in mass respond to propaganda. Right now the propaganda is anti-Western, because the regimes in power are making money flogging anti-Western sentiments.
   When the need arises, the present regimes will be overturned, the propaganda will change to FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!!! and people will go for it just like in WWII. It’ll happen quick too, probably take one election and a couple of months to gear up for war.
   Which will be pretty horrific, given the strides we’ve made in war-making capability since the 1940’s. I’m not looking forward to the possibility myself.

6. I hope you are correct that the mindset of the Western populace can be changed from its current suicidal deference to hostiles. There is an enormous complication though, in comparison to the threat of fascism in the 30s. Germany and Italy were identifiable foreign powers with a state apparatus. The Islamic threat is more nebulous and entrenched within all Western countries, many of them even holding citizenship of the host countries that they openly boast will be transformed into Islamic caliphates. Will citizens of the West have the political willpower to reform immigration policies, aggressively deport so-called asylum seekers, and so on? For a start they will need to develop some immunity to the big bad R-word.
   As an aside, with the benefit of retrospection we can say that American intervention may have shortened WWII. It’s rather speculative, and I think a cogent case can be made on both sides of that argument. I’m an American myself and have endured the curious experience of European leftists criticizing us for “adventurism” in our contemporary wars, yet in practically the same breath criticizing us for not entering WWII until we were ourselves attacked.
   I believe America’s military inaction prior to December 1941 can be explained by a number of things. The Soviet Union also did not enter the war proper (if we discount their actions in Poland and Finland) until they were attacked, but both the USA and USSR knew they were eventually going to be forced into the war; they both also needed time to prepare themselves. America as a superpower is a decidedly postwar phenomenon. We must recall that at the outset of WWII, only America’s Navy was world class. The Army was small, closer in power to Portugal’s than to Germany’s or Japan’s. There was also immense public sentiment against involvement in another European war, a sentiment aggravated by Woodrow Wilson bringing the country into the first war after promising to keep it out. In 1940-41 the most valuable contribution the US could make was the material aid it provided. Even in its rush to build up an army after the outbreak of war, it was still well into 1942 before it could field effective land forces.