War

Bismarck

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Count Otto von Bismarck, known as the Iron Chancellor, was a Prussian Junker, and therefore a notable man of the land, and the lord of a German manor.  He was also a servant of his State and of his God, and, to the extent that the word ‘conservative’ still has any meaning, about as conservative as any man at any time could be.  That did not prevent him from becoming the de facto master of Europe by reference, if necessary, to ‘blood and iron’. 

Nor did it prevent him from achieving the following.  The unification of Germany.  The grant of universal suffrage in the German democracy.  And the beginning of the Welfare State. 

As it happened, the first would lead to the most appalling consequences for not just Europe but the whole world in two world wars – but Bismarck could not be held responsible for either.  The second was alarmingly ‘progressive’ for its time, and the third even more so.  History does not give Germany or Bismarck sufficient credit for laying the foundation of the Welfare State – which the United States still refuses to accept.

In 1883 and 1889, Bismarck pushed through legislation for accident insurance for workers and then old age and disability insurance.  For the first, the German government said it had put an end ‘to all those attempts to make health insurance a private matter …and asserts the role of the state’. 

Nearly thirty years later, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill followed that lead in England with the People’s Budget.  They spoke of the ‘business of the state’ in looking after the infirm and the aged.  They provoked a constitutional crisis.  The English averted revolution by having the King threaten to create enough peers to get the legislation passed.  They followed the precedent of the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832.  In each case, the ancient safety valve saved the day.

Bismarck was a most extraordinary man.

Politics are not a science based on logic; they are the capacity of choosing at each instant, in constantly changing situations, the least harmful, the most useful.

As my friends know, that accords exactly with my view of the common law, which underlies our constitution, and politics.  That may not be all that surprising, because that in my view is the Anglo-Saxon – and therefore German – preference for experience over theory, which so distinguishes England from Europe – including Germany.  That is not meant to be confusing.  The roads by which we got where we are have never been straight.

Bismarck had God and could accommodate Him.

A statesman cannot create anything himself.  He must wait until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of his garment…. I am content when I see where the Lord wishes to go and can stumble after him.

Some, especially right now, may wish, like Hamlet, to substitute Providence for God in detecting even the fall of a sparrow.

I have never been a doctrinaire…. Liberal, reactionary, conservative – those I confess seem to me luxuries….

Can you imagine a better statement of the sheer banality of politics today either here or in places we once respected?

Bismarck spent his whole political life dealing with people he could not respect.

There are white men, there are black men, and there are monarchs.

God only knows what fate would await someone rash enough to say that now.

For his scheme of social insurance, Bismarck was content to accept the label ‘progressive’, even ‘socialist’!  A J P Taylor said:

German social insurance was the first in the world, and has served as a model for every other civilized country…At the end, he [Bismarck] talked of ‘the right to work’ and thought of insurance against unemployment – this was the final step to the welfare state of the twentieth century…. He was a despairing conservative, staving off a dreaded though inevitable future, clinging to the present for the fear of something worse.  Real conservatism is rooted in the pride of class.  Bismarck had no feeling for the Junkers from whom he sprung.  In taste and outlook, he was nearest to the rich merchants of Hamburg.

Well, they don’t write history like that anymore.

Nations crave security.  So do their subjects.  The king commanded his subjects to hold him and the state securely.  People now elected governments so that the state would keep the people securely.  That was change indeed.

Bismarck was a soldier who never read Clausewitz.  Ranke was his favourite historian, but he had a soft spot for Taine.  He soaked himself in the Bible and Shakespeare, but he fancied the novels of Dumas.  He naturally had no time for philosophy – Kant, let alone Hegel – and he dismissed Wagner as a monkey. 

In other words, he was ein mensch with whom you knew where you stood – and when you should stop.  What would we give to have on record what passed between this German and Benjamin Disraeli?  A J P Taylor said:

Both had the brooding melancholy of the Romantic movement in its Byronic phase; both had broken into the charmed circle of privilege…. both had a profound contempt for political moralizing…. In politics both had used universal suffrage to ruin liberalism…. Both genuinely advocated social reform….

So much, then, for pigeon holing people.

I referred above to the banality of our politics.  Hannah Arendt, who had some of the most piercing insights of her time, got into trouble talking about the banality of evil.  We now have to live with the evil of banality.  Those vacuous standard-bearers of theory and ideology, who falsely claim to be prophets of ‘conservatism,’ should look on the works of Bismarck and despair.

A mugging in Washington

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

Three men are involved in conflicts that affect the whole world – Putin, Netanyahu, and Trump.  They look to me to have one thing in common – a contempt for humanity, or at least some parts of it.  It is impossible to believe that any of them accepts what Kant said – that every human being has his or her worth or dignity, which derives merely from the fact that each of us is human – and not some animal.  Each of them is happy to treat humans they regard as different as being inferior.

Russia began a brutal war against Ukraine.  This is not the first act of Russian aggression here, and Russia has defaulted on previous attempts to bring peace.  Putin denies that Ukraine exists as a distinct national entity.

Those who claim to be in charge of Gaza (Hamas) launched a brutal attack on Israel.  Gaza has a long and painful history – as does the whole of the Holy Land going back to prehistory.  Hamas wants to destroy the state of Israel.  Israel stands in the way of Gaza acquiring statehood.

In the course of its attack on Israel, Hamas took hostages – about 250, I think.  In the course of its war against Ukraine, Russia has forcibly kidnapped children – a war crime perpetrated by the Nazis.  (Bear in mind that Russia refuses to acknowledge that there is a war.)  Estimates of the number of childhood victims vary – but there is no doubt that thousands have been taken, up to say, 20,000. 

There is inevitably something heartless about this exercise in statistics about the denial of human worth.  That dedicated mass murderer called Stalin knew this.  The death of one person is a tragedy.  The death of a million is a statistic.  Shakespeare of course had seen this.

I am in blood
Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o’er.  (Macbeth) 3.4.142–144)

(When his wife chided him, Macbeth replied: ‘We are but young in deed.’  Murdering, it would seem, is like making millions – it gets easier as you go.)

We here in Australia stand outside these calamities.  The discussion of the Gaza war is here coloured by the fact that we have here people who identify with either side – it is difficult to imagine any Australian taking the side of Russia.  Or wanting to have anything to do with a nation perpetrating war crimes like those of Hitler and the Nazis.  What decent human being would want to do anything like that?  And we are speaking of a war crime predicated on race, or perhaps worse, caste.

And here it looks like we are all complicit in a denial of the principle of humanity.  International news programs are full of live accounts of the return of hostages in Gaza staged in a manner that is as bizarre as it is brutal.  But we do not hear that much about the deaths of people in either war, and we get next to nothing about the fate of thousands of children who have been kidnapped.

Put the numbers to one side.  Let’s say that there are only 250 children kidnapped.  (Does not the word ‘only’ chill the blood?)  No, let’s say just a dozen, or even a pair, or just one child is involved.  Would the conversation be the same if that one child was a citizen of the US or Israel?

Of course not – and we are all complicit in this denial of universal humanity.  We should be ashamed of ourselves, but the whole history of the world is full of stories of otherwise decent people just lying down before dictators.

That brings me to that recent dreadful scene in the White House.  There was obviously no time to refer to the fate of children there.  It is hard to know what is worse – the conduct of those at the time, or the nonsense offered by sycophants later.

We might look at three words.  Lindsey Graham, the archetypal poodle, said Zelensky should not have taken the ‘bait’.  A bait is something you offer to someone to induce them to act to their detriment.  Why would people negotiating in good faith want to do that to Zelensky?  Well, they were just there to complete a shakedown of a man and a nation on their knees.  They were making an offer they thought Zelensky could not refuse.  I cannot recall any public international conduct as disgraceful as that.  It makes me feel sick.

Many say Vance led the attack.  But Trump commented on the attire of Zelensky immediately he arrived, and one of his goons from the press he favours began the press conference by asking Zelensky why he was not wearing a suit. 

Here again is one of those moments from the Marx Brothers.  The goon said many Americans thought Zelensky showed a lack of respect in turning up like that.  Trump was not surprised by the question and looked mildly quizzical about the answer.  The offended Americans don’t spend most nights in a bomb shelter.  And the goon looks like a drunk out of luck whose idea of decorum is to wear tan sneakers under a suit of the revolting blue favoured by Trump, a man notorious for his lack of taste.  And then of course there is his mate Elon, who turns up at the Oval Office with a silly hat on his head, and a child on his shoulders.  Groucho Marx may have looked cross-eyed at the whole lot of them.

Then there is the issue of ‘respect’.  Some Americans have actually asked Zelensky to apologise for his lack of respect.  According to my Compact OED above this desk, the two primary meanings of that term are ‘a feeling of admiration for someone or something because of their qualities or achievements’ and ‘consideration for the feelings or rights of others.’  You can decide who showed a lack of respect to whom in either sense.  Even at Fox News, does anyone outside the boondocks respect either Trump or Vance?

Finally, Vance, who had once compared his leader to Hitler, deployed his zeal as a convert to bad mouth previous presidents of the U S.  That is appalling misconduct in public, and Vance has never been to the Ukraine – he prefers his laptop.  In his gushing premeditated arrogance, Vance decided to offer his guest a patronising lecture on diplomacy.  According to the same dictionary, ‘diplomacy’ means ‘the profession, activity or skill of managing international relations’ or ‘skill and tact in dealing with people.’  Vance and his boss know nothing of either.  It is impossible to imagine a greater failure of diplomacy.

So, putting to one side the contribution of US armaments to the rubble in Gaza, a one-time New York property developer, now an illiterate convict and the President of the United States, wants to drive out the residents of Gaza and engage in a property development, and then extract wealth from the Ukraine when it has been brought to its knees by his mate and fellow victim of a witch hunt, Vladimir Putin. 

And then, like Richard III, he can say ‘I am myself alone.’ 

And the people of America would be advised to stay home.  They have not a friend in the world.

These were some reflections when in horror yesterday I wrote the following.

Two things seem clear enough.

  1. Trump is aligned with Putin and if necessary will drop Ukraine and NATO.  Either Putin has something over Trump, or they have a common view on the world order.  We are looking at a Trump/Putin axis.
  2. Neither we nor anyone else can ever take the US at its word again.  Trump has the morals of a Mafia don and the US has lost all respect and trust.

We kept saying all this the first time Trump was President, but it is hard to see the U S sinking any lower. 

And the whole nation will have to accept full political responsibility – something they have not been good at since the Puritans arrived and set about cleansing the land of the Indians.  And then offering thanks to their God.  Then they bought slaves.  Then they lied about that in their Declaration. Then the losers in the Civil War did not accept the judgment.  They have not cleared themselves of the stain of slavery.  But then they behaved heroically by rebuilding world order after Hiroshima.  But they have not won a war since.

Now, worst of all, the old Uncle Sam is back in all his arrogance – and, in the full sense of that term, with a ‘vengeance.’

Only someone with an intellect as tortured as that of Vance could think that any of his position is compatible with the teaching of the Jewish Hasid who said we should suffer the little children to come unto him.

Fury

/ Geoffrey Gibson / Leave a comment

 

Fury is am American war film starring Brad Pitt. That is not a good intro for a lot of people, but this is a very, very strong film. What I mean by that, I will come back to.

The film deals with the action of the members of one American tank crew deep in Germany near the end of the Second World War. It starts in a preternatural darkness, and there is rarely much light. The German nation is defeated but fighting on almost as suicidally as the Japs did. The SS are stringing up civilians for not being warlike enough, and children, women, and the infirm are pressed into service. The casualties on both sides are horrific because too many of the Germans are committed to fight unto the death. The German nation was betrayed first by the Wehrmacht when it sold out to Hitler, and then by Hitler when he abandoned the people he had found to be unworthy of him to their enemies. The really fortunate ones just had to deal with the Americans and British; the others had to face the Russians, a peasant army fuelled on vodka and revenge, and on an altogether different plane of humanity.

As it is, the Americans and Germans in this movie have seen and done so much killing that any humanity that is left looks vestigial. Pitt and his crew have been together since the day after D-Day. There is hardly one iota of military discipline in sight, and the two commissioned officers we see are harried warriors just like the rest. The only bond is the comradeship of survival, and a trust in their leader who has kept them intact.

I cannot say whether this is how it was. I was not there. I do know of my own knowledge that some parts take some latitude on weaponry, and some might think the same with the drama. We do know that the American tanks were lighter and more combustible than the German, and the film does show us tanks as cavalry. It is a little hard to see how a town just taken by the US should come under heavy artillery fire, but this film is a poetic drama rather than an historical picture show. It is more like an opera on the snarling waste and cruelty of war and the thinness of the wafer between us and the molten lava beneath us. Its ending is Wagnerian, the full Gotterdammerung.

The film had its own dramatic logic for me – in the end, these men had nothing else but each other and an affinity with death. If you pick up this thread, it is moving in a way that runs very deep in the history of the drama of the West, and in its epics. It also accords with what US psychologists found causes men to keep going in death-threatening savagery. It is nothing other than loyalty to each other.

The story is largely seen from or around a young man – a fresh faced kid – who is assigned to the tank after only eight weeks in the army. It makes your skin crawl when you hear the kid say this. We know the Americans committed this kind of war crime on their own in Vietnam, but in Europe in 1945? The shocking initiation starts, and culminates with Norman being required to shoot a German taken in an American uniform. When the kid gets the hang of it, and machines Germans from the tank, he gets abused for not letting them burn to death – we see one such victim shoot himself. The young man in the part does it well, and I thought, with one possible exception, it avoided cloying.

Pitt avoids being too handsome for the part with a basin cut, and he is now over fifty. His private war involves his hiding his fear from his men. The rest of the crew are an ethnic motley from Catch 22, a mix of wanton depravity and pathetic piety. At least one of them would cause a whole town to lock up its daughters in the nation that gave us Kant, Goethe, and Beethoven. Although Berlin is almost in sight, and the end is both near and certain, it is the Americans who always face the odds in this movie.

The high point of the human drama comes with a scene involving Norman and Pitt and two German women, one quite young. It is a very tense scene. In the East they would have been pack-raped indefinitely, and there is a threat of this here. Just how far does the animalness of these men go? Put differently, is there anything left of the veneer of civilization?

And what about the other war crimes? Germans found in American uniform were lawfully shot as spies. SS officers were shot out of hand for the same reason that Hitler and Himmler would have been – the film expressly links them to the German civilians left hanging by the road. It is idle to talk about war crimes against people like those. But what about the ordinary German soldier who has been engaged in killing as many of your mates as possible in a war that is only going on because of the perfidy of Hitler to his own people? When he is out of ammunition, can he just hold up the white hanky, and expect to be put up until the rest of his mates have been killed? Who, after all, started it? The film puts this question acutely, and I wonder at the impertinence of those who are happy to stand in the shoes of God and give judgment – not least because none of them will have known what war like this was like.

I said that this movie is strong. If it gets you, it will do so with the force of an opera by Wagner, and the depth of a tragedy by Aeschylus. You just feel throughout the movie that you are being exposed to something elemental. It is as if you are being tested. It was strong enough to make me walk out into the daylight outside the Regent in Ballarat feeling different to when I walked in. This film is in my view a very substantial achievement. It is in its own way a war film for those who do not like war films, but it may be some time before I feel the need to see it again.

And, to be consistent, I say the same about Wagner’s Ring Cycle.