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ATLANTIC HIGHLANDS HERALD |
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WAGING WAR THEN AND NOW - PART II (Second of two articles) Last week I contrasted the political and media climate of World War II with the climate President Bush currently deals with during our war against international terror. I expressed doubt that we could defeat Japan and Germany, today, in this environment. In this column we’ll examine additional facets of our national character and culture which bear on our ability to make war against dangerous adversaries. 2.The Disappearance of Evil. As American culture has become less religious, the notion of evil has receded into the misty past. Indeed, what we once called evil has become almost normalized. Behaviors which formerly gave evildoers long terms in prison or even cost them their lives, under the law’s judgments, are now either minimally punished or called “alternate lifestyles”. Today, unregenerate sexual predators live among us, serially victimizing children. If caught and convicted, they go to prison, serve part or all of their sentences, and are released back into society. Communities try to learn who they are, but are often thwarted by authorities concerned for criminals’ “privacy”. States and localities pass laws to identify habitual child-predators, but courts overturn the statutes. Perpetrators of repeated perversions are no longer called “deviants”. Occasionally, a crime captures the attention of the media, as in the recent case of a young woman who has disappeared in Aruba. The media have obsessed for weeks on her kidnapping and probable murder. Certainly, it is a wretched business. Meanwhile, other equally despicable crimes are ignored or given only brief play. In 1999 two homosexual men in Arkansas raped a 13-year-old boy repeatedly. He suffocated when they stuffed underwear in his mouth to stifle his screams. The media all but ignored the incident. The term “evil” did not appear in any news reports I saw. Media disinterest in identifying and fighting evil now extends to terrorist violence committed by foreign agents, here and abroad. Increasingly, media commentators call such agents “freedom fighters” who are disadvantaged losers “in the lottery of life”. Even our American media have taken to calling people who blow up civilians “bombers” or “militants”, instead of “terrorists”. “Terror” and “evil” have gone missing from our lexicon. This is not an analysis of what happened to evil, of course. It is merely an observation that we no longer think of fighting crime and terror in terms of good versus evil. We have “defined evil down”, to paraphrase Senator Daniel P. Moynihan. Perhaps more than most peoples, Americans need to believe they are in mortal combat against Evil when they go to war. This explains why the Vietnam War was so hard to sell. Large numbers of our people – particularly young people – could not see the dashing Vietcong “freedom fighters” as evil. They grew up on Ernest Hemingway, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, and the romantic communists fighting Franco and the fascists in Spain. The “evil” story would not play. In World War II, of course, evil did not need much selling. Thousands of young men lined up outside recruiting stations on December 8, 1941. The Japanese convinced us with the “dastardly” Pearl Harbor attack and Bataan Death March. Word was already trickling out about mass gassings at Nazi death camps in Eastern Europe. Americans didn’t need much persuading that these enemies were real bad guys whom we had to crush. We knew they were evil. This enabled us to finish Japan with the A-bomb. It’s nearly impossible to envision such an action today. Unless we are a-bombed first, the public would not permit it. To defeat terrorism we’ll need to comprehend that people who masquerade as “religious”, while blowing up buildings and beheading innocent people, are not misunderstood. They’re evil. 3. The Feminization of Culture. Some readers might dislike this section – perhaps imagining that I want to roll back opportunities for women. But I mean no such thing. I have a daughter and four granddaughters. Of course, I want them to have every possible opportunity to pursue occupations that suit them. This isn’t about suppressing women. It’s about oppressing boys. On the premise that girls were being shortchanged and denied opportunities, feminists have mounted a fierce thirty-year campaign to make education “girl-friendly”. Whether this was really needed, is open to question. Some female colleagues who worked with me in computing and engineering told of constrained educational opportunities – mostly due to racial discrimination. But I grew up during the 1950s, when girls supposedly were being held back. I knew some pretty smart girls, and I don’t remember any of them being kept from what they wanted to do. Whatever the case was (or was not) in the “bad old days”, schools have unquestionably bowed to feminist pressure and become feminized to the point where boyish behavior is being actively squelched. Christina Hoff Sommers, author of “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men”, says educators are treating boyhood as a “pathology”. The guiding principle, she writes, is: “Girls good, boys bad”. Boys’ rough, active play is discouraged. Even recess has been abolished at some schools. (Nice idea, when childhood obesity is a major problem.) Significant numbers of schoolboys are being given Ritalin for “hyperactivity”. Dr. James Dobson says boys typically show up in a loud, active group. They build something, then knock it down and run off to do something else. All is action, vigor, energy. My sons liked to roughhouse and run and play games that tested each others’ strength. Their sons are the same. These, of course, are things soldiers do. To the extent that boys are kept from such behavior, they are being conditioned away from the active young manhood our military services need. Plenty of people would see this as not only a non-problem but as a positive development. They would be glad if boys do not grow into men who can be good soldiers. That’s all very well. I understand the sentiment. No one wants his son or brother or father to die as a soldier. But as World War II showed us, there comes a time when a nation must fight to survive. When that time arrives, we must have young men who can step up to the task. Notwithstanding the delusions of feminists, young women cannot fill that role. They generally lack the strength (and often the temperament) to be combat soldiers. Only strong, confident young men can do the job. Other contemporary factors bear on this problem. We can’t discuss them in much detail, but they should be mentioned. One is the strong homosexual influence in the popular culture. Cinema and television are saturated with the gay man as the ideal male – sensitive, caring, good looking, well-turned-out, tolerant and far more intelligent and capable than the typical boorish heterosexual male. Smooth-chested – in the gay style – is the way we want our male heroes to look today. The obverse of the gay image is the strong, invincible female – nemesis of the depraved, disgusting male. The Karate Kid, in its final film incarnation, had to be a Viking-like girl who defends her weaker, less capable man and defeats his enemies. Even the newest movie about the love-bug, “Herbie”, features a girl who drives Herbie to victory over her swinish male rival. The media love to follow female golfers around who they hope will break into the PGA, but reality is stubbornly otherwise. Girls are not as strong as boys. Women can’t make the football team. Real life is not a movie. This make-believe helps neither young women nor the young men they might one day depend on to fight the nation’s real, vicious (and mostly male) enemies. 4. Loss of the Citizen-soldier. Young men of my generation rejoiced when the draft ended and the all-volunteer army began. For a confluence of reasons I was not drafted during the Vietnam era, but I knew a lot of guys who were. Some of them came home in wooden boxes. Plenty more came home that way from Europe, the South Pacific, Italy, North Africa and Korea – or are buried in those far-away places. Nobody my age or older gets misty about the good old draft. My father was drafted in 1944, soon after the Normandy landings. He joined the Fourth Division in France – a replacement for some soldier who fell either in the landings or during the battle to break out of Cherbourg. Pop served a year and a half. He caught pneumonia lying in the mud, missed some of the heaviest fighting, and came home to train for the invasion of Japan. The latter never happened because the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki convinced the Emperor that Japan needed to surrender. I never heard Pop complain about the draft or say he wished he hadn’t had to serve. He didn’t love the Army, but he didn’t hate it, either. He spoke of his comrades with humor and affection and kept in touch with some. He always mentioned Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. – commander of the Fourth Division – in terms of the greatest respect and admiration. What Pop did say about the draft was that it generated soldiers who wanted to get the thing done as quickly as possible so they could go home. He also thought that the many draftees from all across the country gave the war a broad base of support that motivated the whole country. Those blue-star and gold-star banners still hung in many homes, even years after the war. It was a total national effort. Very few families were untouched by it. The volunteer army shows strengths, including aspects that are the opposite of the conscript army. The volunteer army can invest in expensive training for its soldiers, knowing they will stick around awhile. Volunteers want to be there. They are motivated to high performance because the Army is a career for them, not just something to get away from as quickly as possible. But the volunteer army has weaknesses, too, as we are now realizing during our first prolonged war since going all-volunteer. One of those weaknesses is that some enlistees pictured only the peacetime army when they joined up. They never expected a war, and were disillusioned about it when it came. Some women soldiers requested discharge when war broke out. A protracted war – even at the relatively low level of the ongoing action in Iraq – has also affected recruiting. An army where you can get killed is – it turns out – a less attractive career choice than an army where the main issues are skills, training, promotion, pay, and benefits. Military leaders have not said so, but one suspects that manpower issues might affect future military strategies and actions in ways never anticipated when the all-volunteer army was originally planned. “Be careful what you wish for,” a wise man once warned. Conscription was always painful, and an unpopular war made it unsupportable. There is, however, growing doubt that an all-volunteer armed force can fight a big war. A two-front war might be impossible without greater strength. And that strength might not be achievable with only volunteers. Even North Korea has more men under arms than we do. Thus, in a dangerous world, the citizen-soldier might return. If he does, he will present some formidable political difficulties. 5. A Diverse Culture. America has always consisted of diverse elements from all over the world. Certainly that was so during World War II. Generally, diversity has been a source of our strength. The difference now is that many immigrants come here without expecting to become Americans. They anticipate remaining Mexicans or Saudis or Iranians, etc., who just happen to live in the United States. Instead of “assimilating”, they live within communities of their particular ethnicity, speak their old language and follow their old customs. Often they learn no English. If they can amass sufficient political influence, they might even force use of their language for business and governmental transactions. This is not your grandfather’s melting pot. During World War II the USA took the radical step – regretted ever-afterward by sympathetic citizens – of interning west-coast people of Japanese descent in inland camps. Authorities feared that their sympathies might lie with the Japanese instead of their adopted country. The question of whether that assessment was correct has been obscured by later controversy over the internment. Today, such a thing could not be done because of racial sensibilities and political correctness, even if it were demonstrably clear that certain foreign communities represented a tangible threat to American security. Indeed, grave suspicion does exist that some radical Islamist communities are such a threat. Until we deal with those factions, our ability to protect the homeland – one of the fundamentals of making war successfully – will be degraded. We dealt with that threat decisively (but radically) in World War II. It represents a major difference between then and now. ******* America has changed in many ways since 1945. We cannot live in the past, but we need to learn from it. Until we do, the War on Terror will be slow, dangerous going.
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