Wagons West: ignorant armies still clash by night

How much the family of my German Jewish father took its heritage and mindset from Europe. At a time when America plunged deep into the heart of Europe via two World Wars -- all the while absorbing millions of European immigrants -- high, low, in the middle.

Even though my father, Arthur, was born on a new frontier -- in Guatemala in 1897 of a German Jewish dry goods merchant, Albert, who immigrated to America in the 1880's.

My grandfather railroaded to San Francisco, rejected the West as a place with little opportunity, before setting up business in Guatemala City. Then coming east to bring his family home to New York City circa 1902.

My father grew up a child of Europe in America's East.

In the last century European ways of thinking (Freud, Marx, as well as more classical studies) deeply penetrated our universities and political movements. Our power and energies allied with Europe against a Russian political religious movement whose prophet, Marx, was a German Jew.

It seemed no American could be truly educated without reentering and studying the belly of the mother from which he/she sprung.

Only "now" perhaps has "push back" really picked up steam.

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The other powerful strain in American history was the push west, expansion, wagon trains, the Mexican War -- the China trade -- and of course the marines and businessmen (such as in a small way my grandfather) who pushed south to influence, create hegemonies in Latin America.

Perhaps no one played as great a part as President James K. Polk in turning an offshoot of Europe into a great trek west. We, who sprung from Europe, spent little time studying this "father" of the Mexican War. For my generation it was sometimes fashionable to look upon this frontier son of North Carolina and Tennessee with embarrassment for stealing America's future from Mexico's past.

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I find it interesting how some friends of mine, the children of immigrants, know little of American history in the times before their ancestors came here.

For some such people the folk music and culture of the Sixties was a way of connecting with that deep American tradition which sprouted before the turn of the century European immigrants came. Even as our generation marched separate from America, we could "pretend" to connect.

So I, a child of the Cold War, took off in the other direction -- to the West. To the University of California at Berkeley to study the mysteries of "Communist China" -- China, where Europe and the US at one point uneasily co-existed in the years before Japanese and American expansions collided.

It was this collision of non European dragons which merged with, perhaps decisively, the Second World War.

Looking back, those of us who were products of the Cold War.....A strange time when the "enemy" the government funded us to study seemed opague, distant, as behind a screen -- through a glass darkly.

Now there is but one superpower -- no doubt strategically overextended -- but that only time will tell. Many centers of power and culture co-existing amidst the technologies of communication and globalization......

It is a world convulsing still in minor struggles -- throwing sparkling and often misleading images of both color and darkness all around the globe. The images change so fast it is sometimes hard to tell day from night.

Amid the shifting sands of faith and doubt are seeds for both the secular and the fundamentalist. It sometimes seems the more the communication, the more the confusion and fear.

And so, as it seemed to Matthew Arnold, trapped in the Nineteenth Century "loss of faith," it can seem so still:

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And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Dover Beach (1867)

A tale of two families: dry goods to cell phones

Oddly enough, while researching the website of Carlos Slim Helu, the Lebanese Mexican telephone mogul who rivals Bill Gates as the world's richest man, I found this photo of the dry goods store La Estrella de Oriente (“the Star of the East”). His father, Don Juan Helu, started it just before World War I.

Juan, who came to Mexico in 1902 at age 15 to avoid the Ottoman draft, married Dona Linda Helu, a Lebanese woman in 1926, He fathered Carlos in 1940.

Carlos, who owns much of Latin America's cell phone industry, runs America Movil, which runs Tracfone, a prepaid cell phone company with millions of customers in the United States.

His recent setback was the collapse of Comp USA in which he had a controlling interest.

This picture of the store struck me as incredibly familiar. Had I seen it before? Then I looked to the right of my desk at that fragmented, delicately framed photograph of my German Jewish grandfather Albert -- in his Guatemala City dry goods store, circa the beginning of the last century.

The stores and the way the staff stand look almost exactly the same -- except Don Juan's store appears a tad bigger, more employees, and more heavily stocked!!!!

Ah, if only.

If only my grandfather Albert, who left Germany for the United States in the 1880's to avoid Bismarck's draft, had stayed in Guatemala with his German Jewish wife. Instead he returned to the US circa 1902 to continue his work in dry goods!

Perhaps today I would be running a cell phone empire!!!!

Instead of only using a Tracfone.

Politicians: careful when you reset that clock!

Despite all the mutual saber rattling between the U.S. and Iran, don't let the politicians and pundits scare you about a world war erupting between proud Iranians and arrogant Americans.

So many modern confrontations take thirty years to heal. Peace could break out around 2010.

The Korean War, beginning in 1950. did not formally end until the United State and China established diplomatic relations in January 1979.

The Vietnam War, also born in the Fifties, but taking off in open military confrontation betwen the US and North Vietnam in 1965, did not really end until formal military and intelligence exchanges in 2005. The seeds of accomodation were apparent at least ten years earlier.

The American Iranian "proxy war," beginning with the taking of American hostages in November, 1979, should run out in about 2010 -- unless trigger happy politicians on both sides fail to read this blog -- and take military action to set the thirty year clock back to "year one."

True, some conflicts stretch longer. The "Cold War" between the United States and the Soviet Union stretched more than 40 years from 1948 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. So the Iranian American "proxy war" could last as far into the future as 2020.

All depends on how many times politicians on both sides set back the clock.

One trick to managing these conflicts is patience and balance -- so that after thirty years the ticking alarm clock awakens us comfortably to the morning sun.

A few bad dreams are natural. Rabble rousing, fear mongering, provocation for domestic political advantage, saber rattling, mutual vilification. For politicians of many nations these are as normal as "apple pie."

But they could get out of hand. If the politicians are not careful, they could set the clock back to "year one."

Escaping the tyranny of the last big war

Is Iraq a Vietnam style "quagmire" to escape from --- as the advocates of speedy withdrawal often claim?

Or is it -- like Vietnam --- a place where defeatists undermine a war effort by trying to cut funds when perseverance could bring victory?

We live in the "post Vietnam era" where we often look at the world through the searing prism of the last big war.

Yet Iraq must be understood in its own terms, illuminated by experience of the past but never forced into rigid molds of other times and other places.

For that could blur the lens of clear perception and boost the power of emotional propaganda.

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It is nothing new -- this tendency to view a current war through the lens of a war in the past.

Civil War officers often saw that conflict through the lens of the Mexican and Napoleonic Wars. So they sent forth their men in frontal charges to be cut down by long range artillery and rifled muskets.

World War I commanders were late to see that machine guns and barbed wire made the tactics of earlier wars of movement even more obsolete -- at least for a time.

After World War I, France's defense planners relied upon a defensive Maginot Line which failed to see that tanks and aircraft would restore a war of movement and make barbed wire and trenches obsolete.

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The challenge, I have learned, is never to be transfixed by one limited historical experience -- but to keep the mind and heart open to "all things under the sun."

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I faced it as a journalist with The Christian Science Monitor -- when my reporting was sometimes partly influenced by how I was raised.

The dim echoes of World War I still sounded in my ears. My father was a convert to Quakerism who was born in 1897 and raised in a socialist/pacifist tradition. For him the "Great War" seemed not a triumph of right over wrong -- but a collapse of civilized reality before an uncontrollable man made plague.

Military power coupled to secret alliances seemed an agent of irrationality in the service of special, often blind interests. So my father joined the merchant marine to escape the draft.

Many after World War I felt the need to limit military power and overseas involvements to prevent a repeat of World War I.

in the post WWII era I was raised in a family which stressed the lessons of WWI. Indeed I cut my teeth in the 1950's studying the diplomatic and military lessons of WWI by studying on my own the classic 1928 historical analysis "The Origins of the World War" by Sidney Bradshaw Fay.

This volume placed responsibility for the war on all powers, but especially Austria, Russia, and Serbia whose local conflicts were allowed to escalate into world war by a system of alliances.

Yet by the 1950's the broader world I grew up in was dominated by residues of World War II, not World War I.

I was a bit out of sync.

My view was shaped as much by the poetry of those who fought in World War I trenches as by the "Double H's" of World War II (Holocaust and Hiroshima), "Double H's" which still color our view of terrorist threats.

The World War II generation often saw war as a means of saving the world from Nazi barbarism ---- a desperate, necessary thing to do at great cost, partly because leaders and peoples in the Thirties had failed to build the military power that would contain, inhibit, or destroy genocidal despots.

Hence many after WWII saw the need to build military power in the service of a moral crusade to prevent a repeat of World War II, to contain an evil totalitarian Soviet Union.

President Johnson's Secretary of State Dean Rusk defended American involvement in Vietnam by the need to avoid 1930's style appeasement, "another Munich."

Indeed some defenders of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein see today's Iraq war as an extension of the World War II's historic mission to destroy totalitarian despots who rule by terror.

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So from the mid 1950's onward I was an earnest student of just how wars did and could begin and grow.

And that is what I reported on from Beijing. In the back of my mind was that old post World War I concern that small wars could escalate into big wars if big powers feel compelled to intervene on behalf of their allies.

In 1979 the Chinese, the Americans and the Russians were smart enough to keep this from happening. Yet the 29 day Chinese attack on Vietnam which cost some 20,000 Chinese lives was a small initial stage in the resumed Cold War that replaced the Nixon Brezhnev detente -- and turned hot from Indochina to Afghanistan and Central America.

So each generation can have a flawed, limited view of the present -- blinkered by the lens of the past.


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The challenge, I have learned, is never to be transfixed by one limited historical experience -- but to keep the mind and heart open to "all things under the sun."

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Eyeopening TV solutions for campus mass shootings

From watching television coverage of the Virginia Tech mass shootings two possible solutions would appear to follow:

A) Maximal:
Ban all born in South Korea from becoming college students; bar all those with a history of mental illness from becoming college students; and ban all handguns.

B) Minimal:
Ban all South Koreans who own handguns and who have a history of mental illness from becoming college students.

The second would be easier to implement, although possibly controversial to enact. Still, one of these alternatives should make sense.

We all know South Koreans CAN be violent; handguns CAN be fatal; and those with a history of mental illness CAN be dangerous. Why not just get rid of them all?

Are there other possible "solutions?" Of course, but you will rarely find them watching television.

The "EXCEPTION WHICH PROVES THE RULE" is CSPAN2's April 23 coverage of hearings on campus security held by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security.

Click here for audio visual streaming and .pdf downloads of this EYEOPENING testimony of experts on campus security, mental health, and student counseling.

As the world turns: it's time to take a snooze

The intracacies of politics in Washington, in Bagdad; climate change; poison pet food. Where will it end?

Words, so many words. Time to take a snooze --- and read a good book, written way back in the 1980's.

A recent Chinese television series has spotlighted this book to encourage discussion on how China's emerging power can avoid the traps other great nations, such as the United States, have fallen into.

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From The New York Times:

Date: January 10, 1988, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 1, Column 3; Book Review Desk
Byline: By MICHAEL HOWARD; Michael Howard is the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford University

THE RISE AND FALL OF THE GREAT POWERS

Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000. By Paul Kennedy. Maps and tables. 677 pp. New York: Random House. $24.95.....


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"Paul Kennedy of Yale University has broken ranks with his colleagues. In a work of almost Toynbeean sweep he describes a pattern of past development that is not only directly relevant to our times but is clearly intended to be read by policy makers, particularly American policy makers....

"He expands his thesis in the introduction and epilogue. It can be easily summarized: The more states increase their power, the larger the proportion of their resources they devote to maintaining it. If too large a proportion of national resources is diverted to military purposes, this in the long run leads to a weakening of power....

"The capacity to sustain a conflict with a comparable state or coalition of states ultimately depends on economic strength; but states apparently at the zenith of their political power are usually already in a condition of comparative economic decline, and the United States is no exception to this rule.

"Power can be maintained only by a prudent balance between the creation of wealth and military expenditure, and great powers in decline almost always hasten their demise by shifting expenditure from the former to the latter. Spain, the Netherlands, France and Britain did exactly that. Now it is the turn of the Soviet Union and the United States.

"THE over-extension of American commitments and the baroque gigantism of the American defense budget have been a matter of such general concern over the last few years that Mr. Kennedy may be accused of the fault against which historians warn their pupils: seeing the past through the perspective of the present.

"It is none the less true that contemporary concerns often alert us to aspects of the past that previous historians have overlooked; and indeed it is this very accumulation of perspectives that keeps the past continuously alive.

"In the hands of a political pamphleteer seeking evidence to prove a case such an approach is a corruption of history, but when a scholar as careful and learned as Mr. Kennedy is prompted by contemporary issues to re-examine the great processes of the past, the result can only be an enhancement of our historical understanding and a fresh enlightenment of the problems of our own time."