"Threats to America"

 

Sydney M. Williams

https://swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Threats to America”

October 21, 2024

 

“The extraordinary thing was the way in which everyone took it for granted that this oozy, bulging

wealth of the English upper and upper-middle classes would last forever, and was part of the order of things.”

                                                                                                George Orwell (1903-1950)

                                                                                                Such, Such Were the Joys,

                                                                                                 Published posthumously, 1952

 

The differences between today and the years preceding World War I are far greater than any similarities. Nevertheless, I worry that the collapse of the Soviet Union 1991, and the concomitant elevation of the United States to global hegemon, has caused complacency toward persistent external threats – a complacency not unlike that which existed in Europe in the first decade and a half of the 20^th Century, before the Great War provided reality in its horrors.

 

………………………………………………………………………

 

The West has enemies, those to whom liberal democracies represent a threat. The autocrats in China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are fearful of what free speech would do to their positions of power. Democracy is an anathema to ideological authoritarians, be they on the Left or the Right, which is why the United States is portrayed as the “Great Satan” by the zealot Ali Khamenei and his followers, and why it is challenged by all four authoritarian states. Nothing is more fearful to a tyrant than freedom.

 

Yet other threats consume the media, particularly so-called “threats to democracy,” by which Progressives mean the re-election of Donald Trump to serve a second term; the flood of undocumented immigrants; abortion; and the threat of climate change. Largely ignored, as well as enemies abroad, is the imminent threat of financial default because of unending federal budget deficits that have grown our debt, as a percent of GDP, from 33% in 2000 to 121% in 2023. It is a trend that was aggravated by the long period of extraordinary low interest rates following the 2008 credit crisis. Nevertheless, all threats should be taken seriously. Democracy is fragile. It can fall to enemies from within or without. Allowing possible terrorists into our country, along with known criminals has consequences for our citizens. Abortion, in my opinion, was best described by President Clinton – it should be “safe, legal, and rare.” As for climate, Earth and the solar system are not eternal. At some point they will cease to exist. Will man be the cause? I don’t know, but I suspect not. The best way to improve the environment is to promote economic growth. And reckless government spending will negatively impact our standards of living.

 

However, it is the threat of another major war, one that sets the U.S., Europe and the West against elements of totalitarianism – Russia, China, Iran and North Korea – that is the subject of this essay. In that regard, understanding some of the causes of the First World War are instructional. Apart from the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and today’s war in Ukraine, Europe has gone for almost eighty years without a continent-wide conflagration, a situation with some similarities to Europe during the ninety-nine years following the end of the Napoleonic wars, wars in which an estimated five to six million people died. Like today, Europe was not entirely free of war following Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 – the Crimean War of 1853-1856 and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 together caused less than a million deaths. Nevertheless, one asks: Does absence of war mitigate its horrors, thereby rendering it more likely?

 

Just as Britain and France were not prepared for war in 1914 (this despite Britain, with their Empire encompassing over 20% of the world’s population, being the hegemon of that era), the United States is not prepared today. The idea of war seemed impossible in 1914. “…nothing really mattered: not them, or the world, or even herself” is the way Robert Harris puts it in his new novel, Precipice. Close ties of heads-of -state combined with diplomacy and negotiation made the prospect for war seem unlikely then, just as victory over the Soviet Union brought us Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” in 1991. In 1985, as Reagan was prosecuting Soviet Communism, U.S. defense spending, as a percent of GDP, was 6.6%. In 2023, at 3.4%, it is just over half that level. The real purpose of a strong defense is to prevent wars by limiting what enemies might do. Ironic as it might sound today, the sign at the entrance to Pease Air Force Base in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (a SAC base at the time) in the early 1960s read: “Peace is Our Profession.”

 

It has been reading Precipice, mentioned above, which has me thinking of this issue. The novel, which begins in early July 1914 and goes through May 1915, is largely based on the author’s access to letters written by Britain’s Prime Minister H. H. (Herbert Henry) Asquith to his paramour, the socialite Beatrice Venetia Stanley, a woman less than half his age. Christopher Clark’s 2011 book The Sleepwalkers is a history of events and alliances leading up to August 1914. That first decade of the 20^th Century was characterized by strong industrial growth in Europe, abetted by trade and raw materials from their Empires. Peace and prosperity were the rule, as displayed in characters from P.G. Wodehouse’s novels. Like today’s tech billionaires, the wealth of European aristocrats in that first decade was expected to last forever. While democracy and individual freedom were not up to today’s standards, and royalty still reigned in most European countries, progress toward liberalism had been made. 

 

Today, two allies of liberal democracy are fighting existential wars of survival. Israel is at war against two of Iran-funded proxies – Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in northern Israel and southern Lebanon. As well, a third Iran-funded proxy, the Houthis in Yemen who have attacked more than 80 merchant ships in the Red Sea. (Last week’s U.S. led B-2 attack on some of their fortifications was a welcome, albeit belated, response.) That Israel fights an existential threat does not appear to be appreciated by those who encourage her retaliations to be “proportional,” whatever that means. If we were attacked as Israel was we would strive to annihilate our enemy. The loss of the one democratic state in the middle East would have a cataclysmic, destabilizing effect on the Middle East and for Western-style liberal democracy in other parts of the world. While we can sympathize with innocent Palestinians in Gaza, the terrorists who represent them must be destroyed, as their goal is the total eradication of the State of Israel. And that is why mullahs who govern Iran must not be allowed to get a nuclear weapon.

 

The February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine is the second instance where the United States must be firm in its support. Does anyone really believe that Mr. Putin would be satisfied with a few eastern provinces when its fertile western plains, or steppes, are considered the world’s “breadbasket?” Yet, the Biden Administration has been slow in giving them the kind of offensive weapons they need to win, and former President Trump seems only interested in reaching an unexplained settlement.

 

Neither political party puts foreign policy near the top of their lists of concern. The Biden-Harris team has made some massive blunders: the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the abandonment of the Bagram Airbase; restarting negotiations with Iran, which has allowed them to come within weeks of a nuclear weapon;  the release of $6 billion in frozen Iranian assets; a failure to deter Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2021 and then, in June 2021, suspending $100 million military aid package to Ukraine after Russia assured Washington it would halt aggressive troop movements near Ukraine’s border; allowing Russia’s Nord Steam 2 to continue to operate, thereby allowing them to fund their fight for Ukraine; failing to fully support Israel, our closest Middle East ally, in their existential fight against Iranian-backed terrorist organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah; side-lining the Abraham Accords agreed to by the Trump Administration; permitting a China spy balloon to transverse the United States.

 

There is no assurance a Trump-Pence team would have done better, except that Mr. Putin, after seizing the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 when Barack Obama was President, waited until Mr. Biden became President before attacking eastern and northern Ukraine. And most foreign policy experts agree that the Trump-initiated Abraham Accords showed promise for Middle East peace. 

 

However, both political parties bear responsibility for the state of today’s sorry global situation. While Democrats and Republicans have been spinning tales (fables, really) of their opponents beliefs and behavior, our enemies have been weaving the fabric that has cloaked their desire for world domination. The media, in siding with one political faction or the other, has served to keep the American people ignorant and divided, thereby preventing rational, intelligent debate.

 

On the afternoon of August 3, 1914, with Germany about to invade Belgium, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey observed: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” For twenty million people his words proved prophetic. Their lives were extinguished. Britain and France were not prepared for war in 1914. Today we live in another frightening time, yet we have let our defense budget lag. The United States is not interested in expanding its territory, nor does it wish to impose its way of life on others. It does, though, have a mandate to protect its people. Remember, the first purpose of a strong military is to prevent war, and only second to prosecute war if it comes.

"The Golden Hour," by Beatriz Williams

Sydney M. Williams

www.burrowingintobooks.blogspot.com

  May 14, 2019

Burrowing into Books

“The Golden Hour,” by Beatriz Williams

“‘The golden hour,’ Wilfred waves his hand at the sun, “…that’s when everything looks

 the most beautiful, just before the sun sets. This luminous air turning everything to gold.’”

                                                                                                            Beatriz Williams

                                                                                                            The Golden Hour

Good historical fiction, when thoroughly researched and well written, serves a purpose straight history cannot. It allows the reader to see events within the context of the time and norms then present. Doing so allows the reader to better know the era. When real people mingle with fictional characters, it helps better understand the behavior of the former. Beatriz Williams has become a master of setting a stage, populating it and providing the dialogue that helps illuminate our often forgotten past

In The Golden Hour, we get a taste of what genteel life in Europe was like before the world descended into the abyss of the Great War, and we get to live through the destruction brought on by the Second World War, when not even the sunny Bahamas were spared the darkness of that time. While this story is primarily about two women, Elfriede and Lulu, born forty-odd years apart in different worlds, it is also about a real murder in the Bahamas that occurred seventy-six years ago, and which remains unsolved.

It was the murder of Sir Harry Oakes, an American-born, Canadian gold mine owner who became a British citizen and then moved to the Bahamas in the late 1930s for tax reasons, that provided the nub for the story. We get to know the Duke of Windsor, formerly Edward VIII and now Governor of the Bahamas, and his wife, the Duchess of Windsor, formerly the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson. The fictional heroine of the story is Lulu Randolph, an attractive young widow, a columnist for “Metropolitan,” a New York society magazine. Lulu describes the Windsors and the era, “…I imagined I might discover some clue to the essential mystery of them – the Windsors I mean – this exquisitely dressed pair of sybaritic bigots who had the power to fascinate millions…” But back to historical figures: we meet Sir Harold Christie and Mrs. Gudewill, a wealthy Canadian and her daughter Marie who is a friend of Harry Oakes’ daughter Nancy. We get to know Nancy and her husband Alfred de Marigny, who was initially charged with the murder, but then released. Beatriz’s purpose is not to solve this decades-old murder, but it serves as a focal point. It amplifies her characters, embellishes her story and makes the reader wonder about this island mystery.

We are transported from Nassau in the early 1940s to a clinic in Switzerland in 1900, back to the Bahamas, then to Germany, London, Florida, Scotland and back to Switzerland, and to the same clinic but under different circumstances. Following the birth of her son Johann in 1898, Elfriede was sent to a Swiss clinic, suffering from what we now know was Postpartum Depression. She has been there two years when we first meet her. Returning to Germany, she finds it a challenge to attract the love of her now three-year-old son. “Certain wars are best won by centimeters, stealing tiny parcels of ground from your opponent who looks elsewhere, until one day you are in possession of the whole.” That sentence serves as a metaphor for this novel, which comes to resolution as Beatriz unwinds the skein that had held it together, in an exciting and unpredictable way.     

The relationship between mothers and children play a big role in the story – between Lulu and her mother who is always offstage, between Elfriede and her three children and between the nurse Charlotte and her three children: “Mothers know, don’t they?” Lulu thinks back on her mother. “They gave birth to you and suckled you and tended every inch of you. They can peer straight through your eyes and part the drapes of your soul.” There is a lot of truth embedded in that observation. The pace quickens as the story unfolds, becoming crescendo-like as it reaches its denouement, with an end that this reader did not anticipate.

Like Anthony Trollope’s characters, Beatriz’s have a tendency to reappear in other novels. One of the main characters in this book Elfriede von Kleist appeared offstage in Along the Infinite Sea, a novel in which her son, Johann, played a role. Readers of The Golden Hourare left hoping to learn more in future novels of those we meet briefly in this one, especially Johann, Ursula and Margaret.

"The Strange Death of Liberal England"

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT  06426

www.burrowingintobooks.blogspot.com

Burrowing into Books

Reviews of Selective Readings

                                                                                                                                 December 8, 2018

“The Strange Death of Liberal England”

George Dangerfield

“English biography adroitly stops in 1910 and starts again in 1914.”

“But the death of liberal England…was a brief but

complete phase in the spiritual life of the nation.”

                                                                                                George Dangerfield (1904-1986)

                                                                                                The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1935

World War I was only seventeen years in the past, and World War II four years in the future, when George Dangerfield, English born and Oxford educated, wrote this book, which is still in print.The result is an informative, literate and witty history of the four years preceding the Great War. It is a record, as Mr. Dangerfield writes, “not of great events but of little ones, which…slowly undermined England’s Parliamentary structure, until, but for the providential intervention of a world war, it would certainly have collapsed.” Whether that is correct or not will never be known; nevertheless,it is a lesson we, today, would be wise to heed,

During forty-nine of the sixty-three years between 1859 and 1922 Liberal Prime Ministers held office. These were men of high moral character who had been influenced by the Enlightenment. They were globalists and favored free trade. They had witnessed, encouraged and benefitted from the expansion of the British Empire, which they saw as destiny. They had seen the landed aristocracy gradually replaced by wealth from the Industrial Revolution and the concomitant rise of a merchant class. Yet they were British to the core, consumed with a sense of superiority.

Dangerfield sets the stage of late Edwardian England when Herbert Henry Asquith, 1^stEarl of Oxford and Asquith served as Prime Minister, which he did until 1916 when he was replaced by fellow Liberal David Lloyd George, 1^stEarl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor: “…the House of Lords…was filled with a horde of hereditary nobodies, possessed with a gentlemanly anxiety to do the wrong thing…” Edward VII,“just comfortably disreputable.” The new King George V (who had replaced Edward VII who died in May 1910) “…was not going to be fashionable. It now appeared he was going to be dull.” 

It was a focus on protecting the Empire that caused political leaders to underestimate the effect of “little events” percolating at home: the suffrage movement, the growth of unions and the Irish question. The suffrage movement had been a long-time brewing. It had begun in Yorkshire in 1832 and thirty-fours later promoted by John Stuart Mill, among others. Like suffrage, trade unions had been on a long boil, with the first trade unions created in the 1820s. Similarly, Catholic Ireland, which had been advocating for independence, found a willing listener in Lord Asquith’s Liberal Party, in an exchange for electoral support. These three forces merged, with meaningful consequences, in the years 1910-1914. 

As well, England’s leaders failed to understand the complex alliances that tied different countries together, and they underestimated the empirical desires of a recently unified Germany.

George Dangerfield wrote: “It was in these years [1910-1914]that that highly moral, that generous, that dyspeptic, that utterly indefinable organism known as the Liberal Party died the death. It died from poison administered by its Conservative foes, and from disillusion over the inefficacy of the word ‘Reform.’ And the last breath which fluttered in this historical flesh was extinguished by War.” 

The War did come. On the evening of August 4^th, 1914, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey looked out the window of the Foreign Office and said to a friend, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit in our lifetime.” He did see them re-lit, for he died in 1933, but not before 20 million people died, including more than 700,000 from the British Empire.

Problems that plagued pre-War England began to be addressed in the post-War period. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 enfranchised women over 30 who met minimum property qualifications. But it was not until 1928 that Parliament passed the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act that gave the vote to all women over twenty-one. In 1922, Ireland became a free state, excluding six north eastern, predominantly Protestant counties. Union problems persisted, with the rail strike of 1919 and a general strike in 1926. It was not until after World War II – in the 1950s and ‘60s – that wages truly gained traction.

The book ends with a poignant reminder that the liberal England that went extinct in those pre-War years was a time of “Beauty and Certainty and Grace, and where nothing was real.” He quotes Rupert Brooke on leaving Rugby around 1903: “As I looked back upon five years, I seemed to see almost every hour golden and radiant, and always increasing in beauty…” It was a world captured by P.G. Wodehouse. Dangerfield concludes his book: “Today we know it(those pre-War years) for what it was; but there are moments, very human moments, when we could almost find it in our hearts to envy those who saw it, and never lived to see the new world.”