OUR PRESENT PENCHANT FOR TOPPLING OF STATUES AND WHY ROBERT E. LEE WAS A GREAT IF FLAWED MAN

"Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can’t change history, but you can learn from it....Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson — who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!”

American President Donald Trump, quoted in: Neil Munshi, "Trump says it is ‘foolish’ to remove Confederate symbols". The Financial Times. 17 August 2017, in www.ft.com.

"Lee was a tactically astute but strategically flawed general who led the Confederacy to defeat during the US civil war of 1861 to 1865. As commander for the slavery-supporting Confederacy, and a cruel slave owner himself, Lee is regarded as a highly offensive figure by African-Americans and many other Americans too. Some southerners argue that the memorials to Lee are about “heritage not hate” and commemorate the ordinary soldiers who died in the tragic conflict that killed more Americans than any other war the nation has ever fought".

Leader, "Past battles should not inflame present disputes". The Financial Times. 18 August 2017, in www.ft.com.

This online journal does not ordinarily discuss or delve into the intricacies of American politics. It is a journal which deals with history and with international politics and diplomacy. The case however of the current American penchant for removing statues of Civil War Confederate leaders and symbols does merit, insofar as it involves a question of History, a comment. In particular, the question raised (in admittedly a very inarticulate fashion) by President Trump does indeed call for a thoughtful response. Especially, in light of the arch typically bien-pensant leader in last week's Financial Times. Without in the least being sympathetic to his general point of view, the American President does indeed raised an ultra-valid concern: where does it stop? If we remove to-day statues of two of the greatest military figures in American History (Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson), for the sin of fighting for the Confederacy, then what is to prevent the throwing down of the statues of say Washington, Jefferson, Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt? You can readily add names to the list. The point being that history in all of its complexity and complication, is rarely a source of simple dialectics, stark black and white coloring. History tends to be more on the grey side of the ledger. And while it is a fact that for some people statues of Confederate heroes may seem 'oppressive', et cetera, there is not a person on this planet who may not in one form or fashion or other be 'hurt' by some public monument or other. To some people (like myself actually), the statue of Cromwell (or as I have heard some say: 'the regicide Crownwell') in Westminster Abbey is an abomination. Pur et simple. For others Admiral Lord Nelson or the Duke of Wellington, or for that matter Field-Marshal the Earl Haig or Sir Winston Churchill are damned figures (admittedly not for me). The larger point that I make is that these are all great and heroic figures produced by History. Whether you agree with them or not. They did not exist, and the statues to them were not erected in order to make someone, anyone 'feel better'. If you or I need to 'feel better' than one should either go to an analyst, or take a drink of champagne. If you are made so anxious by a statue of say Cecil Rhodes and are a student at an Oxford College, than you should probably go to another University (the University of Sussex anyone?). For whatever reason, our ultra-gauchist activists, rarely choose to go elsewhere. So the amount of 'hurt' that they are suffering from, appears to be not sufficient to so prompt them to relocate. For reasons of course which are obvious. Enough said...

In the case of Robert E. Lee, it is very much that hate him or love him (and like most 19th century American figures from history, he leaves me mostly indifferent), the fact is that he is without a doubt the greatest soldier produced by this country. If one had to nominate someone who fits the label of a Napoleonic General, a general who one would associate with all the great military commanders in history, then Lee is that man. Not Grant, not Washington, not Pershing, not MacArthur, not Patton, or Eisenhower, but Robert E. Lee. There is a truism that 'there are no Austerlitzes in American military history'. Well, there are and they are the battles that Lee won over the Union army in the Civil War. The fact that Lee won his renown fighting in favor of Slavery and the Confederacy is of course his tragedy. One can well imagine how different the 1860's would have been if Lee had decided to command the armies of the Republic. However it is well to remember that the choice that Lee made, while an erratum, was not as hideous as it may now seem to most people. It is noteworthy to recall that there were many individuals of liberal views, many who were opposed to slavery, who supported (at least initially) the Confederate cause. The names of Williams Gladstone and Sir John Acton being the most worthy of mention 1. With that said, nothing will tarnish the greatness of Lee as a general and to a lesser extent a man. Something that President Eisenhower accurately pointed out some sixty-years ago:

"General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America; he was a poised and inspiring leader, true to the high trust reposed in him by millions of his fellow citizens; he was thoughtful yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies but ingenious, unrelenting and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or obstacle. Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history. From deep conviction, I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee’s calibre would be unconquerable in spirit and soul. Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities, including his devotion to this land as revealed in his painstaking efforts to help heal the Nation’s wounds once the bitter struggle was over, we, in our own time of danger in a divided world, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained" 2.

Given all the ills and manifold problems that contemporary American society suffers from, the penchant for removing statues, for renaming public venues (as in the Princeton Club's recent renaming the 'Woodrow Wilson room' to something else by the administration of the club, without even a vote or a consultation of the members), and other 'progressive' measures is a piece with a society which is deeply un-serious, nay adolescent in mentality. One can only hope that as in the immortal words of Saint Paul:

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things" 2.

1. On Gladstone see: Roy Jenkins. Gladstone. (1995), pp. 236-238. On the future Lord Acton, see: Roland Hill. Lord Acton. (2000), pp. 86-88.

2. This quote comes courtesy of Rod Dreher, see: "A Monumental History". The American Conservative. 24 May 2017, in www.theamericanconservative.com.

3. See: First Corinthians, Chapter 13. V. I.

TRUMP AND AFGHANISTAN: A COMMENT

"President Donald Trump has revealed a new strategy for Afghanistan that commits to maintaining US forces in the war-torn country and increases pressure on Pakistan to crack down on havens used by terrorists. In a prime-time speech on Monday night, Mr Trump said his instinct had been to withdraw from Afghanistan but that he changed his mind because of concerns about creating a vacuum for terrorists. But he stressed that US support was not a “blank cheque” and that Americans were “weary of war without victory”. “A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum that terrorists — including Isis and al-Qaeda — would instantly fill, just as happened before September 11,” Mr Trump said at Fort Myer outside Washington. Explaining his reversal, Mr Trump said Isis had emerged because the US withdrew from Iraq in 2011 and that America “cannot repeat in Afghanistan the mistake our leaders made in Iraq”. He did not say whether he would deploy additional forces to bolster the 8,400 US troops in Afghanistan but stressed that he would give the military the flexibility to produce an outcome “worthy of the tremendous sacrifices” made in the country. In June, Mr Trump gave James Mattis, defence secretary, the authority to deploy several thousand more troops in Afghanistan, but Mr Mattis wanted to hold off on any decision until the administration had agreed on a strategy. “We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities. Conditions on the ground, not arbitrary timetables, will guide our strategy,” Mr Trump said. “America’s enemies must never know our plans or believe they can wait us out. I will not say when we are going to attack, but attack we will.' " 

Demetri Sevastopulo & Kiran Stacey, "Donald Trump warns against hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan". The Financial Times. 21 August 2017, in www.ft.com.

"Based on its interests, the United States' primary objectives should be to prevent the Taliban from overthrowing the Afghan government, to target terrorist and insurgent groups that threaten the United States and its core interests, and to improve the capacity of the Afghan government and local allies as much as is feasible. Washington should set a more realistic goal: to ensure that the Taliban doesn't win. These objectives are and should remain limited. The Afghan government is weak and poorly functioning—and is likely to continue to be so for the foreseeable future. The United States should thus not expect the Afghan government to defeat the Taliban on the battlefield over the next four years of the administration. Instead, Washington should set a more realistic goal: to ensure that the Taliban doesn't win. In order to do this, Washington could take several steps. First, U.S. diplomats need to continue encouraging governance reform in the country, including helping organize transparent elections and undermining large-scale public corruption. U.S. policymakers should also encourage diplomatic reconciliation with the Taliban. Since World War II, there have been roughly 181 insurgencies. Nearly three-quarters have been won on the battlefield. But of the roughly 30 percent that ended in a draw, most settled into a stalemate where neither side assessed that it could win. The Afghan war is at—or close to—a stalemate now. So negotiations may be the most likely path toward ending the violence given the inability of either side to win. Second, the United States should continue to keep at least the current number of 8,400 forces in Afghanistan, although more non-combat troops could be useful for advising Afghan army forces below the corps level. John Nicholson, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has requested several thousand additional troops from the United States and partner nations to train and advise Afghan forces—what some U.S. commanders have referred to as “thickening” advisory efforts. This is a reasonable request, although it is unlikely to break the stalemate".

Seth Jones, "How Trump Should Manage Afghanistan". The Rand Corporation. 21 March 2017, in www.rand.org.

One does not have to be an admirer of President Trump (do such creatures exist any longer?) to agree with his (or should one in fact say that of Generals McMaster & Mattis?) newest strategy for the Afghanistan war. It is the case in fact that a premature withdrawal of American and other Western forces would have been a disaster of the very first-order. That sans American and other Western boots on the ground, it would very much be the case that the Afghan government forces would have faced tremendous pressures from the Taliban. It being the case, that however disagreeable, it is a empirical fact that the regime in Kabul is not yet prepared to stand on its own two feet without Western assistance. Raising the question as to what was in the mind of the prior administration when it talked so freely about a complete withdrawal of all American (and inevitably) all Western forces by 2016? As Anthony Cordesman one of America's premier defense analysts recently noted:

When the U.S. withdrew combat forces in 2014, senior commanders realized all too clearly that the Afghan force was hollow with many units having little more than basic training and limited combat experience. This was due to rushed efforts to mix Afghan forces with police and army to take on the entire military mission of defeating the Taliban and other insurgents. That effort had only really begun to be fully funded in 2011, and many of the required advisors were only present in 2012-2013. It was clear that the Afghan Air Force was years away from having the strike, lift, and medevac capabilities it needed, and the Afghan government—including the Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Interior—lacked core competence and were deeply corrupt. Senior U.S. commanders recommended a train and assist and combat support mission of some 20,000 troops—a mission that could aid the Afghan security forces down to the combat unit level and help it go from a force with basic training to one that could actually fight 1.

In an ideal universe the errata of the prior American administration would have been reversed on day one or two of the current American administration as Cordesman points out. However, it is a truism in this case that 'better late than never'. With the new strategy in effect, one can hope that the minimum, necessary goals of the Western forces in Afghanistan: keeping the Taliban out of power and on the back foot as much as is possible becomes more achievable. Au fond of course Afghanistan is not an important local in and of itself. It is (in the words of Sir Anthony Eden): 'a road to nowhere'. Still, given our truncated world, even atrocious places like Afghanistan have the (negative) merit that one cannot safely ignore them. As the Americans did to their eventual cost from 1990 to 2000. The 'Trump Strategy' for Afghanistan guarantees that this will not occur anytime soon.

1. Anthony Cordesman, "How the Trump Administration is Losing Afghanistan". Center for Strategic and International Studies. 2 August 2017, in www.csis.org

THE MASSACRE IN BARCELONA: A COMMENT

"A van driver deliberately zigzagged into a crowd enjoying a sunny afternoon on Barcelona’s main pedestrian mall Thursday, killing at least 13 people and leaving 80 lying bloodied on the pavement. It was the worst terrorist attack in Spain since 2004, and was at least the sixth time in the past few years that assailants using vehicles as deadly weapons have struck a European city. The police cordoned off the Plaza de Cataluña and Las Ramblas in the heart of Barcelona, both tourist destinations, and began a chaotic pursuit for the people who carried out the attack. Two people were later arrested, including a Moroccan man whose identification documents had been used to rent the van. But the Barcelona police said neither was believed to be the driver, who remained at large. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the assault, which shattered a peaceful summer afternoon in one of Europe’s most picturesque cities. President Trump and other Western leaders quickly condemned the attack and pledged cooperation".

ANNE-SOPHIE BOLON, PALKO KARASZ and JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr, "Van Hits Pedestrians in Deadly Barcelona Terror Attack". The New York Times. 17 August 2017, in www.nytimes.com.

"Most organised human societies are plagued by terrorism. Within any structured system there will be a political spectrum, and at the ends of this spectrum there will be extremes populated by people who feel the rest of the society is not hearing a political message they need to be awoken to. Last week, Jonathan Evans, the former head of the UK security service MI5, said he believes that Britain will have to confront Islamist terrorism for at least another 20 years. And the reality is that once we have dealt with that strain of the virus, it will simply morph into a new form. To get to the origins of violent Islamist terrorism, one has to go back far beyond the spectacular attacks on the US on September 11 2001 to 1979, a year that rocked the Muslim world. The Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the siege at the Grand Mosque in Mecca by a group of fanatics all showed the violent force of fundamentalist ideas and their power to upend the established order. These three events showed how violent political movements inspired by Islamic theology could threaten superpowers. This was the lesson drawn by the architects of al-Qaeda’s confrontation with the west that culminated on 9/11. Isis is in many ways simply an evolution from that. The attacks on New York and Washington DC almost 16 years ago were not the first time that terrorism had been visited on the west, of course. Before 9/11, Europe had endured successive waves of terrorist violence. Those responsible included right and leftwing groupuscules, separatist outfits such as the IRA and Eta, Middle Eastern networks often linked to the intelligence services of hostile states, and (in the case of France in particular) violent Islamists linked to Algeria and the conflict in Bosnia".

Raffaello Pantucci, "Terrorism will always be with us". The Financial Times. 15 August 2017, in www.ft.com.

The easy cynicism of the bient-pensant liberal, post-enlightenment intelligentsia on the subject of terrorism can be seen on full display in Mr. Pantucci's commentary of two days ago 1. To-day of course we have been forcible reminded that while it is easy (nay far too easy) for bien-pensant commentators like Mr. Pantucci to state that 'terrorism will always be with us', the brutality of that cynicism is exposed for what it is by the events of Barcelona. Of course the sheer mendacity of Mr. Pantucci's comments and those like them are exposed by the fact that people like him would never in a hundred-years, nay a thousand-years state that (to give some easy examples): 'racism will always be with us', 'sexism will always be with us', 'inequality will always be with us', et cetera, et cetera. As per the gist of Mr. Pantucci's argument, it contains aspects which are both accurate and inaccurate. Where Mr. Pantucci's argument is truthful and empirically verifiable, is in his contention that the Muslim extremist violence of the past twenty some years are per se, nothing new. And that Western societies have had problems with terrorism since the early 1970's. Indeed it would be accurate to state that even the numbers killed by Muslim terrorists were to remain at the elevated level of years 2015 and 2016, it would still not come to more than half the total number of attacks and deaths that Europe saw in the 1970's and 1980's 2. Where however Mr. Pantucci's arguments is in erratum, is his thesis that one type of terrorism inevitably replaces another. History shows that this is in fact erroneous. Viz: prior to 1969-1970, terrorism was a non-existent problem in the Western World. Similarly, in the case of Western Europe, terrorist attacks and deaths went down remarkably as old political conflicts in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country were settled or began to be settled. And then for approximately ten-years, European figures on terrorist attacks and deaths by the same went down greatly. In the case of the United States, the number of terrorist attacks and deaths from the same went down drastically from the late 1970's to a low point in 1994. Thereafter with the rise of Muslim extremism and violence in Western societies, does the figures go higher. Of course it is good to be reminded that comparing absolute numbers of deaths from the 1970's and the 1980's with those of the past ten to fifteen years is something akin to a mugs game due to the fact that many injuries which thirty or forty years ago, resulted in someone dying would to-day, due to advances in medicine, merely result in injury and prolonged hospitalization. My larger point herein, aside from exposing the fallacious arguments of Mr. Pantucci and those like him, is to show that Muslim terrorism is both extraordinary (in its violence and its evilness) and yet treatable. It does not require that our Western societies be cowed in fear and craven-like appeasement to those elements who engage in such violence. What our societies need to do is to tackle the problem of Muslim violence head-on with iron gloves. Engage and try to support, 'moderate Muslims' (insofar as they exist) and deport, banish, and drive-out of our societies those Muslims, many of them economic migrants or 'refugees', who engage and or support violence, extremism and or engage in it. What Western societies need is to restore faith in itself. In its basic and fundamental beliefs and verities: Christianity, the rule of law, equality of opportunity, neighborliness even. Au fond, Western society of fifty or forty years ago, were in the mots of George Orwell, akin to a family (albeit in his words: "A family with the wrong members in control") 3. What is needed and required, via a strict control of third-world immigration is to endeavor to return to those halcyon feelings and day before it is too late.

1. See for a similar type of argument. Not as cynical of course: Martin Wolf, "Overreaction to the terrorist threat is the perpetrators’ prize". The Financial Times. 29 June 2017 in www.ft.com.

2. Data Team, "Terrorist atrocities in western Europe". The Economist. 23 March 2017, in www.economist.com.

3. George Orwell. The Lion and the Unicorn. Part One: England your England. (1940).

THE KOREAN CRISIS ANEW: WHAT HISTORY SUGGESTS MAY PERHAPS BE THE VERY BEST OPTION

"In his acclaimed book The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark wrote about how the great powers of 1914 stumbled into a pan-European war that not only destroyed much of the continent, but unleashed destructive forces that defined the global order for much of the following century. Some of us fear that we are sleepwalking again, blindly unaware of the abyss that lies ahead. As a Chinese friend reminded me recently, war has its own logic. So too do crises. History teaches us they are both hard to stop once they start. The greatest global flash point today is the Korean peninsula. Most analysts regard crisis and conflict over the North Korean nuclear programme as improbable. They are right. But the uncomfortable truth is that it is now becoming more possible".

Kevin Rudd, "Creative diplomacy is vital to defuse Korean crisis". The Financial Times. 11 August 2017, in www.ft.com.

"The whole position of the United States is in the balance".

Dean Acheson, position paper dated the 28th of June 1961 on the Berlin Crisis. In Lawrence Friedman. Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam. (2000), p. 67.

"We cannot and will not permit the communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force....In the thermonuclear age, any misjudgment on either side about the intentions of the other could rain more devastation in several hours than has been wrought in all wars of human history".

President John F. Kennedy, Speech on the Berlin Crisis, 25 July 1961, in Friedman, op. cit., p. 71.

History while far from an exact science, does and can tell us a few things concerning the ongoing crisis over North Korea and its mercurial leader. First is that for all the bloodcurdling rhetoric by Mr. Kim Jong Un, as well as its missile and nuclear programme, the fact of the matter is that there is little likelihood that North Korea will unilaterally attack any of its neighbors of the United States. The North Korean nuclear programme is a very expensive and dangerous insurance policy for Mr. Kim. He possesses it, in the expectation that by possessing these weapons and by constructing systems which will allow him to fire nuclear warheads at the United States, that he will ensure the safety of his regime. In point of fact, with the ongoing and now recently strengthened sanctions on his regime, it is far more likely that some day soon, if not this year than in five to ten years from now, the current regime in North Korea will collapse. There most likely will be some coup d'etat by some internal enemy who will: a) oust and probably kill Mr. Kim; b) once 'a' occurs the regime will quickly begin to implode from within. With the eventual crisis resulting in the reunification of the two Koreas and the ending of the North Korean nuclear threat. The upshot is that just as the Americans and their allies withstood the rhetorical blasts of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the years (1958-1962) of the Berlin Crises, so must they do the same now. What occurred was that history was ultimately on the side of the West, the Americans and their allies and the stalemate that ended the crisis, eventually collapsed with the collapse of the DDR in November 1989. It took of course almost thirty years for this to occur. But occur it did. And it is my prognosis that similarly, in due course the regime in North Korea will also eventually collapse, and there is accordingly, absolutely no point in the least to either be provoked by North Korean rhetoric or for that matter North Korean stunts (missiles which are fired off and which hit nothing except empty air and the blue waters of the Pacific). North Korea au fond is a land and a regime of the past. Just as the DDR was. And it will suffer the very same fate. What the Americans and their allies the South Koreans and the Japanese need to do is to keep their nerves and a stiff upper lip while this hoped for event does indeed occur. Accordingly, the less said by the mentally challenged American President the better.