The Little Red Blog

The Actuaries of August

“The Insurance Company is my shepherd; I shall not want.” (alternate translation)

War and Insurance, by Josiah Royce, was an effort by one of America’s greatest philosophers to “outline, with necessary brevity and incompleteness, a plan whereby a possible future organization for mutual insurance amongst the nations may be devised and may tend towards the gradual establishment of more pacific relations among the nations than they now possess.”

First, Royce offers a paean to the modern concept of insurance:

Insurance, viewed either as a mode of business or as a social institution, is one of the most momentous instances of the union of very highly theoretical enterprises with very concrete social applications. Furthermore, as experience shows, the insurance principle has come to be more and more used and useful in modern affairs. Not only does it serve the ends of individuals, or of special groups of individuals. It tends more and more both to pervade and to transform our modern social order. It brings into new syntheses not merely pure and applied science, but private and public interests, individual prudence, and a large regard for the general welfare, thrift, and charity. It discourages recklessness and gambling. It contributes to the sense of stability. It quiets fears and encourages faithfulness.

Next, the philosopher compares nations to individual human beings:

Nations, viewed as corporate entities, are as subject to risks as are individual human beings. Some of these risks are principally moral in their nature; but many of them can be more or less exactly estimated in economic terms. Thus, floods, famines, pestilences, earthquakes, and volcanoes may interfere, in various fashions, with the economic as well as with the rest of the social life of the peoples thus afflicted. Apart from actual famines, the considerable failure of their crops may impair, for a season, the normal supplies of individual nations. Internal crises, social and political, may interrupt their healthy development in ways involving not only moral disasters, but heavy expenses. Such evils come upon various nations irregularly, but also with widely different, weight and seriousness. Only a vast and long-continued collection and an exceedingly difficult statistical analysis of the facts regarding such calamities could determine the regularities which a sufficiently large number of instances of national disaster would be, if properly studied, certain to show. Such regularities, however, if once discovered, would furnish an "actuarial basis" upon which an insurance of individual nations against such risks could conceivably be undertaken.

How, then, should we obtain national insurance? Royce observes that “in order that an insurance could be actually undertaken, there would have to be in existence a vast and well-secured fund, contributed by a great number of individual nations, and held, under established rules, ready to supply the means of paying to an insured nation — perhaps the whole of its loss in case of any previously defined sort of disaster ; or perhaps such a portion of that loss as an equitably devised insurance contract, duly adjusted to the contribution previously made by the nation in question, declared to be payable from the common fund in case a certain definite disaster befell one of the nations which had subscribed to the insurance agreement.

Quantification is the key, of course; what can’t be counted doesn’t count. Fortunately, actuaries exist for the sole purpose of calculating risk, just as adjusters exist for the sole purpose of denying claims:

Since all irregularly distributed phenomena of a given type, if sufficiently numerous, — so long as they are indeed finite in number, — show some kind of statistical regularity, this "actuarial basis" for various forms of international insurance could be furnished by the patient study of the economically definable risks and losses of a sufficiently large group of nations, followed through a long enough period of time.

What could possibly go wrong? Royce imagines a skeptic’s critique:

A fund contributed by individual nations for their insurance against disasters would constitute a possible object of predatory attacks. In other words, the safety of the insurance fund would have to be provided for. This would be as difficult as to provide for the carrying out of any other international agreement in which large interests were involved. Concerning the administration of the fund differences of opinion would arise. Since the fund would be international, these differences would have to be submitted to arbitration or else to war. To the already existing obstacles which the Hague tribunal has to meet new obstacles would be added. Differences of opinion concerning the use of the insurance funds would frequently involve what is usually called national honor. They would, therefore, be hopeless differences. And this initial defect would appear to belong to any international insurance scheme.

And Royce immediately answers his own imagined objections:

A certain fund, contributed by various nations, should be put into the hands of a board of international trustees. (The constitution and the mode of selection of the members of this board is yet to be decided.) The board, according to the scheme proposed, would have a minimum of judicial powers. These judicial powers would never refer to questions which could be called questions of national honor. The judicial problems of the "board would be limited to questions referring to the actual interpretation of certain contracts. These contracts would be either of the nature of insurance policies, or else of other forms of trust agreements. When these contracts had put certain funds into the hands of the board, the funds being held in trust for certain insured nations, or for other nations that intrusted funds to the board, the board would have the sole right, in controversial cases, simply to decide what the terms of the contract, or of certain connected duties of trust, established as the right of the nation or nations of whose funds the board was trustee. The decision of the board regarding these matters — a decision which would always be made by a public procedure and in accordance with established rules — would be a final decision, so that no nation should have any authority, under its agreement, to appeal from the decision in question.

Should any doubts, or doubters, remain, Royce gives this reassurance:

The international board of trustees which my plan contemplates would have no police to guard it, no international army or navy to protect it, no direct interest in international controversies, and no reason for diplomatic relations with any existing powers. It would receive its funds in trust as voluntary contributions of the nations. It would administer its trust in accordance with policies of insurance and deeds of trust. It could neither declare war nor make peace. Nominally it might hold its sessions, after the manner of the Hague tribunal, in some neutral state, and be regarded as possessing a peculiarly close although essentially ideal and, so to speak, sentimental connection with that state. But its obligations would be to its own conscience, guided by the deeds of trust which it had undertaken to administer.

Royce’s solution to international conflict was presented originally as an address “delivered at Berkeley, California before the Philosophical Union of the University of California at its twenty-fifth anniversary.” It is worth noting the date on which Royce delivered the address: August 27, 1914. The “Great War” (now known as World War I) had begun on July 28, 1914; by the time Royce proposed his plan, European nations were engulfed in a pointless conflict that would last four years--outlasting Royce, who died in 1916--and set the stage for the bloodiest century in human history.

The problem wasn’t that Royce’s “solution” was wrong, unrealistic, or impractical; the problem was that no one could hear him over the din and clamor of battle.

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Josiah Royce - Wikipedia

I had never heard of Josiah Royce’s quixotic proposal until finding it mentioned by Eugene McCarraher in The Enchantments of Mammon. Royce’s War and Insurance can be accessed via the Internet Archive (www.archive.org).

Sunday Sermon: "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?"

Where Have All the Flowers Gone? (by Pete Seeger)

Where have all the flowers gone
Long time passing
Where have all the flowers gone
Long time ago
Where have all the flowers gone
Young girls picked them, every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the young girls gone
Long time passing
Where have all the young girls gone
Long time ago
Where have all the young girls gone
Gone to young men, every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the young men gone
Long time passing
Where have all the young men gone
Long time ago
Where have all the young men gone
Gone to soldiers, every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the soldiers gone
Long time passing
Where have all the soldiers gone
A long, long time ago
Where have all the soldiers gone
Gone to graveyards, every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

Where have all the graveyards gone
Long time passing
Where have all the graveyards gone
Long time ago
Where have all the graveyards gone
Gone to flowers, every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?

--------------------------------------------------

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Peter Seeger

Where Have All the Flowers Gone lyrics © Concord Music Publishing LLC, Royalty Network

(105) Chris de Burgh - Where Have All the Flowers Gone Remembrance Day Armistice 100 year anniversary - YouTube

Classic: (105) Marlene Dietrich: Where Have All the Flowers Gone? (Live TV, 1963) - YouTube

Saturday Lecture: To Hell with War

General Smedley Butler, from “War Is a Racket” (1935):

War is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few - the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

For some, fortunes are made; millions and billions of dollars are piled up, by a few. Munitions makers. Bankers. Ship builders. Manufacturers. Meat packers. Speculators. For them, war pays high dividends. But what does it profit the men who are killed? What does it profit their mothers and sisters, their wives and their sweethearts? What does it profit their children? What does it profit anyone except the very few to whom war means huge profits?

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Smedley Butler - Wikipedia

See also: Amsterdam (2022 film) - Wikipedia

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Masters of War (by Bob Dylan)

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991 by Special Rider Music

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Masters of War | The Official Bob Dylan Site

Ed Sheeran acoustic: (105) Ed Sheeran - Masters of War (Acoustic Cover) - YouTube

Haunting cover version: (105) Masters of War - Kate & The Crocodiles - YouTube

Sunday Sermon: "i sing of Olaf"

{In this iconic poem, Olaf’s refusal of war is paralleled by Cummings’ refusal of poetic decorum, grammatical convention, and basic typographic decency.}

XXX (by E.E. Cummings)

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but--though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments--
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
"I will not kiss your fucking flag"

straightway the silver bird looked grave
(departing hurriedly to shave)

but--though all kinds of officers
(a yearning nation's blueeyed pride)
their passive prey did kick and curse
until for wear their clarion
voices and boots were much the worse,
and egged the firstclassprivates on
his rectum wickedly to tease
by means of skilfully applied
bayonets roasted hot with heat--
Olaf(upon what were once knees)
does almost ceaselessly repeat
"there is some shit I will not eat"

our president,being of which
assertions duly notified
threw the yellowsonofabitch
into a dungeon,where he died

Christ(of His mercy infinite)
i pray to see;and Olaf,too

preponderatingly because
unless statistics lie he was
more brave than me:more blond than you.

__________________________________

i sing of Olaf glad and big by E. E. Cummings - Poems | poets.org

Edward Estlin Cummings is known for his radical experimentation with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax; he abandoned traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. He attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.

The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is "one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings's poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence."

About E. E. Cummings | Academy of American Poets

I Muse, Therefore, I Am

Haley Strack, a student at Hillsdale College, has written an article (for the Washington Free Beacon) about “How Men Were Made Redundant”.

Men are losing their grip. Literally. Adult men today have a 30-pound weaker grip strength than four decades ago, writes Richard Reeves in his latest book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. And that's not their worst problem.

Grade-school boys are far more likely than girls to fail math, reading, and science, and twice as likely to have developmental disabilities. The problem persists through higher education: Women receive more than half of bachelor's degrees in the United States and the majority of master's degrees, associate's degrees, law degrees, and doctoral degrees. Women now dominate most previously male-led fields. As Reeves explains, "there have been no equivalent gains for men … nobody predicted that women would overtake men so rapidly, so comprehensively, or so consistently around the world."

The obvious response is that men’s grip could not have been that strong in the first place if it took only five decades of feminism to pry it loose. Ironically, the same people who reject the “woke” concept of hegemony, themselves complain about the feminization of America—as if feminist ideas have become, well, hegemonic.

Are we to believe, then, that, the playing field having been leveled (in theory), women are out-competing men? Richard Reeves does not want to discourage women’s advances; “Raising men up,” he insists, “does not mean holding women down, or ‘displacing' them.” Haley Strack, though, is not so sure. Whereas Reeves says, "We need a pro-social vision of masculinity for a post-feminist world," Strack complains that Reeves “doesn't give men a framework of what it means to be a man” and that “molding masculinity to feminist thought isn't good enough.” 

I see only one solution: affirmative action programs for men.

How Men Were Made Redundant (freebeacon.com)

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At Real Clear History, Miles Smith argues that the “magnitude” of the American civil war has been “undervalued”:

The Civil War changed the U.S. culturally, economically, [and] socially. Now, historians are [finally] starting to concern themselves with the many social and psychological effects of the war. By looking at the war through the eyes of different demographics, historians are grasping the bigger cultural, economic, and social aspects of the war. 

Who among us could have guessed that the events and developments which we call “history” are subject to a variety of interpretations, depending on the contexts and perspectives of the interpreters? From almost any perspective, of course, war (especially civil war) is as devastating to communities, to social stability, and to human solidarity as is capitalism, to which war has long been happily wed. The American civil war was a harbinger of things to come in the twentieth century: war’s essential inhumanity was amplified by industrialism, advanced technologies, and rationalized bureaucratic management. “Taylorism” and “Fordism” worked just as well, if not better, for producing weapons as for producing automobiles.

Modern war is good for business; it is also, in the words of Randolph Bourne, “the health of the State”. Given such a win-win proposition for our merchants of death and our masters of war, is it any wonder we keep fighting each other?

Magnitude of Civil War Undervalued | RealClearHistory

************************************

Finally, we turn to Big Think, where Scotty Hendricks observes that being smart doesn’t mean you might not have (or fall for) some decidedly stupid ideas. In “The Worst Ideas of Five Great Philosophers,” Hendricks takes some of history’s greatest geniuses to task: Plato, for being sexist (and a budding totalitarian); Aristotle, for being so intellectually lazy as to accept the geocentric model of the universe; Kant, for being a condescending and pseudo-scientific racist; John Stuart Mill, for being British a defender of empire and of the white man’s burden; and Gottfried Leibniz, mathematician and philosopher, for “solving” the problem of evil by simply declaring the existing world to be “the best of all possible worlds”—because God wouldn’t settle for anything less.

“Great minds,” writes Hendricks, “are not immune to very bad ideas.” Hendricks is on to something, I believe. An entire (and fascinating) book could be written about “Why Bad Ideas Happen to Good Minds”: Isaac Newton’s fascination with the occult; Rousseau’s fantastical “state of nature”; William James’ flirtation with Spiritualism; Descartes’ “ghost in the machine”; Tolstoy’s Christian anarchism; Sergei Fedorov’s program for resurrecting the dead; the so-called Progressives who championed eugenics; not to mention the myriad obscure, irrational rabbit holes down which otherwise sane, intelligent people have been known to disappear.

Area 51, anyone?

The worst ideas of 5 great philosophers - Big Think  

My mind captured in the act of musing

Sunday Sermon: "Red Army Blues"

Red Army Blues

When I left my home and my family
My mother said to me
"Son, it's not how many Germans you kill that counts
It's how many people you set free!"

So I packed my bags
Brushed my cap
Walked out into the world
Seventeen years old
Never kissed a girl

Took the train to Voronezh
That was as far as it would go
Changed my sacks for a uniform
Bit my lip against the snow
I prayed for Mother Russia
In the summer of '43
And as we drove the Germans back
I really believed
That God was listening to me

We howled into Berlin
Tore the smoking buildings down
Raised the red flag high
Burnt the Reichstag brown
I saw my first American
And he looked a lot like me
He had the same kinda farmer's face
Said he'd come from some place called Hazzard, Tennessee

Then the war was over
My discharge papers came
Me and twenty hundred others
Went to Stettiner for the train
Kiev! said the commissar
From there your own way home
But I never got to Kiev
We never came by home
Train went north to the Taiga
We were stripped and marched in file
Up the great Siberian road
For miles and miles and miles and miles
Dressed in stripes and tatters
In a gulag left to die
All because Comrade Stalin was scared that
We'd become too westernized!

Used to love my country
Used to be so young
Used to believe that life was
The best song ever sung
I would have died for my country
In 1945
But now only one thing remains
But now only one thing remains
But now only one thing remains
But now only one thing remains
The brute will to survive!

(Mike Scott / The Waterboys)

The Waterboys - Red Army Blues Lyrics | AZLyrics.com

Album version, with video footage: (3) The Waterboys - Red Army Blues - YouTube (Warning: includes brutally graphic images)

Live version: (3) The Waterboys. Haldern Festival 2007. 11 Red Army Blues. - YouTube 

Sunday Sermon: Masters of War

Masters of War

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

You’ve thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood
That runs in your veins

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young
You might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know
Though I’m younger than you
Even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die
And your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave
’Til I’m sure that you’re dead

--Bob Dylan

Eddie Vedder version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwa2jK0xglk

Tatiana Moroz version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxxcqXSx2dQ

 

 

The Incalculable Boons of War

{In browsing the writings of conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet, I was taken aback to discover, in a 1988 book, an apparent ode to war as a net-positive social force.}         

In his 1988 book The Present Age, and without even being asked, Robert Nisbet answers the age-old question, War—what is it good for? His explanation is as follows:

War tends to break up the cake of custom, the net of tradition. By so doing, it allows the individual a better chance of being seen and heard in the interstices, in the crevasses opened by the cracking up of old customs, statuses, and conventionalities. War tends to stimulate intellectual and cultural ferment if only because of the mixture of ideas and values that is a by-product of combat, of victory and defeat, in any war. In both world wars, millions of Americans, men and women alike, knew the broadening and enriching effects of travel abroad, of stations in exotic places for the first time, as the result of enlistment or conscription. Granted that some were killed. Far more were not.  

So long as the survivors outnumber the dead, it seems war is a net benefit, bringing us new technologies, new ideas and values, and a more cosmopolitan outlook. War is a kinder, gentler wrecking ball which benevolently demolishes outmoded structures—physical, social, and cultural; it is urban renewal with a human face and a human touch. War’s outstretched helping hand “touches millions of lives which had been so long familiar with only the authorities and rhythms of an existence largely rural and pretty much limited to towns of the hinterland.” In America, “much of the [country’s] dreadful sameness began to crack under the force of the Great War,” which is why “this war remains popular in American memory.” O what a lovely war! It was “the single most vivid experience a large number of Americans had ever known.” If only more Americans could have joined their fellows in the mud- and blood-filled trenches.

“What the Great War did,” Nisbet explained, “is what all major wars do for large numbers of people: relieve, if only briefly, the tedium, monotony, and sheer boredom which have accompanied so many millions of lives in all ages. In this respect, war can compete with liquor, sex, drugs, and domestic violence as an anodyne. War, its tragedies and devastations understood here, breaks down social walls and by so doing stimulates a new individualism. Old traditions, conventions, dogmas, and taboos are opened under war conditions to a challenge, especially from the young, that is less likely in prolonged periods of peace. The very uncertainty of life brought by war can seem a welcome liberation from the tyranny of the predictable, from what a poet has called the ‘long littleness of life’. It is not the certainties but the uncertainties in life which excite and stimulate—if they do not catastrophically obliterate—the energies of men.”

According to Nisbet, one of America’s great 20^th-century sociologists, “Robert Burlingame was correct when he said that if war were ever to be permanently abolished, then something would have to be found to replace it as the stimulus and the context of inventions—mechanical but also social and cultural inventions. America between 1914 and 1918 was no exception. Inventions of preceding years, like the telephone and the electric light, were brought to a higher degree of perfection; so were the automobile, the radio, and the prototypes of what would become cherished household appliances. ¹ The federal government, justified and encouraged by war pressure, was able to do what would have been impossible in time of peace: directly encourage and even help finance new entrepreneurial ventures such as the airplane and radio each to revolutionize American life after the war.”

Apart from the casualties, then—the dead, the maimed, and the traumatized—along with the widowed and orphaned survivors, war is a sound investment, even a humanitarian one: “Advances in medicine rank high among the benefactions of war. The sheer number of the wounded and sick, the possibility—the necessity—of new and radical techniques of surgery, and the focus of effort that war inevitably brings all combine to make times of war periods of major medical advancement, with incalculable boons for posterity.” ² Incalculable boons! Should we not then be perpetually at war? Why should we even give peace a chance when war has done so much more for us?

“As the consequence of two world wars, the acceleration of social and economic reforms in America and the germination of still other reforms to be accomplished later were striking.” Nisbet lists just a few of the causes which benefited from 20^th-century wars: women’s rights, the teetotaling movement, illiterates, unorganized workers, and the move toward racial and ethnic equality. It is an observed irony of history, writes Nisbet, that “almost everywhere, war inspires, in the interest of equity and of social stability, more ‘socialist’ reforms than does the ideology of socialism.” Neo-conservatives take heed! The wars you promote tend to undermine your domestic agenda (and sometimes even lead to higher taxes).

For what it is worth: Robert Nisbet served in the U.S. Army during World War II, stationed on the island of Saipan in the Pacific. He cannot be accused, even posthumously, of not knowing the hellish realities of war. Even giving Nisbet the benefit of the doubt, as well as the intellectual respect he was due, his encomium to war remains puzzling. The briefest glance at history suggests that War hardly needs an advocate; it has prospered, and continues to prosper, on its own.  Nisbet’s claims are easy to satirize; in “Saigon Bride,” one of the memorable anti-war songs of the Sixties, Joan Baez sang, “It takes them off the streets, you know / To places they would never go alone / It gives them useful trade / The lucky boys are even paid.” ³

It is one thing to argue that war is sometimes a necessary evil, but it is something else again to promote it as the Engine of Progress; in fact, that is precisely the sort of thing that gives Progress a bad name.  

_________________

¹ Do not mock the notion of “cherished household appliances,” which played a major role in the Cold War—see the Nixon/Khrushchev “kitchen debate” of 1959 (Kitchen Debate - Wikipedia).

² One example of an incalculable boon: “The whole field of prosthetics, for example, opened up in World War I—to be enormously advanced in the Second War—and with it came widespread relief from the obvious disfigurements of war, so abundant and ubiquitous after the Civil War.” War heals the very wounds it causes!

³  Joan Baez - Saigon Bride - YouTube

Of Lice and Men

According to Mary Vought, Executive Director of the Senate Conservatives Fund, the real threat to America’s elderly is not COVID-19, nor is it the Republicans who dismiss the pandemic’s rising death toll on the grounds that it consists mainly of old people, many of them in nursing homes and therefore on their last legs (except for those in wheelchairs) and of no real value anyway. No, says Ms. Vought, the threat to seniors comes from Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a monster who, while working for President Barack Obama, attempted to “death panel” every American over the age of seventy-five.

Dr. Emanuel was recently tapped by President-elect Biden to serve on a White House coronavirus task force. Ms. Vought wants us to know what lies in store:

Six years ago, Zeke Emanuel, recently named to Biden’s coronavirus task force, famously wrote an essay that The Atlantic entitled “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” In a 2019 interview, he disclaimed responsibility for the article’s title, but not its sentiments. He then asked a provocative question surrounding the elderly: “whether our consumption is worth our contribution.” This naturally raises concerns about the government’s involvement in difficult decisions regarding end-of-life care.

Vought also documents Barack Obama’s determination to euthanize the olds:

In 2009, then-president Barack Obama said that “the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out there.” He called for “a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place.” The interviewer did not ask him to elaborate, but Obama’s reference to a “difficult” conversation implies his preferred solution to the “problem” of high health spending by chronically ill patients. 

If elitists like Obama and Emanuel had their way, all Americans who cling to their guns or their Bibles or to living beyond the age of seventy-five would be rounded up and put out of our misery. 

In all seriousness, Mary Vought should be ashamed of herself for such insinuations. Republicans wax indignant about proposed “end of life” planning, living wills, advance directives, etc. Their indignation does not change the facts of the matter—a disproportionate share of healthcare spending does go towards end-of-life care—nor does it help individuals, families, and healthcare providers, who, like it or not, will have to make those “difficult” decisions eventually.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of elderly Americans continue to die in a pandemic that neither President Trump nor his Republican enablers have taken seriously or attempted to mitigate. I promise to keep an eye out for a statement from Mary Vought about that.  

Biden Advisor Disregards Dignity of the Elderly | RealClearReligion

Writing at Slate, Joe Knight inexplicably attempts to demean Russia’s heroic, world-historic defeat of Napoleon in the Great Patriotic War of 1812 (not to be confused with America’s silly War of 1812 in which British troops burned down the White House and Andrew Jackson won the Battle of New Orleans after the war had ended). According to Mr. Knight:

It wasn’t enemy soldiers or the normal privations soldiers experience that devastated Napoleon’s army. Most of his soldiers were battle-hardened young men, so they should have been able to tolerate the cold, hunger, long marches, and fatigue. No, it was a microscopic organism that wreaked havoc and annihilated Napoleon’s army and his grand plans for conquest. A microbe called typhus, spread by a scourge of lice.

Knight goes on to describe, in disgusting detail, what transpired:

Poland is where things started going badly for Napoleon. He found the region filthy beyond belief. The peasants were unwashed, with matted hair and ridden with lice and fleas, and the wells were fouled. The roads were soft with loose dust or were deeply rutted from the spring rains; the supply trains lagged farther and farther behind the main body of soldiers, and it became difficult to provide food and water. Many of the soldiers pillaged the homes, livestock, and fields of the local peasants. Nearly 20,000 army horses died from lack of water and fodder. The homes of the peasants were so filthy that they seemed to be alive with cockroaches. The typical battlefield diseases of dysentery and other intestinal diseases began to appear, and though hospitals were set up in Danzig, Königsberg, and Thorn, they were unable to deal with the large numbers of sick soldiers sent back to the rear.

But Napoleon’s problems were just beginning.

Several days after crossing the Nieman River, a number of soldiers began to develop high fevers and a red rash on their bodies. Some of them developed a bluish tinge to their faces and then rapidly died. Typhus had made its appearance. A lack of sanitation combined with the unusually hot summer made an ideal environment for the spread of lice. Typhus is caused by the organism Rickettsia prowazekii. It would be an entire century after the 1812 campaign before scientists realized that typhus is found in the feces of lice.

The typical French soldier was dirty and sweaty and lived in the same clothes for days; this is the perfect environment for lice to feed on his body and find a home in the seams of his clothing. Once the clothes and skin of the soldier were contaminated with lice excrement, the smallest scratch or abrasion would have been enough for the typhus germ to enter the soldier’s body. To compound the problem, the soldiers were sleeping in large groups in confined spaces for safety; this closeness allowed the lice to jump quickly to soldiers who were not infested.

Only a month into the campaign, Napoleon lost 80,000 soldiers who were either incapacitated or had died from typhus. The French army’s medical and sanitary measures were the finest in the world, but no one could have coped with the scale of the epidemic.

I will pause here just long enough to go take a shower…

To paraphrase General Sherman, war is lousy. As Knight chronicles, lice and typhus accompanied Napoleon’s campaign all the way to Moscow and throughout his retreat, in the face of a bitter Russian winter, back to France. A little more than a year later—March 1814—victorious Russian troops marched into Paris.

Knight may have his facts straight, but I see no need to denigrate Russians’ valiant defense of their homeland (no less valiant because they chose to abandon Moscow rather than to defend it and then put much of the city to the torch on their way out the back door) just because they had a little help from lice. All’s fair in war, after all, and a nation takes its allies where it can find them. 

Knight concludes by adding insult to insult and spoiling a monumental piece of Russian music:

Most Americans are familiar with the ending of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, commissioned by Russia to celebrate Russia’s defeat of Napoleon. The musical score ends with the sounds of cannons booming and bells pealing; however, if Tchaikovsky wanted to accurately record the sound of Napoleon’s defeat, one would only hear the soft, quiet sound of lice munching on human flesh. An organism too small to be seen by the human eye had changed the course of human history.

The 1812 Overture will never sound the same to me. 

Napoleon march to Russia in 1812: Typhus spread by lice was more powerful than Tchaikovsky’s cannonfire. (slate.com)

If Joe Knight’s article piques your interest, you can get even more gruesome detail from the book The Illustrious Dead:  The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon’s Greatest Army, by Stephen Talty.

Addendum

In my earlier post today ("Saturday Quartets"), I expressed unequivocal approval of pacifism. The Universe, in its wisdom, immediately directed me (via Google) to a refutation of my argument.

I found the counter-argument at Real Clear Books, where Barton Swaim (reviewing Daniel Mahoney’s THE IDOL OF OUR AGE), had this to say:

Among the greatest publicists of the humanitarian religion was Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy, recall, took a literalistic reading of the Sermon on the Mount’s injunction to “resist not evil” to its logically ludicrous conclusion: pacifism, the nonsense philosophy that values the lives of faraway belligerents over the lives of the pacifist’s neighbors and countrymen. Mahoney relays a wonderful passage in Solzhenitsyn’s November 1916 (the second part of The Red Wheel) in which Father Severyan remarks that Tolstoy raided the Gospels for his own purposes and was no Christian at all. This shocks his young interlocutor, who, influenced by Tolstoy, can think of nothing worse than war. The priest responds that there are many things worst than war:

“An unjust trial, for instance, that scalds the outraged heart, is viler,” he says. “Or murder for gain, when the solitary murderer fully understands the implications of what he means to do and all that the victim will suffer at the moment of the crime. Or the ordeal at the hands of a torturer. When you can neither cry out nor fight back nor attempt to defend yourself. Or treachery on the part of someone you trusted. Or mistreatment of widows or orphans. All these things are spiritually dirtier and more terrible than war.” ¹

Father Severyan takes this view both because war is necessary to the human condition and because without it there is no possibility of checking an aggressor. Tolstoy’s embrace of humanity in the abstract led him and his many admirers to formulate a philosophy that leaves innocent people of flesh and blood without defense.

There are, of course, no new arguments on this issue: you either accept that war "is necessary to the human condition" or you don't. I don't--but I appreciate the Universe's attempt to change my mind.

https://www.realclearbooks.com/articles/2019/02/22/christianity_and_humanity_from_a_distance_110187.html

¹ I would note that, while the myriad injustices and outrages that Father Severyan catalogs can happen in peacetime, they occur much more frequently--and are even justified--under the cloak of war.