Why Not Fight 'Em All?

I’ve stayed away from politics with this site, for the most part, though dipping into economics from time to time. Time for a “rant,” as my son might say. It won’t be a regular feature but may occur once in a while, as the spirit moves me. I've been sitting on this one for a week.

So, why do I ever read the columns of Thomas Sowell in the Record-Eagle? Every time I do, my blood pressure soars, and his July 2 column was no exception. Right before the 4th of July, too. Sigh…. Full disclosure: I am not a historian, nor do I pretend to be one. I do not even, as David likes to say about being a doctor, play one on TV. But analyzing argument, which is what philosophers do, is analyzing argument, whether the subject be history, science, ethics or beekeeping. Validity rests on only two legs: (1) the statements used as premises must be true and (2) the conclusion(s) must follow from them. Good historians usually avoid false statements, but I have observed that their conclusions are not infrequently based on insufficient premises, though the insufficiency may go unnoticed even by the historian in his rush to prove a point. So, that’s where I’m coming from.

Thomas Sowell is concerned with patriotism. It seems, as a friend of ours observed recently, that a lot of people these days are concerned about patriotism, and many gauge it by whether or not someone flies a flag or wears a flag lapel pin or has the right sentiments displayed on a bumper sticker. Sowell has more focused concerns. He is suspicious of teachers who present peace as an ideal. If we teach that war brings suffering, he reasons, we will be pushovers. Better to sing the praises of patriotic military heroes than to soften up a generation and prepare them for defeat. That’s his line, and, eager to push his ideological agenda, he cites France as a case study. Again I sigh: Right-wing Americans love to roll their eyes at the French. Sowell would have us believe that the French rolled over for Germany in 1940 because the country’s schoolteachers had failed to promote patriotism, choosing to teach instead that the French had been victims, not heroes, during World War I.

This is a heavy charge--and a new one on me. Teachers are to blame for the fall of the Third Republic? Let’s go one step at a time.

Did, in fact, French teachers after World War I teach that their pupils’ parents had been victims rather than heroes? I cannot imagine Sowell would misrepresent a matter of historical record like school curriculum, so I’ll accept his premise, but let’s then push the “Why?” question further back. Why, after a war in which Germany was ultimately defeated, would France not be gung-ho for another round of bloodshed? --No, that way of putting the question is loaded. Let me rephrase. Why would French teachers not glorify the national victory? To answer this question, we need to look at the First World War, but it may be instructive to look back even further than that.

Eugen Weber, in FRANCE: FIN DE SIECLE (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), argues that French society had been in a state of continual crisis, living under the threat of war year after year, since 1870, the date of the Treaty of Frankfurt, itself seen as an uneasy truce rather than a real treaty. It was not until 1900 that a French court of law finally decided that “Prussian” was not a derogatory term. The conviction of Captain Albert Dreyfus in 1894, William Shirer writes in THE COLLAPSE OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC: AN INQUIRY INTO THE FALL OF FRANCE IN 1940 (NY: Simon & Schuster, 1969), “sheds light on the rocky course” of France’s government leading all the way up to the Second World War. Political divisions over the Dreyfus case persisted after the verdict, and when new evidence came to light, many felt that the forgeries committed to convict the innocent soldier were the result of “patriotic devotion” to country. There was a strong sentiment that patriotism and belief in government and military leaders were more important than the guilt or innocence of one Jew held prisoner on Devil’s Island. To the glory of France, however, others put truth and justice above blind patriotism. Nevertheless, it took its toll:

“Further seeds of what was to come, like the fatal elements which begin to build up in a Greek drama, were planted in French society in this unhappy time. The divisions of a divided people were deepened, the gulf between the Right and the Left widened, and the chances of eventual conciliation between the two made more difficult, if not impossible” (Shirer, 49).

Patriotism does not, in and of itself, imply good decisions. The failures of French military leadership in the First World War were failures of vision and strategy rather than failures of patriotism. “The French High Command simply refused to believe that the main German onslaught would come through Belgium” (Shirer, 121). Both French and German generals going into the war believed the conflict would be quickly resolved. All were wrong. Disciplinary methods used to punish troops for cowardice or desertion served instead to erode morale further.

When the Armistice ending the Great War was signed on November 11, 1918, “It had cost the French 1,357,800 dead, killed in action, 4,266,000 wounded and 537,000 made prisoner or missing—exactly 73 percent of the 8,410,000 men mobilized to defend the land. The northern third of the country was in ruins from four years of battle and deliberate German destruction, the nation’s treasury was empty, the war debts piled so high that they were almost beyond counting” (Shirer, 133).

Nearly 50 years of either war or the constant threat of war; a people divided not only by politics but by religious and ethnic suspicion; a long, brutal war that claimed three-quarters of a male generation of soldiers, robbing families of husbands and fathers; farmland turned to wasteland, forests utterly erased; galloping inflation that wiped out savings. These were all demoralizing factors. (A parenthetical note on inflation: the French were thrifty as well as patriotic, but neither virtue was enough to save their country from devastation.)

I look at the small black-and-white photographs in a Ballantine paperback edition of IN FLANDERS FIELDS: THE 1917 CAMPAIGN, by Leon Wolff, and wonder how my fellow Michiganians would respond to calls for patriotism if our state lands had ever been reduced to the bloody battlegrounds of 1917 France. If we lost close to a generation of young males? If there were a history of hostile invasions onto our soil from neighboring Canada? We worry about an economic slow-down, but how would we deal with the kind of inflation France experienced between the two World Wars? An ever-widening gap between political parties and economic interests, with each side blaming the other for empty government exchequers?

It’s easy to wave a flag, to be stirred by a marching band, to feel pride in the sight of young people in uniform, and none of those are bad things in and of themselves. It should not, however, be easy to send young people to die needlessly. It should not be easy to treat those desperate for a college education or health benefits as cannon fodder to enrich those already on the top of the heap. (Nothing worth the sacrifice trickles down into the grave.) It should not be easy to bankrupt a country for the sake of a show of heroism. It should not be easy to visit suffering on people in other countries while wrapping ourselves in red, white and blue glory.

I love my country and want to be proud of it. My country’s government and certain self-styled “patriots” sometimes make it difficult. In the late fall of 2001, a couple friends and I had a very serious conversation. One was being bombarded with e-mail from old college classmates urging her to display her “patriotism” by flying a flag and refusing to hear any criticism of the government of the United States of America. Maybe that’s one way to be patriotic. It isn’t my way. I’ll repeat here what I said then: “Being an American in your own way is what being an American is all about.” That’s how I see it from where I live.