The Little Red Blog

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: "Fear of Beggars"

Kelly Johnson, from Fear of Beggars:

“Even in the relief of common beggars we shall find that we are more frequently influenced by the desire of getting rid of the importunities of a disgusting object than by the pleasure of relieving it. We wish that it had not fallen in our way, rather than rejoice in the opportunity given us of assisting a fellow creature. We feel a painful emotion at the sight of so much apparent misery; but the pittance we give does not relieve it. We know that it is totally inadequate to produce any essential effect. We know, besides, that we shall be addressed in the same manner at the corner of the next street; and we know that we are liable to the grossest impositions. We hurry therefore sometimes by them and shut our ears to their importunate demands.” (Thomas Malthus)

Beggars do a reasonable thing: needing something and seeing someone one who might have it, they ask for it. Put that way, the act is simple enough. Yet Malthus' description of the encounter remains a distressingly accurate account of how many people react when faced with beggars. Beggars alarm and disturb us. Like Malthus, the clergyman and economist, we find ourselves unable to act well, and can only try to remove ourselves from the offensive situation as quickly as possible.

A case in point: what happens when, walking through Grand Central Station, I see a man holding a sign that reads, "I am at your mercy"?  My normal perception of myself as reasonably just and kind is thrown into Protean contortions. If he is "at my mercy," then what am I? Am I the ruthless victor in a war of all against all? Am I nobility strolling through a world of misery, barely aware of the suffering that makes my life possible? Am I a sucker, the target of a scam that is working only too well, or an enabler, funding a soul's self-destruction? Am I, in fact, in some kind of danger? Or are the beggar and I both flotsam in an economic system which throws some of us on a sunny shore and drowns others, and against which resistance only increases the danger for all of us? I would gladly spot a friend some cash, perhaps a great deal of cash, but what will I do with the intimacy of this request from a stranger? Anyway, who says he is at my mercy, and not at our mercy? What about all the other people passing by without responding?

The cumulative effect of all this uncertainty about self and society is anxiety, confusion, and avoidance. Shopping malls provide merchants and shoppers a sphere free of this moral complexity, and laws controlling the location and behavior of beggars have been championed and denounced across the U.S., from California to Vermont and Florida, over the past decades. In 1988, Mayor Koch [of New York City] set off a storm of debate when he urged New Yorkers not to give to beggars on the grounds that giving only encouraged beggars and attracted more to the same behavior. Refusing to give would force the beggars to seek more acceptable ways to get their living. Koch added that those who were troubled in conscience by refusing a beggar should see their priest.

People have a visceral reaction to beggars, and not merely to stench or disfigurement, but to begging itself. Although most people recognize [in theory] that all of us are in some respects dependent upon each other, the sight of a stranger asking for help outside the public order of rights and the private affection of the family shakes us. Uncertainty about the beggar's honesty and civility, concern that giving alms to one somehow makes things worse for others (or may lead to endless demands), and knowledge that the pittance given is ineffective and may be only a sop to appease the giver's conscience, have together undermined, without destroying, the traditional image of almsgiving as virtuous. The anxiety remains.

Ethicists, as often as anyone else, get trapped at traffic lights where beggars hold up signs, yet whether to give to beggars does not figure as a significant problem in contemporary works on economic ethics. Why the silence?

Beggars implicitly raise questions about the nature and limits of property rights; the efficacy and virtue of almsgiving; the uses of social control and surveillance to differentiate needy from greedy beggars; the possibility of genuine altruism; the material meaning of `dignity'; the moral importance of productivity; the distinction between public and private behaviors; the working of justice among strangers; and the relationships of system and person or intention and effect. Beggars stand in an untidy corner of ethics. The presence of beggars raises questions that societies would sometimes prefer not to address.

The role of beggars in challenging the invisibility of poverty, disregard for the poor, and the nature of property rights is real. The phrase "the fear of beggars" has meaning from two directions. On the one hand, beggars have fears: not only of cold, hunger, and sickness, but also of being alone, of being beaten, of losing those last few precious belongings, of being stripped of any possibility of self-determination. But there are also many fears from the other side, from those who meet beggars on our streets: fears that the beggar might turn violent; that neither giving nor refusing will be morally satisfactory; that behind one beggar stand a thousand others, whose needs will overwhelm any generosity; that the beggar sees an alarming truth about humanity, about me: that had things gone differently, that beggar could have been any one of us.

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Kelly Johnson. The Fear of Beggars: Stewardship and Poverty in Christian Ethics (Eerdmans Ekklesia Series), Kindle Edition.

See also: Overcoming the Fear of Beggars | Catholic Moral Theology

Labor Day

A Modest Proposal: What this country needs is a strong labor movement and a nationwide general strike.

"The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity. We have been cursed with the reign of gold long enough. Money constitutes no proper basis of civilisation. The time has come to regenerate society—we are on the eve of a universal change." --Eugene V. Debs

Preamble to the IWW Constitution (1905)

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.

Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever-growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers.

These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all.

Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work," we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, "Abolition of the wage system."

It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.

https://archive.iww.org/culture/official/preamble/

The General Strike (speech by Bill Haywood, 1911)

How anyone can take the position that a general strike would not be effective and not be a good thing for the working class is more than I can understand. We know that the capitalist uses the general strike to good advantage. Here is the position that we find the working class and the capitalists in. The capitalists have wealth; they have money. They invest the money in machinery, in the resources of the earth. They operate a factory, a mine, a railroad, a mill. They will keep that factory running just as long as there are profits coming in. When anything happens to disturb the profits, what do the capitalists do? They go on strike, don't they? They withdraw their finances from that particular mill. They close it down because there are no profits to be made there. They don't care what becomes of the working class. But the working class, on the other hand, has always been taught to take care of the capitalist's interest in the property. You don't look after your own interest, your labor power, realizing that without a certain amount of provision you can't reproduce it. You are always looking after the interest of the capitalist, while a general strike would displace his interest and would put you in possession of it.

The justification for political action is to control the forces of the capitalists that they use against us; to be in a position to control the power of government so as to make the work of the army ineffective, so as to abolish totally the secret service and the force of detectives. That is the reason that you want the power of government. That is the reason that you should fully understand the power of the ballot. Now, there isn't anyone, Socialist, S. L. P., Industrial Worker or any other workingman or woman, no matter what society you belong to, but what believes in the ballot. I know, or think I know, the power of it, and I know that the industrial organization, as I stated in the beginning, is its broadest interpretation. I know, too, that when the workers are brought together in a great organization they are not going to cease to vote. That is when the workers will begin to vote, to vote for directors to operate the industries in which they are all employed.

So the general strike is a fighting weapon as well as a constructive force. It can be used, and should be used, equally as forcefully by the Socialist as by the Industrial Worker.

The Socialists believe in the general strike. They also believe in the organization of industrial forces after the general strike is successful. So, on this great force of the working class I believe we can agree that we should unite into one great organization--big enough to take in the children that are now working; big enough to take in the black man; the white man; big enough to take in all nationalities--an organization that will be strong enough to obliterate state boundaries, to obliterate national boundaries, and one that will become the great industrial force of the working class of the world.

https://archive.iww.org/history/library/Haywood/GeneralStrike/

                                                                                              
 

Three Blinks

At Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson puts paid to the notion that income reflects hard work, character, or merit of any kind:

When we examine how our notions of “deservingness” match real-world salaries, it’s obvious that they don’t really correlate at all. People say, for example, that you should be rewarded if you work hard and make sacrifices. In practice, the hardest-working people (such as dishwashers and agricultural laborers) are often paid the least, and an easy job in America pays more than an incredibly difficult job in China. As for “sacrifice,” we might think that someone who takes a dangerous and unpleasant job should be paid more than the person who takes a cushy and pleasant job. But the list of most dangerous jobs quickly shows us that the jobs most likely to get you killed aren’t very likely to pay you well for it, and farmworkers, taxi drivers, fishers, roofers, and garbage collectors are the most at risk. On the other hand, being a successful Hollywood actor seems like a lot of fun and you get paid a damn fortune. Hard work and risk-taking often go unrewarded, then, even when people are performing incredibly socially useful jobs. We can offer factual explanations for why this occurs (there are a million roofers and one Bryan Cranston), but “supply and demand” is a description of a phenomenon and not a moral theory for why it is just. Even if you are someone like Robert Nozick who believes that being given something means you deserve it, this is still inconsistent with the Great American Myth that rewards are handed out in accordance with virtue and sacrifice rather than happenstance.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/do-we-get-paid-what-we-deserve

At The Week, Matthew Walther explains President Trump's popularity (such as it is) as being a function of hostile media overreach:

It's not surprising that after little more than a year in office many people who voted for a president still support him. But it's also surprising that a president who has been the object of more negative reporting than any in our history still enjoys something like the same middling base of support he had before taking office. Unless it's the negative reporting that is the problem, which I suspect is very largely the case. You can only ask adults to participate in the fiction that a retweet of a wrestling GIF is a credible threat of violence against some nerd reporters at a cable station or delight in what you hope will be the failure of American trade policy before they decide to tune you out.* Very largely this had already happened by Inauguration Day, but now the work of MSNBC and The New York Times and PolitiFact is complete. Millions of Americans do not know the difference between what is true and what is false and have decided that they do not much care either.

*The absence of "a credible threat of violence again [media]" in Trump's America will surely come as news to Ben Jacobs, a reporter for the Guardian who was physically assaulted in May 2017 by Republican congressional candidate (and now a member of Congress) Greg Gianforte. Matthew Walther will no doubt point out that one swallow does not a summer make, but give it time; Trump's ongoing belligerence towards the media (among others) may yet bear more fruit.

http://theweek.com/articles/764645/why-trump-more-popular-than-ever

Finally, in a post that deserves more thought and more space than I can give it right now, Rod Dreher (The American Conservative) laments the "feminization (and decline)" of Christianity. He has both theological and sociological qualms, but for the moment he is setting aside the former:

What I’m putting into this post is not strictly, or even mostly, a theological matter. I want to establish that point clearly. I don’t believe that women priests are possible within Orthodoxy and Catholicism, because women cannot do what priests do within the sacramental system of those forms of Christianity. If proclaiming and explaining the Word is the point of the worship service though (and not the Eucharist, or if the Eucharist is nothing more than a memorial meal), then I don’t see why men have any advantage over women. In terms of the psychology and sociology of Christian sacerdotal leadership, well, that’s something different.

For his sociological (and historical) argument, Dreher cites at length an obscure 1999 book by the obscure Leon Podles, THE CHURCH IMPOTENT: The Feminization of Christianity.^ Here is a sample of Mr. Podles' approach:

Masculinity is a natural religion, and in many ways resembles the Christianity of which it is a foretaste. Can men worship a savior unless they know what it is to be a savior? A man wants to become a god. He wants to be a savior, protecting all those in his care, giving his own life to save theirs. In other words, he wants to transcend the limits of mere humanity, but that transcendence is dangerous. When he faces death a man can die the death of the body; but he can also die the death of the soul, the second death. All too easily he may be fascinated by darkness and become a partisan and emissary of death—a demon. The further masculinity consciously distances itself from Christianity, the greater the danger that it will make men agents of death—nihilists—because in nothingness they see the ultimate self-transcendence.

And another from Mr. Podles:

For all human beings, life is a struggle, but men know that it is their duty in a special way to be in the thick of that struggle, to confront the hard places in life and strive to know, in the fullest sense, what the mysteries of life and death are all about. Protestant Christianity in the historic churches has largely forgotten this. The tone of contemporary Catholicism, especially in America, too often is an irritating official optimism, in which administrative triumphs are trumpeted as if they were the Second Coming.

Mr. Podles' book is available online for free and certainly merits investigation, if only as a curiosity. In the meantime, I wonder if he would characterize the following as "irritating official optimism":

I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Christians have been trumpeting the Second Coming from the very beginning, and the Second Coming has unfailingly failed to occur; I really don't know what Leon Podles finds so irritating about the contemporary Church's official optimism.

^By "obscure," I mean of course that I have never heard of Mr. Podles or of his book; he, and it, may be quite well known to others.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-feminization-and-decline-of-religion/

Sunday Sermon

Msgr. Charles Pope on "The Pain of Greed":

The sinful drive of greed will always protest unless we...learn to curb it. Greed will always make us think that we need more; that we need what we want, in the way that we want it, and exactly when we want it. And if we get all that, we are still not satisfied; we simply become more particular, fussy, and demanding. Indeed, we have never had so many consumer options, comforts, and conveniences; and yet I would say that on the whole we have never been more unhappy. In this age of comfort and convenience, psychotherapy and psychotropic medications are big businesses. Misery indexes, consumer confidence surveys, and opinion polls often show high levels of fear, dissatisfaction, and anger. It is the same with our health. We have never lived so long and been so healthy, yet we have never worried more about our health.

Yes, no matter how much we have, it is never enough; and we are all afflicted with greed to some extent. Greed is one of the under-confessed sins of our time. It is always the other guy who is greedy, the one who earns more than I do; he is the greedy one.

No, greed is common a human problem, and it takes a heavy toll on us all by robbing us of gratitude, satisfaction, and joy with what we have. Greed robs us of the ability to enjoy life and to savor what is before us.

What does our present age with its unprecedented comforts and conveniences actually afford us? Stress, overwork, and worry seem to be our common lot. We are all in a big hurry to get somewhere, to get on to the next thing. Consider a simple thing like a car or a cell phone—great conveniences, right? Yet they seem to bring more stress. Our cars raise the expectation that we should reasonably be all over God’s green acre with little care for the actual human cost of making the trip and sitting in traffic. Our cell phones make us available at any time of the day or night; there is little or no quiet in our lives; relationships are more often virtual than real.

At some point it all starts to seem loathsome to us. We have more and more, the latest and greatest, the most recent upgrade—more and more until it comes out of our nostrils. We start to long for simplicity and for a time before we ever knew we “needed” all this stuff. Yet we cannot imagine how to pull free from so much of it. Life without a cellphone? Life without Facebook? Are you kidding? All of our gadgets and advanced technology have not freed us; they have ensnared us. And still our greed drives us to want more.

Simplicity may be difficult to achieve in times like these. Living in an Amish village is not an option for most of us, but deciding what is important and then focusing on it is a step in the right direction. To an age that cries out” “You can have it all,” we must learn to respond, “No, I can’t. We have to accept that “all” is too much and that less is more.

Affluence and abundance usually seem unambiguously good to us, but they are not; they bring human costs that we too seldom weigh...In other words, in our abundance we have too much to lose and so are easily threatened. There is a paradoxical kind of freedom that comes from having and needing less.

http://blog.adw.org/2017/04/the-pain-of-greed/

This, That, and a Third Thing

We’ve been told lately by commentators Right and Left that, whatever we may think of The Donald, we must be sympathetic to his supporters, to their legitimate concerns about demographic and cultural changes, and to their economic anxieties.

I’m not buying it, and neither is Damon Linker (at The Week):

What Trump's supporters appear to want is someone to rail rudely against economic, racial, ethnic, and demographic aspects of contemporary American life that they find distasteful, dangerous, and unfair; to place the blame for these trends on somebody besides themselves (immigrants, liberals, big business, stupid people, Muslims, big government, the media, the president); and to promise a magical fix brought about by superhuman feats of commonsense competence. Trump gives them all of this, and his followers love him for it. That makes him a textbook example of a demagogue and them a political force that everyone from Aristotle to Alexander Hamilton would recognize as a mob.

To put it even more bluntly: Donald Trump is a pig running a barnyard campaign, and all the media lipstick in the world won’t change that.

http://theweek.com/articles/595715/rightwing-populism-stopped

Meanwhile, Obamacare continues to be a disaster and must be repealed:

More than 17 million people have acquired coverage under Obamacare and the uninsured rate is the lowest ever recorded. Competition in the fledgling Obamacare marketplaces is robust. And HealthCare.gov, after a disastrous rollout, has become a reliable vehicle for Obamacare customers to shop for coverage. More broadly, Obamacare’s supporters argue that multiple provisions of the law…are fundamentally changing the economics of health care by paying doctors for quality, not quantity, of care. The 2016 enrollment season is off to a good start, with more than 8 million signed up, and may well exceed admittedly modest expectations.

Naturally, Congress has reacted to these developments by “postponing” some of the scheduled Obamacare taxes, thus ensuring that the program will be underfunded and that its reduction of the federal deficit will be less than previously estimated.  Even more naturally, opponents of the law will then blame President Obama himself for the problems.  

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/obamacare-health-care-democrats-cadillac-tax-216966#ixzz3vcYKyOFe

Finally: there’s nothing like being told by a millionaire that money is overrated.  I’d like to appreciate David Heinemeier Hansson’s wisdom (as when he says that Expectations, not outcomes, govern our happiness), I really would, but I’m afraid he lost me with this:

For the first few months [after becoming a millionaire], I barely touched any of the money. Sure, I bought a big-screen TV and more DVD box sets than I could hope to consume, but it wasn't like I couldn't have done that before anyway. It wasn't until near the end of that year I finally drew down on the account of clichéd purchases: a yellow Lamborghini! While it was all very nice, very wonderful, it didn't, as we say, really move the needle of deep satisfaction. ¹

Who among us doesn’t identify with the failure of luxury goods to “move the needle of deep satisfaction”?  Well, maybe those of us who have never possessed such luxury goods in the first place and who wouldn’t mind giving them a try—after all, maybe they could at least move the needle of superficial enjoyment! 

To his credit, Mr. Hansson--who seems like a decent man--concludes:

Once you've taken care of the basics, there's very little in this world for which your life is worth deferring. Whether you know it or not, you've likely already found or at least seen the very best things. Make them count.

I think that’s good advice, but I also think that it’s advice I could get from any number of non-millionaires.  Hansson is seen as credible precisely because he’s become wealthy and can therefore tell us, first-hand, how hollow are the pleasures that money can buy.  I’m sure he doesn’t intend his counsel to come across as condescending, but that’s how it reads to me.  I’m fine not having much money, but I really don’t want to hear “The best things in life are free” from a guy who can buy pretty much any damn thing he wants.

http://www.vox.com/2015/12/28/10416590/millionaire-overrated

 ¹ There are many models of Lamborghini from which to choose; the first one I looked up online is priced “from” $397,000.  That’s a lot to pay for an existential disappointment.  I suggest Mr. Hansson trade in his Lamborghini for a Ford Fiesta and stop whining.