On Columbus Day, Are We Celebrating the Wrong Italian Explorer?

by Avi Davis and Michael Lotus

Every second Monday in October in the United States, the banks close, the post office shuts down, federal services are unavailable and many local public services cease to operate. It is the day in the calendar designated by our government to celebrate Christopher Columbus’  first landing in the New World.

Many American citizens believe that the public holiday marks the discovery of the land mass which would come to be known, three hundred years later, as the United States of America.

This is not true. Christopher Columbus, in none of  the four Atlantic  voyages of discovery he undertook from the Kingdom of Spain, ever set foot on the continent of North America.  The date October 12, 1492 only marks the day upon which he discovered an island off the coast of Cuba in the Caribbean – which some consider present day San Salvador Island and others consider Samana Cay.

What, in fact, we truly celebrate on the second Monday of October each year is not the discovery of the American continent(s) but rather the joining of the Old and New Worlds –  for this essentially marks the modern beginnings of what was to become known as the Western world.

The sudden opening to Europeans of the Western Hemisphere, and the contemporaneous discovery of sea routes to Asia, is one of many links in the chain of causation that led to the modern world. These sea voyages were essential early steps on the near-miraculous steps by which agrarian mankind  escaped from the Malthusian trap of pre-industrial civilization which offered a finite consumption of resources and no exit.  The once-in-history escape from this fate is therefore referred to by Ernest Gellner and Alan Macfarlane as’ The Exit,’ which originated in England and was then adapted to local conditions and replicated around the world.

Another way to describe this unique and world-transforming change is, in Jim Bennett’s words,” the triumph of production over predation.” In a post-Exit world, exploitation of other humans beings, by slavery and other more subtle means,  no longer became the primary path to wealth and power.

Would the Exit have occurred without the linking of the Old World with the New?

We can never be sure. Similarly, we can’t say for certain that the particular combination of history, technology, and geography that led the British Isles to become the driving force for the European Exit was either inevitable or would never be duplicated in another place or time.

What is clear, however , is that the chain of events set in motion by Columbus, Cabot, Verrazzano, Cartier and Jolliet and the other European explorers, resulted in a shift of populations from one hemisphere to another  – populations which would inevitably be linked by common heritage, law and language and creating a network of trade and cultural exchange which has survived to this day.

A further detail worth mentioning on Columbus Day is the observation that we in the Anglosphere may be celebrating the wrong Italian. That is because there were really four European discoveries and settlements in the Western Hemisphere –  a Spanish one -in the Caribbean and Mexico ( as well as points further south); a Portuguese one in Brazil;  a French one in the valleys of the St. Lawrence and  Mississippi Rivers and an English one along the eastern coast of North America.  In this regard, we should not forget that the explorations of John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), on assignment from the King of England in 1497 were the first recorded English commissioned incursions into North America.

So, while giving Columbus his due for uniting the Old and New Worlds, let us also celebrate the achievements of the Venetian sailor John Cabot, commissioned by Henry VII of England, whose discoveries led to the planting of the Anglosphere in the New World — which, in turn, led in turn to America 1.0, America 2.0 and then America 3.0, which is now struggling to be born.

Avi Davis is the president of the American Freedom Alliance. Michael Lotus is a fellow of the American Freedom Alliance and  a founder and senior researcher of the American 3.0 Institute.

An Officer and a Spy : A Review

It is now 80 years since the death of Alfred Dreyfus and 120 years since the end of l’affaire which bore his name. When most people think of this tragic episode in fin-de-siècle France they usually conjure, not images of the defenestrated Jewish officer who became a scapegoat for the French military’s intelligence lapses, but rather of an Austrian journalist covering the trial, who, sickened by the anti-semitic tauntings of the Parisian crowds, soon became the founder of the national political movement known as Zionism.

But Theodor Herzl, as romantic and fascinating a lead character as he might have suggested, does not appear at all in Robert Harris’ latest work An Officer and a Spy, his fictional account of the Dreyfus Affair.  In fact, the tornado of antisemitism, which tore through France and  swirled around Dreyfus and his two trials in the late 1890s, barely plays any role at all.  While there are gratuitous references to mobs screaming “Death to the Jews” and “Kill the Jew Traitor” and deprecatory references by the French High Command to the hated “Jew” Dreyfus, this appears as little more than background noise in the propulsive narrative and not a central focus.

By and large the antisemitism of the age is less a concern for the novelist than is the character of his central protagonist, Colonel Georges Picquart.

Picquart, who became the effective head of  French Intelligence in the wake of the first Dreyfus trial is the novel’s first person narrator and central character.  His counter-espionage investigations reveal that Dreyfus was wrongly convicted and that the real spy, who had delivered military secrets to the  German General Staff in 1894, was a French major, desperate for cash and low on loyalty. But the French High Command had pinned its flags to the Dreyfus mast and so they decided to dig in. Picquart was quickly quarantined and then sent on pointless intelligence gathering missions to the south of France and then onward to Tunisia where he wasted away for months in a lonely frontier outpost while the High Command conspired to send him on suicide missions into North Africa’s deserts.

Picquart retaliated by becoming one of the first of modern whistle blowers and through his lawyer would inform both the French intelligentsia as well as the radical  left of the scandal, both of whom would seize upon the cover- up to draw attention to the corruption of the Nationalists in the French parliament.  The roar of outrage grew into a crescendo when novelist Emile Zola published his famous front page essay, J’accuse which  would not only directly name the individual French generals responsible for the miscarriage of justice, but would land Zola himself in a heap of trouble as the libel suits poured in.

Throughout the languidly paced novel, which revolves largely around the sensational trials of the period, we meet some handsomely drawn characters: the florid Major Hubert- Joseph Henry, Picquart’s second- in-command, who plays a central role in the attempt to frame Dreyfus;  The calculating and politically ambitious General Auguste Mercier, French Minister of War, who leads the cover up and never ceases, until the day he dies, to express his belief in Dreyfus’ guilt; Pauline Monnier, Picquart’s long time mistress, who gets caught up in the scandal and almost loses her family as a result and Fernand Labori, attorney to Zola, Picquart and Dreyfus, who just avoids death from an assassin’s bullet.

In the epicenter of this tumult is, of course, the character of Alfred Dreyfus himself , whose ordeals on Devil’s Island, off the coast of Guyana in South America are recounted through the verbatim correspondence ( often sequestered by French Intelligence and not always delivered to their intended address) between the incarcerated prisoner and his wife, over a period of four years.  His words describe a hell hole where the prisoner endures endless privation and restrictions and which might have driven a less stoic and courageous man to suicide.

But Dreyfus’ self-belief and his perfervid conviction that French justice would ultimately prevail, were enough to prevent his collapse into depression or send him into a death spiral.  He survives to be vindicated and restored to his former command.

The story is in many ways a narrative tour de force, and although ponderous at times,  still drives the reader hungrily onward  with the  question of what will become of both Picquart and Dreyfus, whose fates become curiously intertwined.

Still, well acquainted with the history of the time, I come back to the many pages left inexplicably blank in the book, pages that could well have been filled in with descriptions of the rancor and hatred on the street for Jews , investigating the breadth of its hold on the French imagination and how such antagonism could not only survive, but flourish in so-called enlightened 19th Century France.

Alas, you will not find much of this in An Officer and a Spy.

For a real grasp  of that animus we need to look beyond Harris and refer to the words of Emile Zola himself, written in 1896, even before the full impact of the Dreyfus trials would steamroll France,  foreshadowing some of the horrors of the approaching century:

” For several years I have followed, with growing surprise and revulsion, the campaign against Jews in France. I see it as a monstrosity, by which  I mean something outside the pale of common sense, of truth and justice, a blind, fatuous thing that would push us back centuries, a thing that would lead to the worst abominations, religious persecutions with blood shed over all countries.”

It stupefied him that that such fanaticism should have erupted:

” In our age of democracy, of universal tolerance , when the movement everywhere is toward equality, fraternity and justice, we are at the point of effacing boundaries, of dreaming the community of all peoples, of holding religious congresses where priests of every persuasion embrace, of feeling that common hardship unites us in brotherhood. And a bunch of madmen, of imbeciles of knaves, has chosen this moment  to shout at us: ‘Let’s kill the Jews, lets devour them, lets massacre, lets exterminate, lets bring back stakes and dragonnades.’

 

 

Zola, in these words, was painting a picture of a civilization which beneath its veneer of elegance, élan and openness was sick to its core. This is a characterization only hinted at in Harris’ novel  – and a sorely missed opportunity it is.

Nevertheless, An Officer and a Spy leaves a nerve tingling sense of how even the most sophisticated and accomplished of civilizations can verge on collapse when a maniacal hatred of the other obtains a grip on its consciousness and then tips it off kilter.

In our present day and age one might  refer to any number of parallel political climates where conformity of views is demanded and dissent systematically persecuted.  Certainly our College campuses, particularly in regard to it raging anti-Zionism ofer a compelling analogy to  intolerant, hypocritical 19th Century France.  The  re-emergence of rampant antisemitism in Europe, driven by Muslim fanaticism and yet unimpeded by enlightened European opinion and activism, is a cause for extreme concern.

But we might also compare the case of”climate skeptics” – those individuals who voice doubts or present scientific data which contradict claims of anthropogenic global warming and are vilified, ridiculed and howled down as “deniers” and “traitors” by academics, the press and even political leaders.

Thus when Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island seriously suggests that climate skeptics should be subject to criminal indictment or when the New York Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan proclaims that the NYT may well begin referring, as her paper’s policy, to climate contrarians as “deniers,” we might all begin to hear the echo of those Parisian streets of 130 years ago and shudder with the possible consequences.

Avi Davis is the president of the American Freedom Alliance and the editor of The Intermediate Zone

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The National Prayer Breakfast Presents a Savior

by Avi Davis

The National Prayer Breakfast is an annual event held in Washington, D.C., hosted by the United States Congress on the first Thursday of February each year.  The event is  held in the Hilton’s International Ballroom with invitees from over 100 countries. It is designed to be a forum for the political, social, and business elite to assemble and build relationships.

Every U.S. president since Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 has participated in this annual event.

 

President Barack Obama was there on Thursday and addressed the gathered crowd.  Among the many words spoken by him that morning, was this gem:

 ” But we also see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge — or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon.  From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith, professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it.

So how do we, as people of faith, reconcile these realities — the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends?

 Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.  

So this is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith. In today’s world, when hate groups have their own Twitter accounts and bigotry can fester in hidden places in cyberspace, it can be even harder to counteract such intolerance. But God compels us to try. And in this mission, I believe there are a few principles that can guide us, particularly those of us who profess to believe.

And, first, we should start with some basic humility. I believe that the starting point of faith is some doubt — not being so full of yourself and so confident that you are right and that God speaks only to us, and doesn’t speak to others, that God only cares about us and doesn’t care about others, that somehow we alone are in possession of the truth.”

In case the comparison is lost on anybody, the President, in his expression of a piece of naked politically correct nonsense, was making a direct analogy between the depredations of 21st Century barbarians who decapitate and immolate their victims with 12th and 15th Century Christians who were engaged for their own defensive and political reasons in the protection of their realms.

One would have hoped that the President of the United States would have had a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of history. One would hope that he could express a little more faith in his own civilization, founded incontrovertibly on the principles of the Christian faith and seeded with Judeo- Christian humanistic values and ideals.

 

But before jumping in to address the President’s obtuse and dangerous moral relativism, lets get some important historical facts straight:  The Crusades were largely defensive campaigns, sanctioned by the Pope to turn back the tide of Muslim aggression and imperialism.   The Inquisition was largely political in motivation, an attempt to secure Christian Spain against the resurgence of the Islamic caliphate which had previously governed Spain for 300 years.  And the campaign to destroy the institution of slavery was mostly led by devout Christians such as William Wilberforce in the U.K. and former President John Quincy Adams in the United States  – and without their moral force, slavery would never have been abolished.

This is not to say that there were not attendant evils associated with all of these campaigns and institutions.  But it is important to grasp the reasons they occurred – and not just their outward manifestations.

The President’s high school level appreciation of history might have been bad enough. But in addition he seemed to embrace the notion that there is no absolute truth to which we all can subscribe –  that in fact, there are many varieties of truth which can compete against one another.  This is of course a rephrasing of the same cant which appeared in the President’s Cairo speech in June, 2009  and in his embarrassing statement before the United Nations in September, 2012 in which he declared, among other things that ” the future does not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.”  It is all a piece with the President’s penchant for defending Islam and offering himself up as such an expert on that subject that he can confidently declare ISIS and the assorted other Jihadist factions rampaging across the Middle East and Africa as somehow opposed to the genuine tenets of that faith.

Of course as a Muslim apologist – and defender of their faith, he fails to reveal that the handiwork of Islamic State is vouchsafed by Muslim clerics from London to Sydney.   And that sanction for the decapitation of infidels can be found deeply and consistently embedded throughout Islamic scripture.

The canard that Christians can be just as bad as Muslims however flings a shocking insult at the thousands of Christian communities which have been attacked and viciously put to the torch by jihadists who are conducting their campaigns in the name of Islam.  Let the President be aware that there are no counter offensives from Christian communities against Muslims; there are no midnight burnings by Christian insurgents of mosques with their desperate congregations still trapped inside; no mass beheadings  by Christians of Muslim townsfolk; no Muslim children buried alive by marauding Christian militia and no sudden assaults on innocent villagers who run the risk of evisceration if they fail to convert to the Christian faith.

The Governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, was therefore correct in declaring that the Medieval Christian impulses to rampage and pillage are well under control.  Perhaps it would be appropriate to also remind the President that Christianity has evolved somewhat since the Crusades and Inquisition – having passed through a reformation and intense periods of self reflection and contrition.  Since at least the 19th Century, Christianity has overwhelmingly operated a civilizing influence on the societies wherever it has been introduced –  earning its credentials as a true religion of peace.

Can the same be said for Islam?

The President of the United States, leading a Christian nation, something he unashamedly admitted himself in his same 2012 speech before the United Nations, needs to stop talking about extremism among all religions, and focusing on the depredations of one – Islam, which threatens the lives and welfare of peoples all over the world as no Christian Crusade, Spanish Inquisition or  even the institution of slavery itself ever did.

The reality is that he is unlikely to ever consent to do this this since he has staked his presidency on the same moral relativism which equates America’s role in the world over the past sixty years with the Communists of the U.S.S.R. and the mass murderers of China.  His entire foreign policy is actually driven by the notion that the United  States has not entirely been a force for good in the world but has often perpetrated the same kind of evil as the regimes it opposed.

That kind of rhetoric may get him standing ovations at the United Nations and in the lecture halls of many of our America-despising universities, but it is no way to inspire and lead a country which has unquestionably, over the past 225 years, provided a guiding light for humanity, propagating values and ideals which have been uncompromisingly drawn from the well of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

 

Avi Davis is the President of the American Freedom Alliance and the editor of  the Intermediate Zone

 

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Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus – A Review

by Avi Davis

Director: Tim Mahoney

Release Date: January 19, 2015

In April  2001, 42-year-old Rabbi David Wolpe, regarded as one of the leading Jewish prelates and thinkers in America, dropped a bombshell.  Speaking before his congregation, Sinai Temple in West Los Angeles, he admitted that he had little reason to believe that there was much historical basis to the Exodus narrative. As reported in the Los Angeles Times he said:

“The truth is that virtually every modern archaeologist who has investigated the story of the Exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.”

The fact that Wolpe was speaking on Passover itself – the Jewish festival which commemorates the Exodus  –  and that the Los Angeles Times was there to cover his sermon, goes a long way to explaining the purpose of Wolpe’s sudden admission: he was engaging in an act of political and theological revisionism (some might even say sabotage) –  attempting to bring Judaism into line with modern scholarship and archaeological research, which, he later averred, had found nothing in 200 years to corroborate the Biblical account of the Israelite departure from Egypt.

The characterization of the Exodus as a fanciful myth has of course some telling consequences.  Among them is that many of the greatest events of the Biblical period may never have actually occurred.  It would mean that there was no historical Moses, no Ten Plagues, no slaughter of the first born, no parting of the Red Sea, no desert wandering, no fall of Jericho and no conquest of the land of Canaan.  It could also just possibly mean that there was no ‘ historical’ Ten Commandments at all.

Without sufficient archaeological evidence to corroborate the Exodus, the entire story can be regarded as no more than a heroic narrative woven out of whole cloth by later chroniclers to lend both legitimacy and purpose to the Israelite claim to the land of Israel.  This of course plays into the hands of an assorted range of secularists, atheists, anti-Semites and Israel bashers who are looking for exactly such a quote from a major Jewish leader to either delegitimize the State of Israel, smear Judaism or else deny the Jewish people’s historical claims to the land.

Wolpe’s admission naturally whipped up a firestorm in the American Jewish community but he was quickly supported by many contemporary Biblical scholars who bewailed the absence of an authoritative archaeological record and who had to sadly admit that the archaeologists may be right.

But what if Biblical archaeology has made some fundamental errors about the historical occurrence of the Exodus?

It is almost universally accepted that the Exodus, if it occurred at all, took place in the 13th Century BCE, during the reign of the greatest of Ancient Egypt’s builders –  Rameses II.  And it is true enough that in this period there is scant archaeological evidence to buttress the Exodus story.

Yet is it possible that Biblical archaeologists for the past 100 years have been looking in the wrong time period?  Could it be that they may have been off the historical mark on the Exodus by up to 300 years? And if so, what would they find if they looked there?

That is the starting point for Tim Mahoney’s elegant documentary Patterns of Evidence, a film which records the personal journey of a film maker seeking to uncover the truth about the Exodus. His journey takes him to several countries – to archaeological sites in Egypt and Israel, to the halls of academia in the United States, England and Germany while attempting to maintain an objective mind  -free, as much as possible, of the pitfalls of bias and prejudice which at one time or another afflicts almost every historical academic discipline.

 At the beginning of the film Mahoney outlines his mission: “I didn’t go with a preconceived conclusion, but I was willing to give the Bible the benefit of the doubt as we searched for the truth. I went to the top people in the world and said: ‘Tell me what you know about this story and what does the archaeology tell you.’ I talked with both sides – people who can’t see any evidence for Exodus and people who see the evidence. It became a balanced approach.”

As the film proceeds the evidence mounts that the period of the Middle Kingdom,(2050 BCE and 1652 BCE) if assessed to be the correct chronological time for the Exodus, rather than the New Kingdom (1570–1070 BCE) provides a trove evidence for the existence of a slave tribe which resided in the Nile Delta, its sudden departure from the historical recor , graves which might belong to the twelve sons of Jacob and one grave of which is missing its sarcophagus and might be the grave of the Biblical Joseph.

The film reveals is that there is a body of scholarship – although substantially in the minority, which has found that there is abundant evidence to validate the Exodus, but only if the chronology is shifted back 250 years.  Included in such evidence is a papyrus dated from that time period which recounts an episode of blood in the River Nile and plagues of insects descending on the Nile Delta. In addition to this hieroglyphics on stelae indicating the existence of the Biblical Joseph and  grave sites offering a glimpse into the slave life of the ancient homeland of Azair – the Biblical Goshen  – all of which offer tantalizing evidence to support the Middle Kingdom hypothesis.

So what is keeping archaeologists from making this leap?   Well, first all, this kind of revisionism messes up history big time since the dating of other civilizations is tied to the Ancient Egyptian chronology and calendar. Second, there are reputations to consider since if the key Biblical archaeologists have been getting their chronology wrong all these years what does it say about their credibility as historians?  As we have seen repeatedly in recent years, money, reputation, career advancement and the quest for academic survival can often trump the search for truth in academia. Archaeologists have a great deal to protect in continuing to debunk the Bible as historical fact.

But as I watched the film I was visited by an uneasy feeling.

Arguing that secular scholars are completely wrong or that their opponents are completely right does not serve historical analysis too faithfully.  Could it be that truth falls somewhere in between the position that Mahoney stakes out and the one traditionally advanced by Egyptologists?   It is impossible to either know or to understand this from viewing a two hour film. Real historical research is pounded out in the dialogue between hundreds of articles and papers, and refined in the back and forth of peer review.

By viewing this documentary most people, for instance, would not know that the revised Egyptian chronology is not a new theory at all –  is in fact decades old –  and that it  has been shown to create as many problems for biblical chronology as it solves.

And one thing other thing Mahoney fails to do is to examine in depth the reason Biblical scholarship focuses so intently on the New Kingdom rather than the Middle Kingdom to locate the story of the Exodus.  After all, there is such a thing as carbon dating, as well as comparative literature from the period and other scientific indicators which might justify the time period almost universally accepted by the Biblical scholars.  This question demanded much greater examination.

And of course there are then the philosophical arguments.

In the midst of narrator’s journey Mahoney comes across the writings of Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner – one of the world’s most famous Egyptologists, who admits that all we really have left of the great civilizations that once existed in the desert sands of the Middle East are mere ‘rags and tatters’ –  the detritus of a civilization and not its essential core.

With so little evidence, not only for the Exodus story but for any civilization or event which once existed, how can archaeologists truly be sure of anything?  Is it not true that the findings of archaeologists lead not to the re-creation of historical  facts, but rather the establishment of theories that are rarely ever so water tight that they can never be challenged?

This kind of discussion also leads to some pretty heavy epistemological arguments, namely, how do we actually ever know anything?  Aren’t those who accept the argument that the Exodus never happened merely transferring their faith from one written version of the past to a faith in another’s scientific methods that they can neither personally nor empirically verify nor corroborate?

I have always marveled at David Wolpe’s reasoning on this level: for surely, as a rabbi who believes in the existence of a G’d, he understands the philosophical contortions through which he must pass in order to state so affirmatively that the Biblical story is almost certainly myth. He is, after all, relying on research that he did not personally conduct and on a historical methodology for establishing a chronology with which he is probably unfamiliar. How can he be so sure that the perspective he has so wholesomely adopted was not itself refracted through bias and prejudice and which might be just as determined not to find any evidence of the Exodus as the film maker’s archaeological subjects are to find it?

People of faith don’t require archaeology to corroborate their beliefs.  If we accept that archaeology is a notoriously inexact method of determining historical truth – given the ‘rags and tatters ‘ theory elucidated above, could it not be that the evidence of the Exodus is still waiting to be discovered beneath the mountains of sand and sediment in the Nile Delta?

Why then the rush to judgement when, in the absence of authoritative proof such as a contemporary manuscript, we have what is essentially a written historical narrative, composed many, many centuries closer to the events than we stand today and which operates as at least a tangential guide to understanding this era?  This amounts to giving the Bible ‘the benefit of the doubt’ as Mahoney states in his introduction and it is what the pre-modern archaeologists certainly did.

The eagerness to debunk the Bible’s historical validity is a default intellectual reflex in today’s secular world- a world riven with satirists, deconstructionists and debunkers who gleefully skewer religion at every available opportunity.

But as Mahoney himself states in his book on the subject, the absence of evidence should never be regarded as evidence of absence. That is a credo that both sides of the divide of this important historical inquiry would be well advised to adopt.

 

Avi Davis is the President of the American Freedom Alliance and the editor of The Intermediate Zone

 

 

 

The Death of the World’s Greatest Statesman

by Avi Davis

I was six-years-old and it was time for bed.  It was a hot Australian night and my mother had opened the windows of our room so that my brother and I could sleep with a measure of comfort. Before we went to sleep my father came in and asked us both to come into the TV room.

” Boys, I want you to watch this and to remember it. ”

I looked at the black and white screen and saw a pageant of glum men bearing a casket draped in the British flag.   An orchestra was playing mournful music and many members of the crowd thronging the verges of the street could be seen wiping tears from their eyes.  Little children saluted as the casket passed by; men, ordinary civilians, stood to attention as the procession made its way down the wide boulevard.

” What is it Daddy? What happened? Did somebody die?”

He looked down at the floor and then up at me.

“Its someone whose name you will one day know very well. His name was Winston Churchill and he saved the world. ”

It was hard, from faraway Australia and at such a tender age, to appreciate on that sultry January night, the enormity of the event and of the man who was being carried to his final resting place.

But my father was right. I never forgot that moment for in many way it connected me to the history of the 20th Century and the momentous events that occurred in the decade before my birth.

They were events over which  Sir Winston Spencer Churchill would have the most personal and decisive impact.

Churchill’s extraordinary story has been told many times and in many different ways: descendant of the Duke of Marlborough, son of  the Chancellor of the Exchequer, firebrand journalist, hero of the Boer War, radical liberal parliamentarian, First Lord of the Admiralty, combat officer in the First World War, minister in Conservative governments, political outcast;  and then, miraculously, late in life, wartime Prime Minister for five years and then Prime Minister again for another four.

And this does not even take into account his prolific historical writing for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize; his extraordinary artistic talents which had his paintings valued at millions of pounds after his death; his hobbies as a gardener and a bricklayer which he continued into old age and the hundreds of people around the world who called him their friend.

Many people choose to remember Churchill as the gruff man with the orotund turn of phrase, whose personal example and indomitable spirit saved western civilization, girding England to stand alone against the Nazi Blitzkrieg.  Others would prefer to see him as the proud standard bearer of the English speaking peoples who understood better than almost anyone the special relationship that existed between the United Kingdom and the United States and how they needed one another to stand in defiance of the attack upon the West.

But I prefer to remember Churchill as the sharp tongued ironist, filled with brio and the juices of living –  a brilliant humorist, whose droll wit and lacerating tongue made him the talk of London.

A few anecdotes are sufficient to illustrate:

At a party he attended as a young Parliamentarian when he first adopted the liberal cause, he was approached by a woman who exclaimed:

“Mr. Churchill, I dislike your politics and your moustache even more.”

“Madam,” he responded,” I see no reason for you to come into contact with either.”

In an exchange with Lady Astor in 1920:

Lady Astor: “If I were married to you, I’d put poison in your coffee.”
His reply: “Nancy, if I were married to you, I think I’d drink it.”

 

At another party, many years later, after indulging a little too much in the available Scotch, he was approached by female MP Bessie Braddock who said to Churchill: “Winston, you are drunk, and what’s more you are disgustingly drunk. He replied: “My dear, you are ugly, and what’s more, you are disgustingly ugly. But tomorrow I shall be sober and you will still be ugly.”

At one time while visiting with Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard the presidential yacht, Churchill emerged from his bath naked and without a robe. At that moment Roosevelt happened to wheel himself into the room. Without missing a beat Churchill said:  “You see Franklin, I have nothing to hide from you.”

In the House of Commons, when he was the Leader of the Opposition following the war, he was visiting the men’s room when the current Prime Minister Clement Atlee, a socialist, came in and stood next to him at a urinal. Churchill quickly moved away from Atlee to the farthest stall.

“Feeling standoffish today are we Winston?,” Atlee said, a little miffed. “No Clement,” Churchill replied. “It is just that when ever you see anything big you always want to nationalize it!”

And, then, of course there are the famous quotes, all of which have particular relevance today:

“An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”

“Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.”

“In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet.”

And my personal favorite:

“Show me a young Conservative and I’ll show you someone with no heart. Show me an old Liberal and I’ll show you someone with no brains.”

Winston Churchill passed away at the age of 90 on the morning of January 24th, 1965, 50 years ago today.  With a glint in his eye to the very end he was recorded as saying:  “I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”

No doubt there is a special place in Heaven for Winston Churchill, a short man who cast an enormous shadow.  What would we would not give to have such a leader today.

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Avi Davis is President of the American Freedom Alliance and the editor of The Intermediate Zone

Remembering the Battle of New Orleans and the Conclusion of the War of 1812

By Avi Davis

The first thing you learn about the War of 1812 is that it didn’t take place in only that year.  In fact the war between the British with their Indian allies and the United States lasted right into 1814 and the first month of 1815.

The second thing you learn is that it was an inconclusive war with neither the British nor the U.S. scoring knock out victories.  The resulting peace treaty (The Treaty of Ghent) was brought about not because one party had surrendered to the other but because both sides were exhausted and could not see not much point in continuing hostilities.

What the conflict is mostly remembered for in our present day was the burning of Washington D.C., the writing of the Star Spangled Banner and the faint beginnings of a proud American nationalism.

But perhaps what we should really remember about the War of 1812 and the Battle of New Orleans which concluded it, is that it ended any doubt that the English speaking peoples of the world would ever again become involved in a violent conflict with one another.  From 1815 onward they would forge a partnership which would bring unparalleled prosperity, technological advancement and political stability to their dominions and most of the rest of the world.

We are used to looking back on the history of the late 18th Century and the early 19th as a time when the American colonies fought off British tyranny and began to beat an independent path in history.

But this does not begin to assess what really happened in that forty-five year time span.

For as Daniel Hannan has described it in his seminal work  Inventing Freedom, the American Revolution was in reality a civil war between British citizens, with the rebellious colonies merely attempting to assert their rights, not as Americans but as loyal Englishmen who had become habituated to the liberties available to them as free men.

The very idea of Britain and America forging an unbreakable bond which would later carry the two nations to victory through two world wars, has been central to worldwide progress and to implanting a consciousness of the rights of the individual, the value of representative government and the sanctity of human life in the mind of humanity.

It might not seem much to celebrate, given how far apart the two nations have drifted on any number of issues.  But we should never forget how deeply the bonds of language, values and political tradition still unite the two nations at their very roots.   As Western civilization prepares to confront the most serious challenge in its history, it is good to recall that the leadership of the West – at least since 1815  – has always seesawed between one or the other of these two nations.

In the challenging years ahead those bonds will need to grow tighter than ever before.

Let us hope we elect leaders who understand it.

Avi Davis is the President of the American Freedom Alliance and the editor of The Intermediate Zone

Castro Brothers Will Be The Only Winners From U.S.- Cuban Rapproachement

by Avi Davis

Christopher Columbus did not discover America.  At least not North America.  On October 12, 1492  –  the day we celebrate as Columbus Day – he instead landed at one of the thousand islands that make up the Bahamas Archipelago.   The closest he got to North America was two weeks later, when he set anchor on the north-east coast of what today we know as  Cuba.  Although Columbus would make landings in his later voyages on the Central American coast and the northern coast of South America, he did not step one foot on the coast of the land mass that would one day constitute the territory of the  United States of America.

While other Spanish explorers would land, 20 years later, on the north-east coast of La Florida and name it for the Spanish crown, neither the Spaniards nor the Portuguese would show much interest in colonizing the continent until at least 170 years passed, when the first Spanish Jesuit mission was established in California.

This is quite significant because since Columbus’ time, it was Cuba and the nearby Hispaniola, respectively only only 90  and 170 miles south of the southern most Florida key, which became the center of the New World administration for Spain.  And since that time Cuba never sought to be claimed as part of the North American continent and has jealousy guarded its Spanish heritage.  While the United States might  have dominated the island economically for the 300 years prior to the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and extended military rule there for several years following the conclusion of the Spanish- American War in the early 20th Century, Cuba did not become an American protectorate like Puerto Rico or Guam and had its independence recognized by the U.S. as long ago as 1902.  Annexation has been expressly forbidden in Congress by the Teller Amendment of 1898.

While relations post independence were rocky, the Cuban government generally showed deference to the U.S. since it was almost wholly dependent on trade with its northern neighbor.  The Castro Revolution in 1959 altered that completely when the communist leader began the nationalization of both American owned businesses and land holdings while developing  a political alignment with the Soviet Union.  The imposition of a U.S. economic embargo was soon followed by the severing of diplomatic relations.  A cold war has existed between Cuba and the United States ever since.

Barack Obama’s decision last week, however, to open diplomatic relations with the Castro regime,is a volte face which will bring with it a host of new problems.

 

The exchange of ambassadors and the opening of Cuba to American tourism will not change that much in the dynamic between the two countries.  Cuba already has a solid (if illicit)  U.S. tourist industry and tacit diplomatic exchanges have been going on for years.  It has been argued that the opening of full diplomatic relations will allow modern American freedoms to sweep into Havana and that the Internet will have a galvanizing impact on the local hunger for freedom.  In this regard, the President said that “our sanctions on Cuba have denied Cubans access to technology that has empowered individuals around the globe.”   Yet we have seen how ruthlessly other authoritarian regimes in China, Russia, Iran and North Korea have sought to control the Internet as well as the exit of their citizens, even for vacations abroad. And it seems to ignore one other salient point:  the Castro brothers control all aspects of Cuban life, and have, until now, effectively blocked the Internet for domestic use and show little interest in relaxing their stand.

The argument made by the President – that Cuba is isolated (read that as  ‘desperate’) and needs American investment – is not true.  Cuba has thousands of investors –  European, Latin American and Asian  – all over the island but the country is still  poor. Why?  Because the profits of local Cubans flow into the Cuban Treasury and are used to enrich the current oligarchy which controls everything from the means of production to the country’s retail infrastructure.

And we shouldn’t be so sanguine about the likely rush of American businesses into Cuba.  In order to do business there companies will almost certainly need to partner with the Cuban government or the Cuban military – if business relations with other Communist and post Communist countries worldwide are to provide any guide.

 

Foreigners also won’t have such an easy time moving around Havana.  As the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady commented  last week:

“The isolation is caused by the police state, which controls and surveils foreigners’ movements, herding most visitors into resort enclaves. Foreign journalists who vocally oppose the Communist Party line are not allowed into the country.  More visitors won’t do anything to reduce Cuban poverty. The regime pockets the hard currency that they leave behind and pays workers in worthless pesos. Foreigners who decide to reward good workers without state approval can face prison.”

The most serious issue of normalization however centers around the 53-year-old  U.S. economic embargo and whether it should be lifted.  When the embargo was first imposed in 1961, the Castro Government looked to its communist allies for trade  and then where it found markets and resources among fellow South American countries with it shared a Spanish legacy. In the past 15 years one of the main economic partners was Venezuela which provided both oil, food stuffs and subsidies to the perennially poor island nation. But now that source of funding is drying up as the Venezuelan economy continues to collapse due to reduced demand  for its oil. It can no longer do much for Cuba.

All of which might provide enough incentive, it is argued, for the Castros to relax their iron grip on the country and permit  both economic and political reforms.

But before any one gets too excited and  thinks of dismantling the embargo, there are a few questions the Castro government should answer.

One is a question about compensation for the $1.8 billion in American assets confiscated in 1960 when Fidel Castro nationalized the economy, which adjusted for 2014 values represents approximately $7 billion today.  Some of these assets were the vacation homes and bank accounts of wealthy individuals. But the lion’s share of the confiscated property was sugar factories, mines, oil refineries, and other business operations belonging to American corporations, among them the Coca-Cola Co., Exxon, and the First National Bank of Boston.

A 2009 article in the Inter-American Law Review described Castro’s nationalization of U.S. assets as the “largest uncompensated taking of American property by a foreign government in history.”

Today, there are nearly 6,000 property claims still active – even though some of the original claimants have died and many of the corporations which had business interests on the island no longer exist.   Federal law, under the 1996 Helms Burton Act , actually mandates that any attempted normalization of relations be preceded by a resolution of these claims.

Which poses just a few problems.   For one thing, Cuba is unlikely to ever have enough cash on hand to fully compensate the claimants, especially while the embargo is still in place; and secondly, sorting out who owns what after 53 years could prove something of an intense legal bottleneck for a Cuban justice system ill-equipped to deal with extensive land ownership issues.

There are also many outstanding personal human rights claims against the Cuban government stemming from its mistreatment of POWs following the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion in April, 1961 which involved both U.S. and  Cuban nationals.

Cuban agents who committed torture of American POWs in Vietnam are also still at large.  At a holding pen in North Vietnam known as ” The Zoo” between August 1967 and August 1968, 19 American servicemen were brutally beaten by interrogators assessed to be Cuban agents working under orders from Hanoi.   The torture and the known identities of some of these Cuban agents were made public in testimony before the Senate Committee on International Relations on November 4, 1999.

This is not to mention the thousands of people who attempted to flee Cuba over the past 50 years by air or boat (among them U.S. citizens) and who were either killed or abandoned by merciless Cuban coastguards.

An accounting should be demanded.

The Cuban embargo has been dismissed as a limp holdover from the Cold War, lacking relevance to our contemporary world.  That is a mistake.  The Castro regime committed significant crimes against American citizens and corporations over a number of years.  Normalization of relations does not make them any less criminal and we would be foolish to simply shrug our shoulders and embrace our new friends in Havana, as if they never happened.   To do otherwise will make the Castro Brothers the only true winners of the detente Obama is proposing  –  resulting in not only a miscarriage of justice, but setting a poor example of how to deal with other rogue regimes who are likely, over the next several years, to suffer Cuba’s ignominious fate.

Avi Davis is the President of the American Freedom Alliance in Los Angeles and the editor of The Intermediate Zone

 

*  For a fascinating review of the reality of modern day Cuba, please see Allan Wall’s travelogue  Cuba’s National Question and Ours 

** For an excellent piece on the outcome of the Obama declaration on Cuba please see this article:  Obama and Cuba in  the American Thinker

The Other Side of the Chanukah Story

By Avi Davis

Almost anyone who celebrates Chanukah today knows at least the rudimentary outline of its story.   A righteous Judaean clan in the 2^nd Century BCE led a vigorous uprising against Greek- influenced Seleucid rulers who had desecrated the Temple and outlawed the traditional practices of Judaism.   The revolt led to the recapture of Jerusalem, the purification of the Temple and the establishment of an independent Jewish state.  A  small vial of oil found in the Temple, when no other could be located, burned for eight days, becoming an eternal symbol of the miraculous regeneration of the Jewish people.  The Maccabees, the name of the guerrilla  army, led by the five Hasmonean brothers who were its successive commanders, have gone down in history as symbols of Jewish endurance and revival.

 

But a few things have been forgotten.  The first is that the war that Chanukah commemorates was in fact a civil war, fought between Hellenizing Jewish reformers and Jewish traditionalists whose Temple-centric life had been severely compromised by Greek influence and rule.  Simon, the lone surviving brother became ethnarch after 34 years of civil strife.

After Simon and his two oldest sons were murdered by a son-in-law in 134 BCE,  Simon’s third son, John Hyrcanus (134 BCE -104 BCE) took power.  Although his 30 year reign has been looked upon kindly by Jewish history, the fact that Hyrcanus took a Greek name as a monarchical title, was a portent of things to come.

 

 

It was during the reign of his son and successor Alexander Janneus (104 BCE – 76 BCE)  that the Hasmonean legend began to disintegrate. Alexander had no interest in the religious fervor of his ancestors and exhibited a particular hatred for religious rigorist sects such as the Pharisees and Essenes.   He carefully aligned himself with  the upper class Sadducees and in one incident massacred 6,000 Pharisee worshipers in the Temple courtyard after receiving a personal insult from them during the Feast of Tabernacles  The incident spurred the renewal of a civil war which resulted in 50,000 Jewish deaths. In one further event, after returning to Jerusalem following a victorious campaign in the north, Alexander had 800 of his Jewish male prisoners crucified, but not before murdering their wives and children before their very eyes.

The point of recalling this gruesome tale is to illustrate a historical truism. History often comes full circle, rendering meaningless the achievements of previous generations because memory has lapsed and the commitment to former ideals has evaporated.  The Hasmoneans began as liberators and ended as oppressors.  They started as fervent adherents to Judaism and concluded as its deniers. In the end, they far more resembled the Greek inspired Hellenizers they had fought to eliminate than the vaunted redeemers portrayed in legend.

Ancient Judaea’s contemporary political incarnation, the State of Israel, has much to glean from the historical trajectory of the Hasmoneans.   As a country which formed 66 years ago with high ideals and the promise of Jewish renewal, it may have lost its bearings.  Indeed, for the past few decades, Israel progressively lost its grip on its identity as a Jewish state, buffeted as it has been by post-Zionist academics, a universalist Supreme Court chief justice and a relentless campaign by Palestinians who claim that a Jewish state has no right to exist. The government response to this campaign of delegitimization-   the Israel National Identity Bill, which seeks to reaffirm the Jewish identity of the state  – has led to the collapse of the Netanyahu government and will become a major issue in the forthcoming Israeli elections.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may be no Judah the Maccabee but his instincts are very much in keeping with his ancestor’s desire to revivify the Jewish spirit of the land, even though he may realize that in doing so he might run afoul of abstract democratic ideals.  But not to do so runs the risk of fragmentation of the state over time into a multicultural polyglot, portending a future in which Jews may one day be discriminated against and even persecuted in the very country designed as their refuge.

It is important to remember that leaders cannot predict how their descendants will act or how their legacy of achievement will be treated.    But the burning question the full Hasmonean story presents to us is:  how can nations protect the memory of past struggles and make them meaningful and relevant for the current generation?  Ironically, the institution of the Festival of Chanukah was such an attempt.  And in large part it succeeded.   But the nagging question remains – why did  things go so terribly wrong in ancient Judaea within such a relatively short period of time?  This Chanukah, that question, given many of our current global challenges, should be firmly on our minds, as much as it is on the great Hasmonean triumphs of 2000 years ago.

 

The Unpoliced World: A Review of Bret Stephens’ America in Retreat

        America in Retreat: the New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder

by Bret Stephens

Sentinel, 2014  231 pages

What would the world look like if America stopped investing its diplomatic and military resources in the troubled areas of the globe?

Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens has an idea.

The date is December 25, 2019, approaching Year Three of a Hillary Clinton presidency.   Two and a half years previously, China had covertly taken possession of Kinmen Island – a few miles off  the coast of Taiwan and within  the latter nation’s territorial waters.  Japan, witnessing the failure of the Americans to launch so much as a protest to this violation of international law in the U.N., begins to make overtures to long time enemy South Korea and a few months later, under cover of darkness, lands troops on the contested Senkaku Islands, a transparent attempt to forestall a Kinmen  style fate for its claimed territory.    Russia, already emboldened by uncontested invasions of Georgia and Ukraine a few years  before, has seen its economy cratered by falling gas prices and to shore up his sagging popularity Russian dictator Vladimir Putin stirs the coals of Russian nationalism, exploiting an internal rebellion in Belarus  by sending Russian tanks rolling into Minsk.  With Belarus now conveniently transformed into a Russian satellite, Putin turns his eyes westward to the NATO defended Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.  The Clinton Administration has not said boo to the previous acts but  is certain that Putin would never dare  attack a NATO ally. But then again………

 

 

Meanwhile, in Iran, long time Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has died leaving his son Mojtaba as the new Guardian Jurist.  Within months, uprisings in the Iranian provinces begin to wreak a general cleavage in the population and the Clinton brain trust, unwilling to relive the mistakes of the Obama Administration during Iran’s 2011 Green Revolution, begins to arm the insurgency.  This unfortunately has unintended consequences as Iran’s ruling mullahs find themselves forced to the wall.   When the insurgents attack the nuclear facilities at the Port of Bushehr, the West awakens to the reality that the collapsing regime’s new nuclear arsenal could fall into the hands of even more desperate Islamic militants. There is urgent NATO( and Israeli)  talk about a multilateral force needed to invade Iran in order to secure the nuclear facilities.  This sets  the nervous mullahs on a war footing and contemplating the first belligerent use of a nuclear weapon since the detonation of the second  Atom Bomb at Nagasaki in 1945.

Israel at the same time is confronted with a renewed effort of Palestinians to bring attention to their demands for statehood, independent of an internationally sanctioned agreement. In a 100,000 person march on the Qalandiya Checkpoint, which separates Ramallah from Jerusalem, Palestinians, each bedecked with a neck key –  a poignant symbol of a right of return to purported ancestral  homes – the crowd attempts to break through the checkpoint.  The Israeli military response results in the death of twelve of the protesters and is caught on camera, and then labeled by  the international press  a massacre.  International sanctions pour in from around the world.  The U.S. Administration seeks  to deliver a stern message to the government of Israeli prime minister Moshe Ya’alon –  withdraw to the 1949 Armistice lines and allow the establishment of an independent Palestinian state or else risk the resetting of diplomatic relations between Israel and U.S.  This only emboldens  the Palestinians who repeat the Keys Marches all over the West Bank seeking to provoke Israeli retaliation.                                                         

The European continent faces its own form of crisis. With consistently low growth over several years, Germany slips into recession and one of its most significant state owned banks collapses. The German government announces that it is unwilling to bear the crushing weight of European debt any longer as it nervously watches its other banks lose confidence. Just as Germany is reconsidering its role as European savior, many of the constituent nations of a united Europe begin to fall apart. Catalonia in Spain, Flanders in Belgium and the Veneto in Italy all seek to separate from the sinking ship of Europe in which they play such a crucial economic role and the resulting referendums bring about the ultimate devolutionary crisis that the Brussels bureaucracy cannot stem.

The upshot of this vivid scenario, which comes late in Stephens’ America in Retreat, is to illustrate the chaos which might ensue when the United States gives up any pretense of serving as the world’s policeman – a job it had grudgingly assumed upon Britain’s post war abdication of the role.  The scenario that Stephens paints draws directly from the experiences of the past six years as he demonstrates how the Obama Administration has consistently  sought to  distance itself from world events to the greatest extent possible, hiding behind multilateral actions and seeking to build international consensus instead of prosecuting a vigorous policy of its own.   This misguided agenda has produced a raft of unintended consequences, including the emboldening of a revanchist Russia, the strengthening of Iranian drive for nuclear power, the recrudescence of Chinese imperialism and the devolution of Europe.  It is the mantle that  Hilary Clinton, should she succeed in her presidential quest, will inherit.

But more troubling than this is the abandonment of stalwart democratic allies.  Israel, Poland, the Czech Republic, the Baltic states, Japan, Taiwan and India all now have doubts as to the worth of American guarantees and the trustworthiness of its promises. Stephens spares no effort to demonstrate how devastating the volte face has been for America’s reputation and the likely consequences of allowing our allies to hang out to dry.

Such an abandonment traces its roots among American politicians of both left and right to the concept of ‘ Declinism’ – the theory that American power is on the wane and that the nation can no longer maintain much of its influence in world affairs. The ‘ America Come Home’ slogan, which has anchored U.S. foreign policy over the past the past six years, is a fundamental reflection of this ideology. The battle for the control of American foreign policy is always a contest between internationalists who want more engagement in the world and realists who seek less. That is nothing new. What is perhaps new and alarming in our present day, Stephens contends, is the abiding sense of national impotence that the Obama Administration continues to convey to the American people and to the world  – and which eclipses U.S. efforts to maintain a decisive influence in world affairs.

One factor that Stephens does unfortunately fail to mention is the Obama Administration’s resistance to drawing appropriate parallels from the 1938 Munich Agreement – the central  event in world history whose lessons would form the foundation of America’s post war foreign policy.   Every post-war president has at one time or another felt the need to  invoke the memory of  Munich –  a determination to never appease nor tolerate aggression  –  as a cornerstone of a muscular American world view. Obama has never once referred to it -not  in any speech nor in any writing. The glaring absence of this vital historical  lesson in the thinking of the Commander -in- Chief, has exposed the empty core of his philosophy.

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The battle for the control of American foreign policy is always a struggle between internationalists who want more engagement in the world and realists who seek less.  That is nothing new.  What is perhaps new and alarming in our present day is the abiding sense of national impotence that  the Obama Administration continues to convey to the American people and to the world.

Stephens, whose witty, elegant prose in the Wall Street Journal has elevated him to the top echelons of American journalism (and last year won him the Pulitzer Prize), concludes his book with an analogy of the broken windows theory of policing. Expressed concisely it is the idea that increased police presence on our urban streets is in itself a deterrent to crime – enforcing community norms, punishing minor violations and maintaining a semblance of order. As with cities, so with nations. The institution of good policing prevents rogue nations exercising free rein and results in a global order which ultimately enhances American national interests.

The American performance of the role of the good cop walking a global beat was one of the key factors enabling the extraordinary spread of liberty and prosperity in the post- war world – at a level unknown in human history. It contributed decisively to the containment of communism with all its human miseries while facilitating the flow of free trade – which has been indispensable to worldwide economic growth. But we fool ourselves into believing that the world has settled into a modern day Shangri-la which requires no further monitoring. The internationalist and realist can both appreciate that the world is still a dangerous place, full of miscreants, rogues, liars and thieves – many of whom are committed to our undoing. If America forgets this and retreats from the world, it cannot be surprised when the chaos which then ensues one day washes up on its own shores.

 

This article was first published in Stubborn Things on December 3, 2014

Remembering the Fallen of the Civil War

The November 11th ceremonies which were held around the world yesterday rightfully recalled the valor and sacrifice of those who fell in the many wars of the 20th Century.  Being as it is the centennial year of the outbreak of the First World War, it was fitting that the English, French and Germans jointly held ceremonies which recalled the terrible sacrifices of 1914. Many more ceremonies will no doubt be held by those countries in the following four years as such WWI battlefields as the Somme and Verdun will receive their due memorials.

It is interesting though how little attention is now paid to the fallen of America’s most consequential war.  In the Veteran’s Cemetery , not a mile from my house in Los Angeles, there lie buried  hundreds of men who fought or participated in the American Civil War. No one is alive now who remembers them  and time has washed away their personalities.   There are no flowers on the graves of these soldiers.

I thought about this last month when my sons and I took a four day tour of  some of the most prominent Civil War battlefields in Pennsylvania and Virginia.  There we visited Antietam, Manassas ( the First and Second Battles of the Bull Run), Harper’s Ferry in West Virginia  and the greatest of all battlefields in the United States- – Gettysburg.

One can read about the Civil  War and its many battles, but there is nothing like being right there, standing on the very soil where combat ensued and so many American lives were lost.  The documentaries presented in the visitors centers of the Memorial Battlefield sites portray the devastating impact of the war on the young men who signed up to fight in the volunteer armies and what it might have been like to be under fire during that time.  There are many things I learned which I would not have known had I not been there.

For example, I did not know that in the first battles of the Civil War, regiments were made up of an assortment of  volunteers who had no uniforms so they would just show up in their regular work clothes. On the battlefield  this caused endless confusion as many were dressed in the opposite colors of the regiments they were assigned to.  In other words, Confederates were dressed often in blue and the Federals often in grey, which would mean that sometimes troops would be fighting men from their own armies.

I learned that in the early battles the two sides would line up facing each other, sometimes just 300 yards apart, and would fire at one another in succession. One row of soldiers would fall and the next row behind it would replace it. There was no seeking cover and no breastworks.  The carnage was appalling.

I learned that Confederate soldiers often had no boots and had to steal them on the battlefield from both their own and the enemies’ dead.

I saw the famous ‘Sunken Road’ at Antietam – a dirt track running beneath a corn field where the Union dead  who had been crossing the field   – and then the Confederate defenders who had tried to stop them  – piled up so high that observers later said that after the battle, you could walk nearly a mile down that road and not touch the ground for the amount of corpses that lined its banks and floor.  As I gazed at that very simple farm road I had to wonder how obscure landmarks in the geography of a location can become such important strategic elements in the outcome of a battle.

I had not known that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. , the future Supreme Court Chief Justice , was a 23 – year-old junior officer at Antietam and was wounded in the neck during the battle, barely surviving; Nor had I known that several future U.S. presidents fought in the battle, including William McKinley, who served as a Union captain.

There was no greater revelation however than the Gettysburg Battlefield itself where the Union forces withstood the full might of Lee’s Army of  Northern Virginia and threw it back after three days of desperate fighting.  The battlefield is actually several  miles long – another surprise – and lined with monuments commemorating the heroic stands of  the hundreds of both Union and Confederate battalions.  The beautiful rolling hills of Southern Pennsylvania made it hard to picture the utter devastation which ensued over those three hot summer days in July, 1863.  But the cemetery at the site tells the story.  Many thousands of young men – as young as 15 – perished in the heat of those afternoons.

I have never faced volleys of  unrelenting rifle fire or persistent, pounding artillery in battle.  I have not had to step over the body of a dead comrade, pick up his rifle and shoot at men storming my position from 100 yards away.   I have been told that the terror of that experience can never be effectively conveyed in  film, print or even by word of mouth.  All one can do is to stand in these now silent fields, look over the edge of these ridges and try to imagine young boys, barely out of school, hardly familiar with their weapons or even each other, confronting the horror of death and the desperate struggle for survival.

What drives such young men to abandon all thought for their personal safety and commit themselves to win such battles at any cost – even if the cost is their own lives? It is not an easy question to answer. Perhaps history itself provides a clue. For if the Union Army had been defeated at Gettysburg, Lee’s forces would have almost certainly proceeded to besiege Washington D.C. itself, which might have been left largely undefended.   The war might have been ended a few months later by a negotiated peace  with the United States finally forced to recognize the independence of the Confederate States of America. Lincoln would have lost the 1864 election; there would have been no Gettysburg Address and slavery in the South may have continued as a protected institution for many decades into the future. How different might the history of the world looked with such an outcome?

The Union soldiers who manned their positions on the foothills and ridges overlooking the Gettysburg battlefield  were almost certainly not thinking about such geopolitical consequences. But much like other soldiers throughout U.S. history, they must have had the intuitive sense that a defeat had deep irreversible implications which could affect not only themselves, but their families and possibly even the future of their country.

On Memorial Day it is therefore fitting and appropriate to recall our veterans as ordinary men -not overly brave, not by nature perhaps even that courageous – but  who were thrown into extraordinary circumstances and fought, often to the death, so that our prosperous lives and our freedoms would continue.

If you can’t remember their names, remember at least such commitment and that will be a fitting memorial.