Passing away peacefully of old age and infirmity

 On page 728 of his THE SECOND WORLD WARS, Victor Davis Hanson wrote, “The Axis Bit Three – Hitler, Tojo, and Mussolini – all died violently as a result of their defeat.  Allied leaders passed away peaceful of old age and infirmity.”

As much as I admire Hanson, I’m inclined to quibble with this statement.  

Over the years I’ve read several books about World War II.  I might be said to have grown up alongside it.  I was born October 12, 1934 and recall waiting outside our house for my mother to take us to Sunday School at church when my father stepped out on the porch and announced, “The Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor.”  

My imagination was captured and I followed the war in our local Wilmington Press Telegram.  The war was over in 1945, but in 1950 the Korean War was in full swing, and I was resolved to get into that one.  I was a great admirer of the Marine Corps and read several books about it from the local library.  Still being a kid, I wanted to make sure I made it through bootcamp, so I maintained a heavy workout program and entered boot camp in July 1952 shortly after graduation from High School.

I was in Korea for the last two Korean War battle seasons, but then the truce was signed, to my great disappointment.  I was a sergeant by the time my enlistment was up and was offered an increase to Staff Sergeant if I would reenlist, but I wasn’t impressed with the Peace-time Marines, especially at 29 Palms and so decided to go to college on the G.I. Bill instead.  I majored in English, and wouldn’t have thought there was a need for such a skill in Aerospace, but engineers were notorious bad writers, and the Air Force officially complained during the Skybolt Program, so I was welcomed aboard that program in Santa Monica in 1959 and continued working for them as they morphed into McDonnell Douglas and eventually submerged in to Boeing.  I retired after 39 years with them in 1999 and have engaged in a variety of activities during retirement including a number of study projects, World War II being one of them.  I had read about the major battles from time to time, but being an admirer of Hanson finally got around to his summing up – in various ways.  No doubt the fact that I am now 91 affected my impression of the Hanson passage I quoted.  I suspect my initial interpretation was not one he intended.

I thought of a male lion in the African jungle too old and infirm to go ahunting with the rest of the pride.  A pack of hyenas gather around and start eating him as he feebly attempts to fend them off.  

Which is not unlike my current experience, doctors gathered around as I feebly fail to fend them off as they strive to medicate me to death.  

I can usually figure out what Hanson means but from my current perspective, dying in battle seems preferable to the “old age and infirmity” Hanson prefers.  

Oddly, my children favor Hanson’s view on this matter.

 

An old man thinking about his political future in San Jacinto

 

Ian Kershaw (who wrote a highly acclaimed biography of Hitler) is quoted in Wikipedia as saying that defining Fascism is like nailing jelly to the wall, and yet modern critics of modern Republican politicians apply that term with aplomb.  It has in effect become a modern curse-word, plucked out of history, without serious modern meaning.  The safest definition involves leaving it in its historical setting and applying it to the political practices of Hitler and Mussolini, and time has rolled them both up and placed them in the historical waste basket.   Hitler with his remarkable intelligence and political power had nevertheless received little formal education.  His desire to conquer Europe would have been understandable by many of the powerful monarch of the middle-ages, but no practical modern politician would seek such a goal.  We see the weakness of something similar in Putin's desire to restore the Russian empire.  The leaders of various of the former national entities that had broken away from the USSR after its collapse have for the most part no desire to abandon their own political interests and allow Putin to incorporate them back into a moribund Russia.

The invention of the printing press altered or undercut all the old ways.   Wars had historically been fought over matters of religion.  One had to adhere to the religion of one's monarch or potentially be declared a heretic and executed.  But once copies of the Bible were printed by Gutenberg, any intellectual who was interested could read the language and have an opinion that might well be counter to the official teachings of Rome, and as time went on, Protestant intellectuals countered the teachings of both Calvin and Luther as well.  So fragmented has Christian doctrine become that the declaring of a single teaching has become so impracticable that it has been determined to be against the law in the West.  A Western state can no longer establish an official religion. 

Politics is sort of moving in the same direction as religion.  But whereas it is possible for an individual to declare that he or she is an atheist, it is not possible for an individual to declare that he does not believe in politics -- or is it?  Well, it sort of seems so.  At various times small groups opt out of society in some form as (sort of) happened during the Vietnam War when people were urged to make love and not war.  The actual political forces that made actual decisions (both Democrat and Republican) made war anyway.  But again, Gutenberg's press (in its modern iteration in the Internet and rapid world communication) is making war less convenient, and in the midst of turmoil that in earlier times (as happened in fairly recent times when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor) there was the opera Nixon in China.  Forget about the precise motivations which shifted and still shift about regarding that opera.  Its words, and in this case also its music altered (or was a symbol of the alteration) of the relationship between the U.S. and China, and even today when it seems the two nations are at serious odds with each other (and China no longer officially appreciates that opera) war between the two, given their economic involvement with each other, seems almost untenable.   Will China invade Taiwan?  Perhaps it wants to, but it is almost certainly trying to figure out a way to do it without going to war against America, and most likely America's current allies, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Australia and perhaps a few more in Southeast Asia.

Francis Fukuyama perhaps over-enthusiastically after the collapse of the Soviet Union, saw Liberal Democracy as having a clear path to becoming the dominate economy practiced by the rest of the world.  Fukuyama has been written off as being wrong since wars continue, but he didn't say wars would stop.  The opponents of Liberal Democracy are autocrats that are examples of Fukuyama's Last Man, leaders Thomas Carlyle would have recognized with more approval than most in the West now do -- people whose ambitions override the practicality of becoming a Liberal Democracy.  Putin, for example, isn't willing to abandon the glory that the Russian Empire once achieved.  Will a resurgent Russian Empire gather up many of the elements lost after the 1989 collapse of Communism?  We will see.  Russia may well impoverish itself in its war with Ukraine, and even if it wins some part of Ukraine at the end, it may be a Pyrrhic victory.  Other parts of the former USSR are gearing up to resist Putin, and NATO a previously paper tiger, is taking Russia's ambitions seriously and even if Russia takes back most of the Russian speaking part of the Ukraine as Samuel P. Huntington assumed in his Clash of Civilizations, they probably won't get most of those who speak Ukrainian. 

Back in China, the war with Chiang Kai-Shek is still sharp in the memory of many Chinese still alive today.  When Chiang moved his army to Formosa, Mao's forces weren't able to do anything to dislodge him.  Can Mao's political descendants now accomplish the task?  Not without something like suicidal results, results something like Putin is risking in his Quixotic quest to restore a Russia Empire. 

Meanwhile here in the U.S., can we afford to oppose all the autocrats that defy Fukuyama's prediction that Liberal Democracy is sure to win out over all the other superseded forms of government in the world?   Samuel Huntington, if he were alive today might be surprised at many of our modern choices.  I don't think he would have approved of our siding with Ukraine militarily.  He thought the Russian speaking part of Ukraine might logically become part of Russia, but the Ukrainian-speaking part would probably ally itself to the West.  Whatever happened, Huntington didn't, in my opinion, envision our going to war in opposition to Russia over Ukraine.  He saw Russia as being the Core nation in the Slavic world, and believed we should not interfere with Russia's choices, just as Russia shouldn't interfere with the core nation in the West, namely the U.S. in matters within the Western enclave of nations.   And, he would have said the same thing about our commitment to Taiwan, because China is the core nation in the Asian enclave of nations.

I am still fond of Samuel P. Huntington.  He wrote about the ongoing clashes of civilization, and now, living in the later results of such clashes, I wonder if we can afford to clash as much as some politicians would like.  Oh, I'm sure we can do it by printing more money to pay for our military expenditures (if China continues to like such an investment).   However, back here in San Jacinto, I recently turned 90 and my doctors seem to think I'm going to live several years longer, so I'm wondering if my retirement package, which seemed more than adequate in 1999 when after 39 years in aerospace I retired, will last as long as I do.  Should I look forward to making it to 100 as my doctors are encouraging me to anticipate, or should I take stock of our commitment as world policeman and decide I can't afford it?

Meanwhile, here in the West

 I've been following the war on YouTube.  The Ukrainians have mounted a stirring defense and are being applauded by Western nations.  They claim to only need regular replenishment of their weapons and ammunition in order to drive Russia completely out of most of territorial Ukraine.  Much of the Eastern part is inhabited by Russians and Russian speaking Ukrainians.  Samuel P. Huntington years ago in his Clash of Civilizations wrote about this.  He thought that Ukraine would be split up with the Eastern part becoming part of Russia and the Western part becoming forever independent, but he thought it would happen peacefully and logically.  Since his day, however, the view is growing among anthropologists that our species is much more warlike than was previously thought.  The idea of peaceful little scavengers has given way (to a significant degree) to a blood-thirsty ancestry not above eating our fallen enemies.  At one point around 40,000 years ago, during the Cro Magnon period, we went on a rampage and wiped out all competing species.  Huntington missed out on our current view of our species.

Francis Fukuyama in his overly optimistic The End of History and the Last Man thought that Western economic and political systems being so much more efficient than anything else out there would soon pervade the entire world and history, the sort of history involving war, would end.  However, the second part of his thesis involved the risk of autocrats, dictators, leaders whose egos would drive them to start wars for their own ego-centric reasons, and Putin seems to fit that pattern.  And the last men with weak chests and weak wills "may" let them get away with it.  In Putin's case the "may" may have turned to "will."

The historians who have studied Russia describe Russia’s well-deserved paranoia.  Danger historically, even before Napoleon came from the West.  Russians would be driven further and further to the east until the invader’s supply lines became exhausted and then they would retaliate and drive the enemy from their land.  But if their close-by buffer states side with the potential enemy, then the Russians when they are invaded might not have the necessary territory to retreat to. 

We hear mostly about Russian dissidents and soldiers unwilling to fight, but Putin has a lot of support among Russians, and they are as paranoid as he is.  We in the West insist that we have no interest invading Russia, but each year the Russians celebrate the time when the last invasion (Hitler's) was defeated.  There is no longer a Hitler anyplace in the West as far as we know and so we think Putin's paranoia unjustified, but the Russians who lived through the last invasion and their children find the steady encroachment of the West, albeit peaceful from our point of view, threatening. 

On the positive side, the Russian paranoia won't risk nuclear war.  They love their land and have always depended upon their armies -- traditionally not very competent at the beginning of their wars, but as they are winnowed while being driven further and further to the east, the soldiers who remain become super-soldiers well capable of defeating the enemy.  Why should they resort to weapons which could destroy large parts of their homeland?  They don't need to. Their land armies will take care of them. 

Once again, the Russians have begun poorly, but if they don't succeed in reacquiring their Communist era buffer states, they'll settle for what they have -- for now -- and then work on correcting the flaws in their soldiery, tactics and weapons.  They are not interested in World War Three, but later on, if the future gives them some other opportunities, they'll attempt to inch their borders westward once again.

As to what we in the West ought to do.  I think we're doing it.  The Russians may have their paranoia, but it isn't ours and our democratically based economies aren't comfortable with nations which have psychological problems, however historically deserved.  We in the West see no need for Putin's Russia to attack its neighbors.  Why don't they become as peaceful as we are -- as we prepare for war?  We know we have peaceful intentions, but at the same time we will not tolerate nations who start wars and are well prepared and positioned to crush them in warfare -- which we are extremely good at, by the way. :-)

Gerhard Weinberg and Hari Seldon

On page 29 of A World at Arms, Gerhard Weinberg writes, “The personal element was Hitler’s fear of an early death for himself or, alternatively, the preference for leading Germany into war while he was still vigorous rather than aging.  Identifying Germany’s fate and future with his personal life and his role in its history, Hitler preferred to lead the country into war himself, lest his successors lack the will to do so.  He also thought of his age as a factor of importance; it is impossible to ignore his repeated extraordinary assertions in 1938 that he preferred to go to war at the age of forty-nine and in 1939 that he would rather lead his nation at the age of fifty than go to war when fifty-five or sixty years old.  In this regard one enters a realm yet to be seriously and reliably explored by psychohistorians. . . .”

I’m obviously not far into Weinberg’s book, but I’ve already encountered several comments that have puzzled me.  The above is one of them.  What Hitler is doing here is, it seems to me, little more than “counting the cost.” 

            For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and deliberate whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him with twenty thousand? And if not, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.  [From Luke 14]

I have been doing something like this for a long time in regard to my dogs.  I haven’t had normal hearing for a long time and so appreciate having a dog who can warn me of various things on hikes and more recently when Amazon or UPS is delivering a package downstairs.  Earlier last year I was counting the ages of my dogs: Ben and Duffy both turned nine.  Jessica turned three.  There was nothing physically wrong with me, and family and friends thought I would live to a hundred.  Shoot, maybe I would, in which case I might even out-live Jessica.  I was definitely slowing down, maybe the dog after Jessica should be less energetic . . . that was my thinking before one or more of my dogs knocked me down from the stairs and I ended up with a broken patella which doctors didn’t want to repair because of my age.  And while no other ailment has been discovered, I do feel less permanent and have quit worrying about what dog to get after I lose Jessica.  I think more nowadays of which one of my kids would be best to take Jessica when she outlives me.  

Don’t most of us do this sort of thing?  Do we all need psychohistorians? 

Or . . . is Gerhard Weinberg making a joke?  I haven’t heard the term “psychohistorian” since reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation.  I thought of that and Hari Seldon, but then I thought, surely not.  Surely Weinberg is being serious.  Someone I read said historians keep advancing (or something like that).  Maybe modern historians use the term (knowingly borrowed from Asimov) to refer to historians who delve into psychological elements of a major-person’s history.  Shoot, I don’t know.