War and Myth III

I grew up as a history buff. When I was in middle school read such tomes as a British critique of “Stonewall Jackson and The American Civil War” as well as the official evaluation of American/British strategic bombing in World War II. All I saw were the waving flags, the power and the glory. In the mid-1960s as a young man, I saw something else.
Queen Elizabeth awarded the Beetles with the Order of The British Empire—a military decoration and a high honor. Outraged veterans of Dunkirk, El Alamein, Singapore, Tobruk, the Blitz, Burma, the North Atlantic and D-Day sent their medals back, horrified and disgusted that four unkempt singers could be given the same medal they risked life and limb to win.
I thought about this, hard. Why? What was the Queen thinking? How do you equate being crippled for life with singing, “Love Me, Do”? Then I realized something. From the point of view of a government—the Queen’s or anyone else’s-- the Beetles and the man who spent four years in a Japanese POW camp had accomplished the same thing.
During World War II, England was threatened with near total destruction—political, military and ECONOMIC. The man who lost a limb in Burma was fighting to prevent such a defeat—and such a bleak future.
Fifteen years after the war, the Empire had imploded, Britain’s economy was in shambles and her future looked nearly as bleak as it had twenty years before. The first export England developed that all the world wanted—that put the crown and the nation back on an economically successful track-- was the four moptops. They made huge amounts of money for the crown.
That, I realized, is the proper function of war. Soldiers serve fundamentally to make or salvage money for the “crown”. One who does it especially well deserves a medal. The Beetles made lots and lots of money for the “crown”—they did it especially well. They too deserved a decoration.
I began to rethink my entire view of war—its causes, its purposes, its consequences, its usages and its liabilities. I thought of the two kinds of wars. There is the first kind—the VOLUNTARY kind, the kind you actually have the option not to fight.
Every American war since the French and Indian War in 1754 has been of this variety. Honor, loss of face or assets, determination to hang on to what had or (as the Biblical book “James” puts it) a war fought because we wanted something we did not have, these were all reasons we fought.
But, at whatever cost in face, treasure or future prospect, we could in fact have walked away. The South would not have invaded us; we could have stopped Pearl Harbor by simply selling Japan the fuel it needed to keep factories running and people from freezing; they had no compelling wish to attack us.
If we hadn’t flown bombers over Germany and fired on German subs in mid-Atlantic Hitler would not have voluntarily declared war. Not immediately, at least. The Revolution was completely unnecessary—if all we were really after was more freedom. Before we allowed people to vote for Senators, Britain passed most of the reforms we demanded. And so forth, and so forth.
We chose the wars we entered—just as we chose to fight in Iraq. (We had greater necessity in Afghanistan, rather like the French in Algeria, but we bungled it so horribly.) I’m not saying we shouldn’t have. I like the consequences of living in a huge—and hugely profitable—American Empire.
I’m not talking about involuntary wars—like Poland invaded by Germany or Mexico invaded by the United States. These are sometimes true tragedies. You fight simply to survive, like Israel in an Arab sea—and the profitability of the war doesn’t figure in. But these are actually somewhat rare—certainly in American history they have been.
Let’s look honestly at our wars. We did what we did because we wanted to—and we could. We may have found ourselves on the side of the angels from time to time (be careful about claiming that—it’s safer simply to be honest).
Let’s not let our own myths leave us confused. We wind up lying to ourselves that way—and that is the most dangerous person to lie to!
Let’s take another look at myth tomorrow—about the “Good Wars” of the Twentieth Century