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Cutting The Knot

As I have already mentioned, Poulos’ post is outstanding.  In addition to pointing out the virtues and significance of deliberative rhetoric and its function in channeling political and legal conflict into peaceful forms of disputation, James cuts right to, and through, the heart of one of the more dreadful rhetorical tropes of certain conservative pundits of an empire-friendly bent: the […]

As I have already mentioned, Poulos’ post is outstanding.  In addition to pointing out the virtues and significance of deliberative rhetoric and its function in channeling political and legal conflict into peaceful forms of disputation, James cuts right to, and through, the heart of one of the more dreadful rhetorical tropes of certain conservative pundits of an empire-friendly bent: the frequent pairing of the “Unionist” assault on the Confederacy with the war against the Axis, in particular the fight against Nazi Germany, as if they were comparable in any meaningful way.  The only real point of comparison is that both wars were waged by the United States government and both resulted in victories for that government–after that, they are not all that similar.  I will return to the first point later, but let me say something about this pairing first. 

There are some obvious problems with this from the start.  The “Unionist” war against the South was fought in contravention of the Constitution (though, quite naturally, it was fought “in the name of” the Constitution, as so many usurpations ever after have been justified) and represented the concentrated effort by an assembly of polities to invade and conquer another.  WWII, whatever one wants to argue about the policies leading up to it and the negative effects that it had on the country (and there were more than a few), was nonetheless a constitutional, declared war fought as a response to an attack on American territory.  The opponents fought by the United States government in the two wars were scarcely comparable in ideological and political terms.  Where one sought to withdraw peaceably from a political arrangement, inasmuch as this was permitted, the other sought to expand its territory by conquering, suppressing and dominating all the nations around it.  One represented a social and political order that was, if anything, attempting to retain some combination of aristocratic and agrarian republican structures out of a profound respect for past precedents and classical models (which is, ironically, one of the reasons why Hanson, a classicist, hates the Old South so much), while the other was a rude, modernising revolutionary force that idolised the future.  At the risk of some oversimplification, the progressive Yankee nationalist could only see in the Southron his antithesis, the embodiment of virtually everything he wanted (and tried) to purge from his country, while the progressive 20th century New Dealer confronted in fascism a hostile variant of his own progressive nationalist managerial statism.  Mass democratic nationalism coupled with the beginnings of a managerial state found itself warring against an ideology with which it had a little too much affinity for some people’s comfort.  As Kuehnelt-Leddihn said of democracy, fascism and communism more generally, the intensity of the hostility between these different systems was that of a family feud, not one of diametrically opposed extremes.  The similarities between these different centralised, managerial statisms may help explain why fascism elicits so much more powerful emotional negative reactions from everyone across the spectrum, as if to overcompensate for these similarities through extra denunciation.    

James quotes from Fred Thompson:

Hansen writes [that’s Victor Davis Hanson we’re talking about here, sic; get out your copyeditors, NR-JP], “The hundred years of talking about slavery was not as important as two days at Gettysburg. The success or failure of Normandy affected Hitler more in an hour than had years of pleading with him in the 1930s.” If for no other reason than that we want to avoid war whenever we can, universities should at least offer the option of studying it.

James credits these assessments as more or less correct (“nothing in this sequence is untrue or inaccurate”), but says also that they miss certain important distinctions that he describes thus:

One is that between Gettysburg and Normandy. Another is between Hanson’s hour of decisive bloodshed and Fred’s hoped-for ideal of eternally postponed bloodshed. And the third is between pleading and studying.

James notes many of the key differences between the wars being mentioned in the same breath.  However, I must very respectfully disagree with my learned associate on the accuracy of the Hanson remarks that Thompson quoted.  On a slightly pedantic level, I would note that Gettysburg was a battle of three days and it was the third, final day that rather made all the difference in making it into a decisive defeat for the Army of Northern Virginia rather than an inconclusive draw.  This might not be such a major objection, except that it was the decisiveness of the battle that lends it its special significance as a “turning point” in the history of the war and so gives it whatever greater importance as an event that it possesses.  It does not exactly help the cause of reviving military history studies to state inaccurately a key detail of one of the best-known battles in American history.  A little less pedantic is the objection to the apparent interpretation (very common for Americans to make) that Normandy was somehow on par with Gettysburg’s significance in the War of Secession by being the decisive turning point in WWII, when that honour really must, for better or worse, belong to Stalingrad.  A more substantive point is that, as a matter of history, the Battle of Gettysburg is not “more important” than the hundred years of debate that preceded it.  If you tried to take that attitude into an American history class today or at any time in the past as a student, you would not do very well.  With respect to the outcome of the war, the battle was an extremely significant event that brought about a sizeable change in the course of the war by ending the Confederacy’s attempts to take the war into the North and hastening ultimate Confederate defeat.  Battles can and do change the course of events in dramatic ways (see Gaugamela, Actium, Yarmuk), because wars are events of profound transformation and wars turn in no small part on the outcome of battles, but this does not make them “more important” than the decades of political argument and struggle that paved the way for the war to happen in the first place.  It is just this sort of talk that can give the study of histoire evenementielle a bad name. 

Some of its partisans rightly want to emphasise that events can be decisive and that history is contingent on events, and they then get entirely carried away by elevating these events into a category of greater significancee than the mundane, plodding periods of peace and the very real structures of institutions and the mentalities of nations.  It is as if some of these partisans cannot argue for the significance of war as a transformative force in history without implicitly (or, in this case, explicitly) devaluing everything outside of war.  Just behind this language of greater importance is the notion that it would have been better to “resolve” the conflicts that these wars “solved” earlier…by means of an earlier war.  Far from seeing war as a catastrophic failure and a great enemy of civilisation, those making this kind of argument see it as a sort of quick fix, a simple answer to very knotty questions.  It declares animosity towards brokered deals, compromises and all of the accommodations that must be made for political life to continue without violent interruption.  The opponents of this approach will quite often attribute to them a tendency to offer simplistic answers, because that is very often the kind of answer they are offering–not because they are fools, but because they really think the answer is that simple. 

The threads of life over the course of decades in all their complexity jumble into something very much like a Gordian Knot, and these folks seem rather too eager to cut right through with a sword.   Behind this is an impatience with deliberation, an intolerance for fussing about with argument and, well, a dislike for basically everything that we know of as politics.  One is reminded of Gladiator‘s version of Commodus speaking to the hero: “You are a man who knows what it is to command.  You give your orders, the orders are obeyed, and the battle is won.  But these senators, they scheme and squabble, flatter, deceive.  Maximus, we must save Rome from the politicians.”  So, actually, I think there is quite a lot wrong with Hanson’s statement as quoted by Thompson. 

Thompson himself is right that universities should provide courses in military history, which would, of course, require more institutional support for hiring those with interests in military history.  Part of the reason why there is less interest and less support for those working in this area is that it is seen as being heavily focused on institutions (the military being the main one) and events, which are two kinds of historical research that are not exactly tickets to success and prominence in the discipline today.  They are not popular or fashionable because I think they are viewed as approaches that neglect too many things, unduly privilege discrete events and resemble a little too much the “one damn thing after another” school.  This may be an unfair judgement in certain ways, but because of this atmosphere that makes it that much more important that military historians adapt to at least some contemporary expectations in paying attention to social and cultural dimensions of warfare (and good military historians do exactly this).  We are caught in something of a vicious cycle, where relatively few are being trained to study these things because the study of them in the past has been seen to be lacking, which is hardly helped by proponents of reviving the study of military history making bold statements about the vastly greater importance of single decisive events.

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