HISTORY – Page 3 – Ramparts of Civilization

June 16, 2019October 27, 2019

Freedom Digs In for the Long Haul

Millions march for freedom in Hong Kong -photo attrib. ABC News – Go.com

The quant notions of individual liberty and freedom of expression born out of the Enlightenment manage to resist extinction in the most unexpected of places. In a world where the mature democracies have grown tired of the responsibilities and maintenance the actualization of liberty requires, fresh examples of the yearning of a free people to control their own destinies and secure pursuit of happiness blossom like spring flowers in the tundra. Iran, under the oppressive theocracy that demands submission, sees a never ending stream of brave actions by common citizens who risk the thuggery of suppressors, imprisonment, and even death at the hands of government and its purchased enforcement arm. Venezuela, starved and humiliated by a gangster regime that has outsourced its further existence to the military autocrats of Cuba , yet somehow finds the strength to protest and persevere against the gang of socialist pretenders that hoard the levers of economic activity and basic survival. Now Hong Kong, a former colony of one imperial overlord, released only to be progressively subsumed by another, larger and more oppressive overlord, has decided to take the lessons learned from the first to stand up to the second. The desire for all to live a life of free will is currently finding its most fertile soil for nurturing in places that have had but a brief taste of its possibilities, once felt beyond the reach of this most “western” of ideals.

Hong Kong learned the hard way what freedom could mean. Existing for a 150 years as a colonial outpost to secure British imperial commercial ambitions of the vast mainland of China, could for the most part as expatriate Chinese only live indirectly in the glow of British concepts of juris prudence, democratic governance, educational opportunity, and international free market capitalism. Compared to the third and fourth world economies surrounding it though, Hong Kong populated almost entirely by Han Chinese, incorporated the enormous industriousness of their makeup and a world class harbor into the opportunity afforded by the British Empire to form one of its most successful and prosperous colonies. As a consequence of the legacy of this relationship, almost half of the 7.8 million people inhabiting the Kowloon Peninsula and surrounding islands maintain some form of British nationality and a quarter of a million are British citizens.

The concept of ‘colony’ even in the hands of a benign imperial administration is inherently artificial and pathologic, and ultimately as China finally found its bearings and national footing in the 1980s, the perpetuation of a colonial stain on the mainland was an overt insult and increasing anachronism of previous eras. The British had negotiated in 1898 a 99 year agreement from the Chinese to administer Hong Kong, and with the impending end of the agreement, China was in no mood and a contracted Great Britain in no position to perpetuate the arrangement. The British negotiated the return of sovereignty of Hong Kong to the Chinese government in 1997. No one asked the local residents their preference. What was to become of freedom minded Hong Kong under the thumb of a communist overlord? The British negotiated a salve that put forth the concept of “one nation two systems” that the Chinese government agreed to respect for 50 years. The value of such a buoyant economic engine and financial center oriented to the outside world appealed to the Communists of Beijing who had under Deng Xiaoping determined to inject a contorted capitalism into China to speed up its modernization while maintaining rigid control of society and dominance of its one party rule. The British were gone, and progressively the Chinese mainland looked to assert its dominance and progressive control of the profit drivers. The wild card no one took much heed of was, how much the local population had grown over the years to treasure its institutions of limited governance and personal freedoms. Genetically Chinese or not, the Hong Kong citizens had somehow absorbed the concepts of representative limited government and rule of law as not quant British relics but bedrock universal rights.

The inevitable has happened, as the Chinese authorities look to reel in Hong Kong into the subservient relationship the mainland Chinese have with their rulers, the people of Hong Kong refuse to play along. In the latest iteration, the communist appointed Chief Executive Carrie Lam has attempted to force through an extradition treaty that would give the mainland the ability to determine ‘unwelcome elements’ in the Hong Kong citizenry and extradite them to the mainland for communist inspired justice. The obvious consequences to the freedom loving citizens of Hong Kong made this attempt a bridge too far. Risking all in a world where increasingly governmental surveillance makes coordinated demonstration an extremely dangerous enterprise, democracy leaders in Hong Kong have managed massive protests that have paralyzed the government and raised the stakes extremely high to the authoritarians in Beijing. An even partial victory risks the freedom virus spreading onto the mainland Chinese cities and a potential return of Tiananmen Square instability; a crackdown a universal condemnation or worse. Freedom is a fundamental threat to any government forcing its citizens to live under less artificially, and the Chinese communists have held their position with ruthlessness when necessary.

The brave Hong Kong protesters soldier on, joining their compatriots in Iran, Venezuela, and other corners of the earth that have sought the liberty that mature democracies take for granted, and often are foolishly willing to give away. We live in interesting times, where the true bedrock values of freedom and liberty may need to be reinjected in our own psyche by the courageous and committed exemplars in places that have barely known such freedoms.

As Deng Xiaoping may have presciently, but inadvertently expressed – may a thousand flowers bloom…

October 28, 2018October 28, 2018

Tumult

Jair Bolsanaro has just capped off a most tumultuous month. Surviving an leftist assassination attempt in September, 2018, the former Brazilian army officer and long time congressman has blown through a primary, then, run off election, with a crushing defeat of his socialist opponent. Brazil, a country that has been dominated by socialist populist rule since its military dictatorship was overcome in the 1980s, has been drawn to Bolsanaro’s message of a nationalist socially conservative agenda of privatization, gun rights, and law and order. A surge of support from Brazilians tired of seeing corruption and stilted progress dominate the government of their massive country, has now catapulted a traditionalist conservative to the very pinnacle of power.

Beginning with the stunning Brexit win in Great Britain in the summer of 2016, followed by the ascendancy of the Trump phenomena in the United States, the world has been rocked from its globalist moorings by election reactions of democracies towards more nationalist overtones. No continent cohabitant with democratic process has been spared. A supposedly unified Europe has seen strong elective resistance to trans-national European Union overlords, in Poland, Italy, Hungary, and Austria. North America has seen nationalists win in Mexico, and most dramatically, the United States. Now, South America, watching the real time suicide of a once prosperous Venezuela under the boot of disastrous socialist autocracy, has seen its largest country radically swing away from any dalliance with the virus that has strangled the Venezuelan prosperity.

At the turn of the century, there was a brief communal awareness that perhaps the world had, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 seen the “end of history”, with global coordination of borderless trade positioning governments to remove the concept of borders altogether. A dominant military superpower in the United States allowed bureaucrats to resist developing national power structures in favor bureaucrats who would reign by regulation rather than martial projection of power. The need for national exceptionalism was to progressively give way to global universality dominated by an intellectual elite that would bypass the need for borders by eliminating the cultural uniqueness that in their mind supported inequality through border separateness. Globalist thought saw borders as an anachronism, and therefore, encouraged removal of any impediments to immigration, to further blend the cultural soup into an indistinguishable compote. A post religion, post language, post inequity world was in sight, where martial energies could be directed toward global dragons such as “climate change” and “redistribution”. The wrenching effect on individuals of enforced cultural change, derision of time honored traditions, and a feeling that their way of life was wantonly considered an “acceptable” sacrifice on the altar of a ‘better’ future never entered into globalist calculations.

The first reactionary slap was the fundamentalist violent recoil of radical Islam on 09/11. Despite the transient collective national response to the attack, the left almost immediately sought to demonize an aggressive national reaction , and sought to invent a rationalization that would seek global bureaucratic “legal” recourse to terrorism, rather than military destruction of terrorists. Despite the enormous associated risks, global bureaucracies stuck to the stated goal of unfettered immigration, regardless of the obvious risk to their citizens of additionally allowing the virus of radicalism, terrorism, and destruction of rule of law to proceed apace. With the election of Barrack Obama, the bastion home of the clarion call for sovereignty, limited government, and individual freedoms, the United States, was now positioned to lose its exceptionalism, and be assimilated to the future, like its European forebears themselves.

Historical dissonance once driven too far into an unnatural human posture, inevitably leads to reactionary strains, and we are in one now. The only consensus that currently exists is that there can be no consensus between a increasingly globalist, social uniformity championed by the left, and a large and growing reactionary pull back toward traditional virtues and competitive national stories. I can’t see that this division, so intensely demanded by the proponents of each future, will somehow end in comity. The recent hysterical outrages claimed by the left, and the progressive successes on the right in the ballot box only intensifies the divide.

Unfortunately, a chasm is developing, and the first violent outbursts and simmering hatreds are beginning to find root. Violence at the periphery from the disaffected is increasingly finding its way to more and more dramatic expression. The left has never accepted the idea that the “arc of history towards social justice” could ever be thwarted. The threat of violence has been the left’s tool for ultimate submission of those who do not see the future the way they do. The reaction in the not so distant past to the violent tendencies of the over reaching left, has been in past times an equally over reaching right. We will see if the skill set of such men as Trump and Bolsanaro prove up to the task of ably setting things right, without resorting to pulling as far right as the left has pulled left. If they are not savvy enough, pressure pot may boil over, and we all might unfortunately end up looking back to this tumultuous time, as the quiet before the storm.

August 26, 2018

Maverick

Zuni Rocket sets L.Cr. John McCain’s plane aflame on the USS Forrestal

At 10:51am July 29, 1967, the USS Forrestal, an American aircraft carrier positioned in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of Vietnam prepared a flight deck for participation in the strategic bombing campaign, Rolling Thunder, and had a deck full of fighter aircraft loaded with ordinance. Completing the dangerous process of loading live ordinance , an A-4 Skyhawk captained by Lieutenant Commander John S. McCain III was docked at the stern of the carrier when a Zuni rocket secured to a craft on the opposite side of the deck, due to an electrical surge on the craft, spontaneously fired and released, shooting across the tarmac directly into McCain’s jet fuel tank, spilling hundreds of gallons of highly flammable fuel.

Deck crewmen, quickly realizing the extreme gravity of the situation, rushed to douse the flames. McCain got himself extracted from his cockpit, jumped down off the craft and raced across the deck as the fire crews ran past him to spray fire retardant.

McCain got half way across the deck when the first 1000 lb bomb beneath his craft ignited from the fire’s heat, blasting him 10 feet in the air, peppering him in shrapnel, and instantly disintegrating the courageous fire team behind him. Before the conflagration was over, scores of bombs exploded on the deck of the Forrestal tens of thousands of gallons of jet fuel ignited, and in the worst on deck accident in U.S. history, 134 servicemen were killed, another 161 injured. John S. McCain, so close to the center of a death defying ordeal, managed to come out of the conflagration to live another day.

Yesterday, the Maverick met an ordeal beyond even his unique survival skills, and succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 82. Like every other adversary he had the misfortune to face in his life, he proved himself both courageous and circumspect in his place in the battle to survive.

John S. McCain III left an indelible mark on the world in the 50 or so years he was a public figure. History called him from birth to be a participant, not an observer. His grandfather John McCain was an integral part of carrier actions in World War II. Foreshadowing his grandson, he was a Naval Academy graduate, hard driving, profane individual who liked to take responsibility on his shoulders, and was empowered by the proximity to danger and action. A top Pacific commander at the end of the war, he died of a heart attack just four days after the Japanese surrender, completely worn out by the demands of the job. His son, John S. McCain, Jr., followed his father’s footsteps to become a four star admiral in charge of Naval Pacific Operations in the Vietnam War. It was an unavoidable destiny, therefore, for John S. McCain III, nondescript student and having a reputation as a hell raiser at the Naval Academy, to follow his father and grandfather’s path as a Naval aviator in the midst of the Vietnam War and a participant in the fighting during his father’s command.

The Forrestal was just the first of MCain’s life altering brushes with death. The second occurred three months later from the Forrestal disaster, when on October 26, 1967, when on a bombing mission over North Vietnam, McCain was shot down by a surface to air missile. Forced to eject from the plane, McCain fractured both arms and a leg on the ejection impact, nearly drowned when he parachuted into a lake, then was dragged out by North Vietnamese troops, who permanently crushed his right shoulder with a gunstock and bayoneted him. Transported to the notorious ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison camp, the severe injuries were left untreated, and further torture followed until it was discovered who his father was by the captors. This led to a hospitalization for basic treatment in hopes that McCain could serve as a propaganda tool against his father, and country. McCain lost fifty pounds in the ‘hospital’ and was not expected to live. When he revealed to the enemy the Maverick survival orneriness that everyone back home already knew about, he was placed in solitary confinement for the next two years. The beatings resumed in an effort to get him to sign a ‘confession of guilt for war crimes’ and he was offered early release if he would sign. The horrendous treatment could not break him, refusing any preferential treatment. He remained steadfast in the five and one half years that he was imprisoned until his release in 1972. He carried the physical and mental scars of his brutal treatment to the end of his life.

McCain returned from the war a different man, but as events that are as severe as the ones he had lived through, reinforced both his good and bad impulses. He returned to navy command and performed well, but recognized he would never achieve his ambitions to the extent that his father and grandfather did in the Navy. He turned his direction out of the military — and away from his faithful wife, who had been injured in a car accident, and suffered much of the same rehabilitation requirements that McCain endured upon returning to the States. He requested a divorce, and remarried, this time to an Arizonan who was an heir to a fortune and who’s father related to Arizonans of real influence. McCain entered Arizona politics, and won the congress seat for the Ist district as part of the Reagan wave of conservative victories, then subsequently, won the Senate seat of the retiring legendary senator Barry Goldwater.

Assumed to be a pure conservative, Senator McCain began the conversion to a contrarian that would earn him the title of political Maverick by a conflicted press, that, while enjoying his willingness to destabilize his own party unity and his love of the battle, confounded by his residual tendency to hold, for them, abhorrent conservative foundations and ‘warhawk’ persona.

He enjoyed the public world, never shying from a headline, and relished the discomfort his ‘reach across the aisle’ attitude caused his fellow Republicans. His ambitions showed full flower when he engaged in a bitter race for the Republican nomination for President in 2000 against the front runner George W. Bush, losing , but holding a fairly significant grudge in the process, that led to McCain functioning as an unpredictable thorn in the eventual President Bush’s side in legislative issues such as tax cuts, carbon taxes, campaign finance, and gun rights. He remained illogically close to John Kerry, a radical anti Vietnam war protestor following a controversial Vietnam combat experience, leading to a timid support of Bush in the 2004 election, and a further distancing from the party’s conservative core. Yet, when a quagmire and a potential ignominious defeat in Iraq loomed, MCain was unwavering in his support for President Bush’s decision against all odds and advice, to support an American military surge tactic, that turned the conflict and removed direct war in Iraq as an obstacle for future Presidents.

The moment of truth for John McCain came in 2008, when his ambitions and the party’s presidential opportunity coalesced in a Presidential nomination at the party convention. McCain worked tirelessly, but his contrariness and his lack of party discipline got him into trouble from which he never recovered. McCain made several crucial mistakes that doomed the already difficult task of defeating a Bush weary country against an unknown idealized Democrat candidate, Barrack Obama – young, sophisticated, and of mixed race — an exotic combination that proved intoxicating for a compliant press and a country looking to get a way from a war footing. McCain became disappointed that his personal rapport with the press held little sway when up against someone that exemplified their idyllic view of government. He selected an obscure candidate for Vice President in Governor Sara Palin of Alaska , who he hoped would restore his shaky relationships with conservatives, only to nearly abandon her when she proved shaky in her grasp of facts and unexperienced with the full court pressure applied by the press. He grossly misread the effect “suspending” his Presidential campaign when the October 2008 banking crisis hit, traveling to Washington to ‘work for ‘solutions’ where he was easily tarred as an accomplice in the disaster. Obama, also a Senator, wisely stayed away and let Washington flail, allowing Obama to remain clean of all the necessarily politically unpleasant decisions required to survive the crisis. McCain’s likeablity and hero status translated to nearly 60 million votes, but he was swamped in the electoral college by nearly 200. John McCain had reached the pinnacle of his political life, only to come up against a more presidentially projectable maverick than he, in Obama.

He spent his residual years in the Senate prior to his illness trying to fashion the illusory middle ground that he felt was the way forward for the country. Opposed to the Accountable Care Act as an unworkable and undemocratic bill, he ended up being the crossover vote that protected the bill against rejection in 2017, when he felt the alternative was equally unstructured and undemocratic. He sided with the Obama administration in the ill conceived actions in Egypt and Libya, but was virulently against the inactions in Syria and the process of negotiating with Iran’s theocratic dictators without Senate treaty submission. Despite being the Senator of a border state, he could never find a comfortable position on the need for border security and immigration reform. Regardless, as with all historical moments in his life, McCain positioned himself in the center of the action, and determined a course he felt he could live with, and a priority and principle he felt was consistent with his personal calling.

John S. McCain saw himself as a maverick, and like all mavericks was comfortable with the inconsistencies and flaws the maverick nature tends to expose. But more than maverick he was heroic, living through pain, torment, and controversy as if they were ennobling, rather than dehumanizing. He was authentically American in his heroism, sometimes losing the consistent and realistic for the ideal, and never, ever wavering in his love of country or mission his family had taken over multiple generations to sustain it. Choosing politics as his ultimate personal mission, he exhibited some of the recklessness that lost him the coalescence of support from all the factions that are necessary to ultimately prevail. The maverick model was, perhaps, a little ahead of its time, and McCain stopped just short of the populist impulse that would eventually position another maverick candidate, Donald Trump to achieve the ultimate prize.

John S. McCain III was above all, one great American story. His core is described in both his own memoir, Faith of My Fathers , and in the brilliant reporting of Robert Timberg in The Nightingale’s Song. We will miss John McCain as we will miss a crucial part of our Americanness, – action oriented, courageous, occasionally impulsive – but trying to find the right and true way forward.

Rest in Peace, John McCain. God Speed to the Maverick.

July 1, 2018

July 2nd, 1776

In 1776, the highest form of capital crime in the United Kingdom or the vast expanse of colonized lands under the sovereignty of King George III was the crime of high treason, disloyalty to the Crown. The concept of high treason represented the ultimate attempt to distort or erode the authority of the sovereign and for hundreds of years represented the ultimate moral stain on a subject of that sovereign. As such, the punishment for such a heinous crime was defined under law as equally heinous — drawing, hanging, and quartering. The traitor would be drawn to his place of execution, hung in a fashion insufficient to kill him outright, then eviscerated and quartered while still alive so that he could experience the full extent of the torture before being beheaded. The sentence of forfeiture, the assumption of all lands and possessions of the traitor and all relations followed the direct sentence, assuring the position of the traitor was forever wiped from any societal stature forever more. Among the various crimes reflective of such high treason was a subject undertaking premeditated war against the sovereign.

The 56 men who formed the Second Continental Congress could not help to have a visceral foreboding sense of such a personal outcome potentiated by the proposed actions they debated through the spring and hot summer of 1776. The Second Congress had been called as a consequence of the outbreak of war against the sovereign’s army in April, 1775 outside of Boston, culminating in a surprise victory for the colonials and an ignominious defeat for the king’s forces in March, 1776, resulting in the withdrawal of British royal forces from Massachusetts. If the colonial representatives of the Congress had hoped the King had any intentions of pulling back from brink of total insurrection, he quashed them rapidly with the passage of the Prohibitory Acts, that blockaded all American ports and declared all American vessels enemy vessels, assuring a continent wide crushing economic burden. it was fully apparent to all thirteen colonies that their persistence in meeting as a collective assured them a collective consequential verdict in the King’s eyes. Bandits. Rascals. Traitors.

The Age of Enlightenment began as a scientific revolution, but exploded into a golden age of philosophic thought not seen since the ancient Greeks. The power of reason surged through a 100 year renaissance of the ideas of Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Spinoza, Hume, Locke, Kant and Smith that dominated the advanced education of any gentleman of the 18th century and infected an entire generation learned men not only in England, Scotland, and France, but the entire continent and the New World. The concepts of innate individual rights, rational society, and the concept of common men in charge of their own reason and destiny struck directly at the heart of the concept of divine rights of kings. The concept that a King through edict could impel subjects to defer these rights without any representation of their opinions to influence seemed antithetical to the generation currently standing as leaders of the American colonies. Americans saw themselves as having lived an almost 170 year experiment in independent incentive required to survive the harsh consequences of having to colonize and civilize a harsh and wild continent, and though loyal to the concept of being essentially British, assumed that the process that was borne at the Magna Carta, Glorious Revolution, and ascension of Parliamentary representation was their history as well. Great Britain had many colonial dominions, however, and the King could not cotton one set of colonies securing rights and privileges he would then have to inevitably accede to in all others.

In the spring of 1776, there was certainly no unanimity of thought as to the direction to take to address the developing crisis. Each of the thirteen colonial legislatures felt themselves unique in governance and provided contrary instructions to their representatives of the Congress, but the tide of opinion was swelling toward a more profound separation than most wanted to admit. The radical north, having felt the violence of insurrection directly, led by John Adams of Massachusetts, proposed a Preamble of a potential resolution for separation from the mother country. At the same time the Virginia convention, the legislature of the most prosperous and influential colony, on May 15th, 1776, proposed that the Congress debate a resolution to declare the colonies free and independent states, absolved from all allegiance to great Britain. In light of this edict, Richard Lee, the Virginia representative, proposed to the Continental Congress a debate over a three part resolve to declare independence, form foreign alliances, and prepare for a trans-colonial confederation of states. The motion was seconded by John Adams, and cold hard reality of the commission of high treasonous acts was now an unavoidable possibility for every delegate. The profound maneuver was truly revolutionary and multiple delegations did not feel they had sufficient power to declare for their associated colonies without further instruction. The resolution was therefore tabled, and a three week recess was called, while delegates could return home to their legislatures for further instruction. The Congress appointed a committee of five, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman to develop a definitive declarative statement. The language was definitively Jefferson, but contributions of Adams and Franklin brought clarity to important segments. The above photo shows the influence of corrections applied to Jefferson’s hand written document in real time by both the committee and subsequently the congressional delegates themselves. The eventual Declaration of the Continental Congress as envisioned by the authors became a document of the very principles of the Enlightenment highlighted by the single statement that defined all subsequent actions and has resonated through all humanity for the next 242 years:

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness.

No statement had ever firmed the conviction of undertaking the obvious risks of separation from a ruling power based on the stance of inherent rights borne of men. The argument that such rights were endowed by the Creator, and therefore preceded any worldly declaration of governance was so revolutionary that the very statement if somehow able to be realized, would forever remove the divine rule concept that had dominated all society since the dawn of the tribe. To sign such a declaration was to state the sovereign never held any such rights of dominion in the first place. There could no rationalization of the statement as anything other than the highest treason in the case of an eventual defeat for any of the delegates who would endorse, and they knew it.

On July 1st, the Congress reassembled and the Declaration was debated in earnest, with significant adjustments and substantial shortening agreed upon to strengthen the document and improve its impact. Considerable angst was felt by many, and the capacity for an unanimous declaration was in doubt. Benjamin Franklin rallied the delegates with the clarifying focus of the importance of unanimity:

‘We must hang together, or surely we will hang separately.’

On the evening of July 1st, the Congress after a full day of debate took up the edited Declaration of Independence and advanced to the roll call of the individual delegations. No doubt each faced the enormous weight of history of such a declaration against the King of the most powerful nation on earth, both personally and as the leading edge representation of their fellow Americans. The initial roll call had dissent from South Carolina and Pennsylvania, and abstention from New York. The exhausted delegates determined to table the resolution until the following morning. The overwhelming weight of holding back history smothered the Carolina and Pennsylvania delegations through the night. On the subsequent morning July 2nd, 1776, the roll call was again taken and South Carolina reversed its vote, and the lonely dissent fell to Pennsylvania. Though personally against the declaration, John Dickerson and Robert Morris bravely abstained so the declaration could be voted upon by the residual five members of the delegation. A 3 to 2 vote in favor resulted and the last holdout Pennsylvania fell into the approval column. With no residual dissent the Declaration passed, and the convention declared the colonies Free and Independent States.

One can only imagine the sense of stunned silence that must have permeated the hall as the delegates fully absorbed what they had just done. Though the public proclamation followed on the 4th of July, the future of the world was sealed on July 2nd, 1776 as the foundation of a concept of a governance underwritten by individual liberty and property, self governed, would have its birth forever recognized from this seminal vote.

Two hundred and forty-two years later, living testimonially in the greatest semblance of liberty and individual rights ever assembled, we celebrate the gentlemen on that oppressively hot morning in Philadelphia who faced an impossible task fearlessly because of the overwhelming surety of their cause. In an age where the liberties so dangerously promoted and so painfully sacrificed for are frivolously given up for a transient sense of security, the moment needs to be re-lived.

Life. Liberty. The Pursuit of Happiness. Let the bells ring out and the drums peal! Happy Independence Day.

May 27, 2018May 28, 2018

Fallen Heroes Remembered

The British Advance The Battle of Brooklyn 1776

Somewhere, beneath the brownstones and newly chic coffeehouses and restaurants of the Gowanus district of Brooklyn, New York, transected by the busy streets of 3rd street and 4th avenue, lies a mass grave. Buried by centuries and concrete, tens of thousands of people daily unknowingly walk over heroes, several hundred lain together head to foot, placed there by invading British armies in August of 1776. Attempts over the years to identify the hallowed ground, and memorialize appropriately these men of an another age and another time, have proved fruitless. The place, once country berm against a small creek known as Gowanus, has likely been erased by history and the massive growth of a modern metropolis. Yet , somewhere beneath the raging civilization, they are there, the remnants of the 1st Maryland, known as the Maryland 400, who took it upon themselves, to sacrifice themselves, and save a nation.

The people who participated in the Revolutionary War for American Independence required a will and internal rectitude of such supreme depth to accept the challenge of defeating the greatest military power on earth, that it at times of crisis, many assumed the hand of divine providence. John Page declared , in his 1776 letter to Thomas Jefferson, “Do you not think an angel rides in this whirlwind, and directs this storm?” At the center of the whirlwind, of course, was not the epic philosopher Jefferson, but, like all conflagrations, the every day citizens that left their nondescript worlds to put their lives at risk for a cause they felt greater then themselves. As through history, men of similar geography and life view formed militias in their home towns, and met up with their like minded neighbors, to form regiments. In a world where the violence of the battle and the paucity of medical knowledge to prevent disease among congregated men or respond appropriately to injury made the risk of dying a palpable reality, the cause had to be clear and indisputable to risk all. The ideas of equality and freedom, not just for the elite, but for every man, was just such a powerful elixir. Among the most capable and the most committed, was the 1st Maryland. The men of Maryland were acutely aware that their colony had been formed on revolutionary principles — particularly, religious tolerance, at a time of rigid religious segregation. This innate binding of people to accept other placed Maryland at the forefront of colonies that could understand the implications of a document such as the Declaration of Independence. It brought the 1st Maryland a reputation of being one of the most accomplished, courageous, and committed regiments of General George Washington’s fledgling army.

The world forever changed on July 4th,1776 with the Declaration of Independence. A treatise that stated men were not so much bound by their ancestry but the revolutionary concept of a set of ideals opened the world to inexorable tumult between the traditions of tribe and king, and the enlightened view that every man should be his own king. On the North American continent, the ideas were so compelling that it determined to pit men against the greatest economic and military power on earth in Great Britain. The British King, King George III, was certainly not of a mind to allow such heresy to take root and fragment off a massive portion of his worldly dominion, and determined to ruthlessly crush the revolt. He was not interested in drawn out affairs. He sent a massive transoceanic invasion force of 35,000 to snuff out a wisp of optimism that may have been gleaned by the Americans in their unexpected achievement of the ignominious withdrawal of British forces from Boston the winter of 1775. Despite the massive expanse of the American colonies, there were only three populations centers of any significance, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and the British military plan was to capture New York, carve the rebellion in half, and take care of each residual remnant separately. The Continental Congress promised General Washington a fighting force of 28,000 men, but the reality between a professional fighting force, and a ragtag conglomeration of disparate militias, was acutely apparent. The brief ebullience of the July Declaration quickly gave way to dismay, as a very real professional fighting force of 32,000 men, 3000 supporting navy delivered by over 100 royal fighting ships disembarked on Staten Island, preparing to deliver a knockout blow to the American rebel contingent guarding the city. The rattled Americans could see the daily accumulation of an invasion force many times their own , and given the dominance of the royal Navy, no chance to do anything about it. General Washington, unsure of British invasion beach, hastily determined to split in half his already outnumbered army, and managed only to sew confusion in the ranks and weaken his resistance capacity further. On the morning of August 22nd, no further guessing was necessary as seasoned troops began to transit across the harbor to Gravesend Bay, landing on the south shore of Long Island. By noon there were 15000 troops including thousands of Hessian troops, considered among Europe’s finest, disembarked and facing a spread out, ill equipped and panicked 6000 Americans. Generals Clinton and Cornwallis pinned the frontline troops at Guan Hills while a flanking maneuver fairly easily crushed inward the American’s left flank. Almost immediately, desperation set in. In short order, half of the entire American continental force was cratering and at risk for being entirely surrounded, and the war was in danger of being over before it had practically begun.

General Washington, viewing the unfolding calamity from Brooklyn Heights, against the East River, realized only a hurried, dangerous retreat across the river to Manhattan offered any temporary salvation. Some event would have to buy him time, and it would take asking the impossible of panicked retreating men to attack against all odds, to gain that time. With the retreating army piecemeal and chaotically drifting toward the heights, it fell to the several hundred men of the 1st Maryland guarding the south banks of Gowanus Creek near the old stone Vechte- Cortelyou farmhouse, coalesced under the leadership of Lord Stirling. A Scottish lord peerage achieved through lineage, Lord Stirling (William Alexander) was every bit American born and bred. He was a trusted confidant of Washington’s, an unconflicted American patriot, and stepped forward to take on the task with his troops. Known forever as the Maryland 400, the fighting force was likely closer to 275 battle capable troops, facing at least five times the opposing British force, led by General James Grant. Facing insurmountable odds, the Marylanders managed as many as five separate charges into the teeth of the advancing British army, facing artillery against flint muskets, often engaging in desperate hand to hand combat. Where minutes mattered, the regiment managed to hold off the British for over four hours with savage sustained attack — until there was essentially no regiment left. Behind the brave charges, thousands of American soldiers made it to the heights, escaping to Manhattan, to fight another day. It was estimated less than 20 Marylanders survived the battle.

The 1st Maryland Regiment holds the Line at the Old Stone House and Mill as troops escape across Gowanus Creek to the Brooklyn Heights, in the foreground.

We are privileged on Memorial Day to take a moment to reflect on the sacrifice of so many to allow us to live out our lives in a land of freedom. Very few understand how rare in human history this concept of universal freedom is, and how extraordinarily fragile such freedom truly is. It has been borne on the back of enormous individual sacrifice, that at most times, was given with little faith in a successful outcome or sufficient reason for the sacrifice. More often than not, it was given to protect the fellow human along side that perhaps would survive to enjoy someday the preservation of those freedoms, the freedom to live an eventful and self determined life. We owe so much to all who have given limb and life in defense of an indivisible truth that all people are worthy and all opportunity for happiness is shared.

With a marauding, overwhelming British force and a collapsing army, no 1st Marylander could expect that their individual sacrifice in the middle of a whirlwind, could possibly effect the ultimate outcome in the slightest. But they were determined to give their lives at least trying to hold their freedoms to their last breath, and in so doing, in the middle of the whirlwind, gave the angels time to make miracles happen.

Somewhere beneath the bustling metropolis of Brooklyn, New York, lie 256 Marylanders, lain by their British foes in a mass grave, facing east and towards the rising sun, brother to brother.

Thanks to my father, and all veterans, who served and sacrificed for their country, on this Memorial Day.

January 7, 2018January 7, 2018

Darkest Hour – Winston Churchill and the Monomyth

Prime Minister Winston Churchill – AP file photo

In the last six months, bookend movies have been produced that focus on a very tight window of time from May to June, 1940, when the United Kingdom, under enormous external threat, faced an existential crisis of leadership and free will. In a few short weeks, a dark reality presented with the spectacular collapse of its European democratic erstwhile ally France and its own military implosion on the continent as the German military machine split and cornered the whole of the British Expeditionary Force against the sea. The assumptions of an entire generation of British political elite, that the dictator Hitler could be placated, or if requiring confrontation, subdued by fixed continental defenses, cascaded in the space of a few short days from misplaced confidence to absolute panic. The French multi-million man army possessing superior firepower and internal lines of support, proved absent the critical will to absorb punishment, having exhausted its martial spirit in being bled white a generation earlier in the Great War conflagration. The British forces, assuming themselves to be the flanking hammer in the low countries, found themselves instead flanked by a superior German philosophy of combined assault of armored thrusts and air cover, that quickly drove a wedge between the mass of the French force and the British forces through the Abbeville gap to the sea at Calais. Flanked, then surrounded, the collapsing British fell against the beaches at Dunkirk, hundreds of thousands of British infantry trapped against the seawalls, awaiting the inevitable end , like fish in a barrel. The front line drama of this moment was captured in the summer 2017 movie, Dunkirk, and reviewed previously by Ramparts. The missing back story of Dunkirk, the unfolding of the impending disaster and the specific decisions of leadership as the German hegemon stood athwart Dunkirk poised to destroy British land defense capability, is the core of Darkest Hour.

The coupling of the two movies, Dunkirk and Darkest Hour, present at a curious time. Atypical for the inspiration of such period historical dramas, there is no identified anniversary of events or people that would lead one to assume the enthusiasm and funding for such movies. The events and the number of people who can physically remember them in actuality , is receding rapidly into the mists of time. With the distance from such memories and their implied heroism, progressively goes the sense of recognition and interest in the existential threat that faced the participants. The globalist modern western world has little time for the concepts of “Christian Civilization” and “martial spirit” that drove Churchill and the common people of the United Kingdom to even consider that a battle to the death would be preferable to subjugation beneath a Nazi philosophy of a master race. Modern globalists look aghast at the idea that an individual could reorder the tides of history through something as quant as personal will or loquacious inspiration. Modern tides are defined by horizons defined by events and movements, such as Global Warming, Intersectionality, and Social Justice. Individual freedom, the idea that one can determine one’s destiny in the face of such tides of history seems anachronistic.

The philosophical construct that great men can influence and direct outcomes in history found origin in the writings of Thomas Carlyle, a 19th century Scottish writer. Articulating the Great Man Theory, Carlyle surmised that certain individuals possessing exceptional charisma, insight and political will could actually shape historical events decisively. Such Heroes and Anti Heroes existed among men through time and predictably reassert individual impacts on historical forces. The American author Joseph Campbell, in Hero of a Thousand Faces developed the concept as a unifying multi-cultural archetype through history, the Hero of the monomyth:

In laying out the monomyth, Campbell describes a number of stages or steps along this journey. The hero starts in the ordinary world, and receives a call to enter an unusual world of strange powers and events (a call to adventure). If the hero accepts the call to enter this strange world, the hero must face tasks and trials (a road of trials), and may have to face these trials alone, or may have assistance. At its most intense, the hero must survive a severe challenge, often with help earned along the journey. If the hero survives, the hero may achieve a great gift (the goal or “boon”), which often results in the discovery of important self-knowledge. The hero must then decide whether to return with this boon (the return to the ordinary world), often facing challenges on the return journey. If the hero is successful in returning, the boon or gift may be used to improve the world (the application of the boon). (wikipedia)

Winston Churchill has been identified as such a hero of the monomyth, and the very idea that this flawed individual could rise above myth and possibly be the proof of a living, breathing example of the Great Man come to life has been the vortex of the battle of the two opposing views of history.

The movie Dunkirk, for all its spectacular cinematic scope, stands slightly empty in that the human element is entirely interchangeable against the massive overwhelming threat that is the unseen enemy. The forces and events that place the individual soldiers against the sea wall and lead others to try to save them are not developed beyond human suffering and the need to assuage such suffering. The context that would suggest fighting to survive against overwhelming odds for an uncertain future might be preferable to surrendering to the inevitable is barely developed.

Darkest Hour lives in a profoundly different cinematic universe. The central figure Winston Churchill is fully developed and the action scenes only implied. The movie coalesces around the forces of opposition to Churchill as he finds himself alone in a large sense of the movie, both figuratively and literally under attack from both internal and external forces. This movie monomyth finds himself swept up into the pinnacle of his career with, as suggested by the movie, nary a supporter other than his wife (even the American President Roosevelt throws him under the bus). This Churchill is at times doddering and seems doubtful of his physical and mental abilities to perform the task, and needs reinforcement from his wife, his secretary, his king, and ultimately directly the British people themselves. In actual events, Churchill had positioned himself at the crucible of moral strength through years of calling out the Conservative Party leadership for Britain’s lack of preparedness and correctly identifying the threat of Hitler while others appeased, and had sustained support from the opposition Labor party leaders who mistrusted any other Conservative leader to stand up to Hitler. Upon ascending to the Prime Ministership on May 10th,1940, Churchill astounded others with his incredible work ethic and energy, working long days and far into the night, taking multiple flights into the war zone to buck up the French leaders, seek multiple alternative plans to attempt to arrest the tide and ultimately save the forces stranded at Dunkirk.

The movie does however function on a higher level in showing the politician Churchill recognizing that people he needed to convince were not his immediate cabinet so much as the people beyond. The British people would be asked to sacrifice profoundly and needed to understand at their core what was at risk and what would be worthy of such sacrifice. This is of course the monomyth’s gift of self knowledge that the hero Churchill receives, and delivers to his people that all important gift in language that has rarely been replicated for immediate impact and gathered unity of purpose. In the gangway of the Commons, speech perched upon the red dispatch box of the Prime Minister, Churchill used his oratorical gifts time and time again to frame the daunting challenge and stakes through the spring, summer and fall of 1940 when Britain stood alone against the Nazi war machine. The actor Gary Oldman epically reveals the internal pressures Churchill no doubt sensed and his ability to rise to the occasion in magnificent prose and take the entire weight upon his shoulders. In the movie, the Viscount Halifax is quoted as saying after Churchill’s epic speech following Dunkirk, ” He has mobilized the language and sent it into battle”. Though the quote is actually Edward R Murrow’s regarding Churchill years later, it fits the drama of the moment better than any, and works in the movie.

Darkest Hour, flaws of content and dramatic license aside, speaks to assert the role of a hero figure to impose his will on history. This most world war of wars was obviously fought upon the sacrifice of untold millions to whom mere words held little solace. But World War II was also a profound realization of the Hero and the Anti-Hero, so clear cut that the goal of each opposing force was always to try to find a way to kill Churchill or Hitler , so pivotal to the forces of light and darkness respectively each represented. When the world is at its darkest, one looks for illumination and salvation at the most mythic levels. In a cinematic age of cartoon heroes , Darkest Hour gives us some insight on how real heroes find their way.

January 1, 2018

2017 Hands Off A Potentially Historical Arc for Freedom To 2018

Old Year 2017 hands off to New Year 2018

Each year reaches exhaustion on the Gregorian Calendar at the same time midnight December 31st. Since Pope Gregory in 1587 determined Julius Caesar’s calendar was sufficiently out of sync that an extra day was required every four years to leap the calendar forward and secure it appropriately with the seasons, we have counted our transition to the new year with similarity to our ancestors for 430 years. Most of those years, the resolutions are personal, with an oath to do things differently, a fresh start in life upon the advancement of the calendar to the new year. History, however, is more continuous in arc and less amenable to rigid stops and starts. Suddenly though , the end of 2017 has shifted the ground so dramatically in Iran that something similar to the real historical diversion made in 1989, may be upon us with the coming of the new year. Maybe something truly heroic; maybe, at long last, the breath of freedom to a long suffering people.

IRAN In 1979, the people of Iran were grifted out of their people’s revolution in overthrowing the autocratic Shah, the autocratic dictatorship absconded by religious zealots and replaced with a theocratic one. For nearly 40 years, the Iranian people have suffered under a small cadre of clerics that assume their brand of rigid male dominated society forcing all others into subservience will somehow continue to resonate with a population which is now 60% under the age of thirty and no longer willing to be denied their individual pursuit of happiness. Like all religions with a dark, negativistic view of human interaction, the puritanical restrictions eventually morph into downright moral corruption and overreach that eventually cause fundamental collapse of the subjected’s passive acceptance of authority.

In 2009, President Obama, the so-called leader of the Free World, reached the lowest moral point of his Presidency when he remained silent during the protests of millions in Iran’s Green Revolution as young people were massacred on the streets by regime thugs. History records that he did so as he did not want to upset his fantastical plan to work with the mullahs in achieving a diplomatic pact that would place theocratic Iran in the position of dominance in the Middle East and Central Asia. He was willing to deal away the heroic uprising, remove sanctions, restore billions of dollars to the mullahs, avert his eyes as the regime’s terrorist arm, Hezbollah threatened Israel, overran Lebanon, helped convert Syria into a human calamity, allow Iran to continue to develop ballistic weapons for nuclear delivery that could threaten Israel, the Arabian Peninsula and Europe, kill hundreds of American soldiers in Iraq, and prepare for an active nuclear capability. It is hard to underestimate how ugly this colossal misjudgment proved to be.

Now, seemingly out of the blue to averted western eyes, the Iranian people are rising again to throw off their enslavers, and this time, it may be hard to put the genie back in the bottle. The regime is full of viciousness and will not stand for a mortal threat to its existence, for each of these ‘religious” figures understand that there could be a ‘Libyan sendoff‘ for each of them should their authority erode and their role in murder , theft, and corruption becomes fully uncovered. As 2017 ends, the clamp down on information escaping Iran by authorities makes the extent and potential success of what has erupted from the population difficult to discern. What appears critical this time, is that the revolt of the people is across the width and breath of Iran, and transcends class. Outgunned and up against a vicious reactionary leadership, there is little doubt that success if at all possible will more resemble the French Revolution of 1789 than the Velvet Revolution of 1989. We at the ramparts, must watch and pray for the latter, but history suggests usually otherwise. At least this time, the Iranian people will see an American leader who recognizes their struggle for what it is:

As 2017 leads into 2018, a historic fulcrum is upon Iran and its heroic people. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, oppressive authority withers two ways : gradually and then, suddenly.

August 28, 2017

American History is no longer Statuesque

The General Robert E. Lee statue is removed from its pedestal on Lee Circle in New Orleans May 19th, 2017

In 1884, 19 years removed from the intense passions of the brutal interlude of the American Civil War, an illustrious crowd led by Confederate royalty, including the former President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, the Confederate General Beauregard, and two daughters of General Lee, saw the dignified and solemn statue of the Confederacy’s most famous general dedicated in New Orleans. The statue survived on its pedestal through the twentieth century and many re-interpretations of the causes and principles of the struggle, and levels of veneration of the reluctant general who vigorously led the South in battle. The statue on its 107th birthday was placed in protected status on the National Register of Historic Places. Rising nearly a hundred feet over New Orleans, its was one of the more recognizable and representative historical structures in the city.

On May 19th, 2017, the monument to the South’s peculiar cultural identity and tragic mis-direction was taken down, as the city’s government’s final success in removing Confederate historical figures from the city.

New Orleans’ drive to expunge its connection with secessionist history injected momentum across the United States to find ‘inappropriately venerated’ historical monuments and expunge them and perhaps what they teach us about ourselves , from our consciousness. The focus by self interested groups on the left to roust out such history accelerated after the events of Charlottesville, and have led to less civilized and more aggressive removal and destruction of similar monuments. As with all movements where the original logic for the actions shift with the political motivations of the activists, the destructive eye now points toward previously uniting monuments

to the American story such as the Jefferson Monument and Mt. Rushmore. The radical aggression has spilled beyond the country’s founders to the very base disgust the radicals feel for anything that defines America, such as Christopher Columbus and yes, Abraham Lincoln.

Really. Abraham Lincoln.

We are living through a dangerously anti-historical time, when the extent and meaning of events, so formative in how we became, are being evangelistically eradicated by those with little sense of history and a real hatred of who we are. It is nonsensical to not understand that monuments are often erected to highlight what people have seen over years to be enduring and important, rather than any pretense that these individuals represented were without flaw. Robert E. Lee is venerated for the way he led men, not for the fractured logic of his divided loyalties. Thomas Jefferson elevated for all time the principle of individual rights and the expressed equality of man, not his own timid, very human inability in his time and culture to live up to his own principles. The many representations of a heroic southern sacrifice do not celebrate the horrid culture of slavery, but of an epic, crushing struggle that left a million dead, nearly twice as many as in World War II, in a country a third as populous. In the profound battle to end the wretched scar of American slavery hobbling a society founded on equality and freedom, the passions that drove one side to the righteous, and the other to a doomed and inhonorable and erroneous principle, were complex and inexorable. Tearing down history, without recognizing its ability to teach, encourages the very close minded processes that led to such passions in the first place.

That said, history and our human story is too imbued within us to fall silent when facing the the poorly chosen specific statue or monument. Heroes are etherial and not locked in their time. A statue to Roger Taney or a George Wallace are not time heroic. There is no feasible need to teach their inhumanity, regardless of their skills, that suggests any need for their continuing memorial existence. A modern society can reflect upon its heroes and determine their relevance soberly, and cull with care. We needn’t feel sentimental justifying a particular malevolence, because of a peculiar skill. There is justice in removing a Hussein or Stalin from the pedestal, once their own societies have identified the hypocrisy of their veneration.

Yet the danger always resides in the zealous nature of our own perceived purity and our unwillingness to register our humility in judgement of others. Could it be possible that we could even learn from a Nathan Bedford Forrest?

Civil war, such as you have just passed through, naturally engenders feelings of animosity, hatred, and revenge. It is our duty to divest ourselves of such feelings, and, so far as it is in our power to do so, , to cultivate feelings toward those with whom we have so long contested and heretofore so widely but honestly differed. Neighborhood feuds, personal animosities, and private differences should be blotted out, and when you return home, a manly, straightforward course of conduct will secure the respect of even of your enemies. Whatever your responsibilities may be to government , to society, or to individuals, meet them like men, The attempt to establish a separate and independent confederation has failed, but the consciousness of doing your duty faithfully at to the end will in some measure repay for the hardships you have undergone.

LT. General Nathan Bedford Forrest to his soldiers

May 9th, 1865

Before we tear it all down, maybe we should hear out all the strains of history, and find the better angels of our nature.

July 23, 2017July 23, 2017

Miracle at Dunkirk: Re-Imagining History in the Post History Age

One of the “Little Boats” used at Dunkirk – Imperial War Museum

I recently had the occasion to see Director Christopher Nolan’s cinematic epic “Dunkirk”. We have been through a period in cinema , depicting heroism relegated to the contrived world of comic super heroes and steroid injected Ubermen, where courage is universal because personal risk is essentially eliminated. The real world is altogether different, where courage is usually selfless, with the recognition of one’s mortal being and the randomness and cruelty of destructive fate is ever present. Nolan has attempted to revert back to old fashioned cinematic concepts of relating historical events, more in line with the effect upon individuals of sweeping and inexorable waves of history. “Dunkirk” is told in perspective style, in which time is warped to view a simultaneous event from the perception of those on land, on water, and in the air. Nolan tells everyone’s story on the Dunkirk beach by concentrating on no one’s particular story, instead, relaying a visual masterpiece of surreal beauty, claustrophobic terror, and harrowing visual and audial tension. It is heroism on a human scale, with self preservation in conflict with duty, small gestures raised to epic scope, and helplessness at war with determination. It is a war epic in classic mode, leaving the seeds of conflict for others to tell, focusing on the innate human quality of somehow rising to the occasion, forming the mythic foundations of the human story.

Nolan’s epic, though entertaining in both its visual scope and its technical virtuosity, is strangely absent in the critical ingredient needed to attain great cinematic art, the art of telling a mythic event as an engrossing story. Nolan’s screenplay relates in intimate detail of the overwhelming sense of entrapment and helplessness of the hundreds of thousands of men clinging to the beaches of Dunkirk, but little of the story as to the reasons for their predicament, or of the heroic and determined effort of those who put them there, to get them out. It is the obvious trap of having to tell a complex story that extends over a week, in the two hours that the movie can relate, that resulted in Nolan determining to leave the tension and heroism in, and the history out. The result is, despite the brilliance on the screen, one leaves the theater with the story of the “miracle of Dunkirk” seeming vaguely flat and unsatisfying as an epic event. It is unfortunately the burden of attempting to tell history to a post historical audience, in which the assumption of knowledge of the event and consideration of its importance to our current comfort and security meets a mostly empty vessel of recognition. Without presenting the background of the event to the modern audience, now immersed in a world of casual, politically corrected facts and extremely limited awareness of history, Nolan has made “Dunkirk” into an entertaining, but at its essence, simple “disaster” movie, ultimately no more impactful than a characterless Poseidon Adventure.

Dunkirk holds more than enough epic stories to fill a serial movie treatment. The extent of the looming disaster to western civilization cannot be underestimated. The relative security and interlude of the ‘Phony War’ of the winter of 1940 came to a sudden and violent end with the Nazi war machine invading Belgium and ultimately France on May 10th, 1940. Displaying “Blitzkrieg”, the innovative and overwhelming strategy of rapid ground advancement spearheaded with tanks accompanied by devastating air support, the German Wehrmacht achieved in weeks what they could not in 4 brutal years of trench fighting in WWI, the encirclement of the entire British Expeditionary Force in Europe, along with the residual of the French army, in a small enclave in northwest France. The only means of escape were the ports, and with the rapid loss of Boulogne and Calais, there was left only a small salient around Dunkirk, ten miles from the Belgian border. Over 400,000 British and French forces were bottled up against the coast with diminishing supplies and overwhelming opposition pinching from the flanks. A near total loss of the critically trained foundation of the British Army was imminent. The developing catastrophe had caused the prime ministership of Neville Chamberlain to fall, with the massive responsibility and enormous consequences of failure now assigned to his replacement, Winston Churchill. Loss of the expeditionary army of 300,000 men and equipment would likely leave the British homeland prostrate before the multi-faceted superiority of the German war machine. The future survival of recognizable western civilization lay in the balance.

Pushed against the ocean in Dunkirk, the thousands of men lay inexorably trapped against the artillery from the surrounding enemy and the vicious strafing from the Luftwaffe from above. The small silver lining was the curious decision of the German forces at the end of May to halt tank advancement against the Dunkirk enclave, believing the surroundings not conducive to tanks due to marshes, and rely upon the air force to prevent extraction from the sea and devastate the residual force from the air. This provided a small amount of breathing space for a complex and coordinated heroic attempt to hold off the Germans long enough to evacuate as many as could be evacuated by sea.

Troop evacuations off the beaches at Dunkirk June 1940 – wikipedia

Nicknamed Operation Dynamo, the plan consisted of a barricade of predominantly French troops to prevent German ground forces from entering Dunkirk while coordinated landings of the bulk of the British fleet at the Dunkirk port would remove soldiers under the relative security of British air cover. The evacuations started on the 25th of May, and the onset of the plan was fully realized on the 26th. The ominous goal of perhaps removing at most, 10% of the trapped troops, 40,000 men, was the hope of Churchill and his planning team.

The difficulty of the plan, both in scope and in diminishing available time, rapidly increased the chaos at the beaches. Incoming boats with drafts too deep for the shallow waters of the harbor proved inadequate and slow for the process, and were vulnerable to both air attack and u-boat packs, with brutal losses of ships and men. The inner harbor was soon abandoned for the outer breakers, or moles, where men could more efficiently organize and board, though no less vulnerable to strafing attack, as harrowingly visualized in the movie. The mythic part of the evacuation was the participation of many British citizen sailors manning hundreds of small craft, known as the “little boats”, including the motorized life boat pictured at the top of this essay. This motley armada braved seas, minefields, u-boats and strafing aircraft to pick up and deliver home tens of thousands of additional soldiers.

The evacuation routes from Dover to Dunkirk and back – Route X was laced with minefields and Y with u-boats, but the shortest distance Z was abandoned due to its proximity to German land based artillery. – map by wikipedia

The tremulous dribble of troops out of Dunkirk soon turned into a flood, with at its height as many as 2500 troops an hour evacuated. By June 4th, in stunning fashion, over 338,200 British and French soldiers had been rescued and returned to the homeland, to be positioned to help defend the homeland and, maybe one day, reverse the tide against the Germans.

The losses to achieve the ‘miracle at Dunkirk’ were immense. Losses of thousands of defender’s lives, over 100 airplanes and crew, and 226 of 693 participating ships were sacrificed to accomplish the stunning feat. The collapse of the residual French army and the established hegemony over the mass of the European continent by the Nazi dictator was soon achieved. Churchill recognized the reality in his comments to the House of Commons on June 4th, 1940, regarding the Dunkirk evacuation:

What has happened is a miracle of deliverance, but we must be very careful not to assign this deliverance the attributes of victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.”

A movie like Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk” provides a ‘you are there’ realism that can be achieved by no other medium. The movie pulls at your fears and elevates your senses to bring the immediacy of an event alive and current. What the movie does not do is frame the “how and why” of history, bringing meaning to sacrifice and perspective as to the outcome. The immense scope of the endeavor and a nation’s gritty and determined effort to succeed against all odds, from its leadership on down to the most common of men, is the real survival story of Dunkirk. The participation of the whole and the sacrifice of blood, sweat and tears for principles that define events such as Dunkirk in the stirring tale of history. Our post – historical world can only emotionally experience the tragedy of individual loss, too superficially cognizant in their civilization’s history to acknowledge the bounty of human achievement preserved for future generations in such moments. Our current willingness to be ignorant of history makes us susceptible to emotionally resign to a life of personal security for the greater intellectual demands of a life of meaning. Dunkirk reminds us that giving in when there is hope is giving up our humanity. Across the ocean lies a better future, if we are willing to dream.

July 2, 2017

Crossroads at Gettysburg

Gettysburg National Military Park – wikipedia commons

Today’s society is inwardly directed and struggles to grasp the forces of history that often re-orient destiny. When the republic was newer, however, and more attuned to the circumstances and elements of its birth, most citizens had an acute recognition of the role of action and consequence. The concept of historical crossroads, a point of time at which the direction of the arc of history is called, was acknowledged by all to be present at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in early July, 1863. The bitter battle over who owned the correct interpretation of the events of the American Revolution had slogged its way through two years of horrific struggle, but the indeterminate outcome thus far had only sharpened the the intensity of the philosophical commitment to determine the owners of the arc. As Lincoln so presciently remarked in his ‘house divided’ speech in 1858:

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

The first six months of 1863 had wetted the appetite of the confederate military leader of the Army of Northern Virginia, Robert E. Lee, to bring a finality to Lincoln’s epic conceptualization. Two crushing victories over attacking Union forces at Fredericksburg in December, 1862, and Chancellorsville in May, 1863, had led Lee to dare to visualize a path to ultimate victory, predicated upon a penultimate battle on the Union’s own territory. Lee saw the Union forces as worn down, divided, and the Union states weary of the devastating cost of battle and indifferent to Lincoln’s vision. He was confident, and he was wrong, but this particular historical arc required that the question be called and destiny be played out.

The crossroads of history would therefore have a virtual and actual set-piece in the little town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. A unique confluence of actual crossroads and logistical support needs led the massive Union and Confederate Armies to congregate on Gettysburg on the 1st of July, 1863. Five roads intersected the little town from the north, three from the south through some of the most fertile and prosperous farmland in the world.

In a somewhat fortuitous twist of fate, the Confederate army would enter from the north, the Union army from the south. The initial battles took place north and west of town as Union forces led by General John Reynolds initially contacted and repulsed Confederate brigades at the tip of the spear, but as the mass of General Ewell’s confederate Second Corps arrived, the Union forces were pushed to and through Gettysburg into a defensive position on Cemetery Hill, with the crushingly painful mortal loss of Reynolds to a bullet. An over-confident Lee, somewhat blinded by the absence of his ‘eyes’ , the cavalry force led by Jeb Stuart, inadvertently caught on the wrong side of Union General Meade’s Army of the Potomac, did not recognize the bulk of the Union Army had successfully crossed the Potomac River, and looked to roll up his union opponents in a devastating piecemeal fashion. Meade, however, proved infinitely better than his predecessors in mobilizing force and by the morning of July 2nd, had created a ‘fishhook’ defensive line which he was able to reinforce as necessary.

The following two days of battle stand as immortal lore in the discussion of courage, fortitude, devastating loss, and magnificent victory.

The sun rose on July 2nd with Lee striving to develop his ‘role up’ plan with massive attacks to the flanks of the Union army, hoping to crush it upon itself similar to Stonewall Jackson’s attack at Chancellorsville, but Lee had no Stonewall Jackson, as Jackson had been accidentally struck down by one of his own snipers at Chancellorsville at the moment of victory.

Lee instead relied upon a coordinated attack from General Ewell’s forces upon Culp’s hill to the north, and General Longstreet and Hill from the south against Cemetery Ridge. This being an era of slow and incomplete communication, no significant coordination ever developed, and the battered Union forces heroically managed to hold against massive and fierce assaults from Longstreet at the Devil’s Den and Little Round Top. Despite huge losses, the Union lines held and Meade was able to mobilize 20,000 troops to fill the breaches to the defensive line caused by the day’s violence. All day long, Confederate forces had come within yards of a full breach of the Union flank, with vicious hand to hand combat between individuals and their recognition of the crucial nature of their historical role determining the fate of tens of thousands, and ultimately, the fate of a nation. On the evening of July 2nd, Lee convinced himself that the Union Army, softened by years of inept and indecisive generalship, would finally crumble under the pressure of pointed overwhelming force aiming to split the Union Army in half and drive through its reserves. Despite the events of the day, Lee had a prismatic view of the indestructible capability of his troops and their rightful place in Providence, and sought to raise the final call to question of July 3rd.

The crossroads of history weighed heavily across an open field in the early afternoon of an oppressively hot day on the 3rd of July, 1863 in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The terrible, heroic beauty of the specific battle known down through time as Pickett’s Charge have been rendered by Ramparts in 2011, and worthy of a separate read.

General Lee’s vision of the tip of an irresistible force driven to and through a tiny door, at the angle of a low stone wall, was undertaken in the epic form associated with the mythical heroes of the Iliad. An initial artillery bombardment, designed to create a porous defensive wall was undertaken by Confederate artillery. The door was to be blown open, and then thousands of troops would then pour through and rout the core of the Union forces and, indirectly the Union state’s morale to continue the war itself. The artillery barrage, though massive, struggled to concentrate, and much of the damage sailed over the frontline, leaving it intact. From the concealing trees of Seminary Ridge came Pickett’s ten thousand, across the open field, focused like a laser on the door to victory, and their place in determining the outcome of this crucial crossroad of history. Once again, in a battle of tens of thousands of surging and seething armies, the tiny angle of a farmer’s stone wall on Cemetery Ridge just past the Emmitsburg Road held a future world of either freedom or servitude in the hands of several hundred men. Each man on the angle assumed himself the final arbiter, one determined to be invincible, one immovable – and history wavered and heaved in the heat.

In the end the attack was repulsed, and Lee’s view of an unconquerable Confederate force protected by Providence lay in taters, along with the Union Army’s previous sense of Lee’s invincibility as a leader of men.

The crossroads at Gettysburg had led ten thousands of men to an intersecting fate, and thousands of men to their deaths. The largest armies that had ever faced across a battle field on the North American continent, had resulted in the largest number of casualties ever suffered on the North American continent, over 50,000 for the combined armies over the course of the campaign.

On the nation’s birthday, July 4th, 1863, the call to question – a house divided against itself cannot stand — combined with the conclusive victory of General Grant at Vicksburg on the very same day, was answered affirmatively and indisputably on the side of individual freedom. The war would go on for two more long years, with much sorrow and loss to come, but the verdict of history would never be in question again for this uniquely American arc.

We face our current July 4th with a population versed on the day being a holiday of fireworks and picnics, but with little connectivity to the unique fundamentals of individual liberty birthed on that specific day in 1776, or dramatically and heroically sacrificed for in 1863. A physical battle is not what is wanting in this country. Rather it is an intellectual one, based on individuals versed on what is at stake with every won freedom, overcoming those who are blithely ignorant of what is irretrievably lost in their self absorbed drive toward passivity and security.

On this 4th of July, enjoy the fireworks and friends, but take some personal time to absorb all that has come before and help to make the amazing country we inhabit today. Grab a copy of a founding document, and take a minute to digest its profound wisdom. There is no room for a house divided. We all inhabit the same house of freedom.