And now we lie in Flanders fields

War, adolescence, empathy, decisions

Matthew Parris has been reading a diary, the diary of an adolescent girl writing in interesting times. A German girl writing between 1940 and 1945. He gets involved in her life, feels something of what she felt, sees things for a moment through her eyes. Her diary does for him what what good books do: it broadens his sympathies.

Yet the context given to the article by the headline (Hilke’s diary: Anne Frank with a difference) and by Parris himself is one of surprise that this girl, like Anne Frank, should feel and say all these normal things at such a time, and yet still be German. Parris, like some of his commenters, seem to assume that Anne Frank has cornered the market on wartime adolescence and that all such experience is summed up in hers. That therefore we should be amazed that a girl living under the Nazis should capture our sympathy.

He finishes with this.

I went yesterday to a memorial service for one of my great predecessor sketchwriters on this paper, Frank Johnson, at St Clement Danes Church in the Strand: the Air Force Church, restored after German bombs reduced it to ruin. Outside is a bronze statue of Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris. Inside we sang: “I vow to thee my country”. Hilke’s diary was in my briefcase.

I’m not suggesting an answer. I don’t even know the question. But is there a better way?

This is the sort of sentimentalism that makes us unable to deal with the world. Is there a better way than war? Yes, and most people most of the time choose it. There's an Orwell essay in which he asks what Britain, shorn of all its imperial power, can offer the world. He answers, "the habit of not killing each other". And generally, that's what people, almost everywhere, almost all the time, opt to do: not kill each other. They talk, make rules, bend the rules, break the rules, look the other way, close their eyes, ears and noses rather than kill, or even be placed in a position where killing becomes a little more likely.

But sometimes, there isn't a better way. Sometimes, a decision has to be made that will lead to men, women and little girls like Hilke having bombs dropped on them. The people who have to make those decisions cannot do so in the state of mind in which Parris found himself after reading the diary. It would render them impotent, incapable of action. Who but the pathologically damaged would kill someone for whom they felt such sympathy?

When the time comes to make such decisions, it is not the Hilkes but the group, your group, you are thinking of and the question is one of survival as a group. Individual lives matter insofar as they matter to the survival of the group. It would be nice to pretend it could be otherwise, but it never has been and I can see no reason why it would ever be.

Hilke didn't die under the bombing. She survived and married. I'm very glad. But I'm also glad we killed enough of her countrymen to destroy the regime that they fought for.

The mistake of believing in you

In an article for the May, 1999 issue of Commentary, Gabriel Schoenfeld reappraised Kissinger through a consideration of his memoirs The White House Years and Years of Upheaval. He follows Kissinger's account of the fall of Phnom Penh, which includes a letter that should be read and re-read.

As the Khmer Rouge closed in on the capital city of Phnom Penh in early April 1975, the United States offered a number of Cambodian officials a chance to escape.

The reply addressed to the U.S. ambassador by Sirik Matak, a former Cambodian prime minister, and reprinted by Kissinger in full, is one of the more important documents of the entire Vietnam-war era.

Dear Excellency and Friend:
I thank you very sincerely for your letter and for your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection, and we can do nothing about it.

You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But, mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is no matter, because we are all born and must die. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you [the Americans].

Please accept, Excellency and dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments.

Immediately after the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, writes Kissinger, Sirik Matak was shot in the stomach and left to die over the course of three days from his untreated wounds.

Following this passage, Schoenfeld rekindles Kissinger's bitterness against the media, in particular, The New York Times, whose correspondent, Sydney Schanberg painted a rosy picture of the Khmer Rouge, dismissed the prospect of further violence and whose headline at the fall of Phnom Penh went:

Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life.

He later won a Pulitzer Prize.

(via Ninme)

Why go?

From a piece by 2LT Mark Daily on MySpace.

Maybe the reality of politics makes all political action inherently crude and immoral. Or maybe it is these adventures in philosophical masturbation that prevent people from ever taking any kind of effective action against men like Saddam Hussein. One thing is for certain, as disagreeable or as confusing as my decision to enter the fray may be, consider what peace vigils against genocide have accomplished lately. Consider that there are 19 year old soldiers from the Midwest who have never touched a college campus or a protest who have done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of representative government and individual rights by placing themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal religious fanatics. Often times it is less about how clean your actions are and more about how pure your intentions are.

He died last month in Mosul. In Iraq Journal has a larger excerpt and links, including one to the LA Times, whence this

In typical fashion, he sought out new points of view. In one discussion, he wrote that he asked a Kurdish man whether the insurgents could be viewed as freedom fighters. The man cut him off. "The difference between insurgents and American soldiers," Daily said the man told him, "is that they get paid to take life — to murder — and you get paid to save lives."

"That Kurdish man's assessment of our presence means more to me than all of the naysayers and makeshift humanists that monopolize our interpretation of this war," Daily wrote in a Dec. 31 e-mail.

There moral, and there's moral

Nick Cohen has written a book called What's Left: How Liberals Lost Their Way about ... well, what the title says (but in American - how come?). He wonders how so many of the well-intentioned could march in their millions to defend a brutal dictator, how they could give support and succour to any group, no matter how inimical to their purported values, as long as it opposed the US.

There is a long excerpt from the book here and it is well worth reading. The only problem I have with it is that his argument is entirely 'surface moral' (I'll explain that later). Saddam Hussein was a very bad man and it was a good thing to get rid of him. Agreed. But it wasn't Saddam's badness that induced us to help the Americans spend immense quantities of blood and money in getting rid of him. It was in our interests to get rid of Saddam. Just as it is in our interests to support a stable, relatively democratic Iraq.

It is also in the interests of Iraq and much of the rest of the world, though I wouldn't claim that benevolence had much part to play in the decision. Nevertheless, the possibility that a stable, untyrannical and non-theocratic state could be established in the Middle East was in the interests of virtually everybody who is not a Jihadist. In a region that is a perpetual social disaster contributing nothing to the world but its unrest and violence, a state that broke the Middle Eastern mould might make a big difference.

It may yet turn out well, after a generation or two. But, for me, the saddest thing is what happened here. Our leaders found it necessary to hide behind the loincloth of WMD, and they did so because they didn't believe the comfortable public of the democracies could live with the role of enforcer of world order, with the strategic vision which imposes that sometimes those that can, must. They were probably right. A public narcotised by the present tense sentimentalism of television images of suffering is not only incapable, but unwilling to look a little further ahead and take on the responsibilities of power. It doesn't bode well for our ability to keep power.

The decision to take down Saddam was moral but in a deeper, long-term sense than that of his 'badness'. Yes, he might have done even worse, but, more importantly, it was what Iraq could be that made this important. I'm not saying that it's going to work, but it might. And if it does, it will be to the benefit of all of us.

As a society we may be spoilt children, but on the other hand, it does mean that we have the image below to treasure forever.

One group of SWP stalwarts were joined, for the first march in any of their histories, by their mothers.

It's a boy! Circle the wagons!

Here's a different slant on the argument from demographics that Mark Steyn has made his own. In this one Islam is not the problem; it's lads

.... when 15 to 29-year-olds make up more than 30 per cent of the population, violence tends to happen; when large percentages are under 15, violence is often imminent. The "causes" in the name of which that violence is committed can be immaterial. There are 67 countries in the world with such "youth bulges" now and 60 of them are undergoing some kind of civil war or mass killing.

This is the view of Gunnar Heinsohn, of the University of Bremen, who has written a book, as yet untranslated, which if it were, would be called Sons and World Power. He points to the violence in the Palestinian territories, no longer directed against the Israelis, but against other Palestinians. And to Afghanistan, where

in the decade leading up to 1993, on the eve of the Taliban takeover, the population ... grew from 14m to 22m.

John Weidner adds the British example: the over-supply of loose cannon (sons) in the late 18th Century. The military drank a toast at the time:

Here's to a bloody war. Many to go and few to come!

They had stronger stomachs then, and no chances of promotion if a few officers didn't go down.

So not a clash of civilisations after all? One part of me resists explanations like this merely because they are mechanical, and therefore neither interesting nor open to the influence of intelligence or will. Nonetheless, it is precisely factors such as these that leave the clever analysts looking King Cnut. This is a thesis worth investigating further.

Another reason I resist such ideas is that they can lead to a sort of quietism. The FT journalist wonders

Should the west just wait for this wave to burn itself out? When the world is at peace, will it have been better to have kept our nose out of other people's business? Will it have been better to say we at least tried to steer the developing world through this crisis in a humane way?

What good would such an approach have been towards the British between 1750 and 1900? Zilch. But I do wonder, who is going to do something about it? The Europeans?

Societies with a glut of young men become temperamentally different from "singleton societies" such as Europe's, where the prospect of sending an only child to war is almost unthinkable. Europe's pacifism since 1945, in Mr Heinsohn's view, reflects an inability to wage war, not a disinclination.

On the other hand

Of the 27 biggest youth-bulge nations, 13 are Muslim.