Thin red line of heroes?

I don’t know how it is in the USA with civilian/military relations in everyday life, but, as ever, Kipling in his Tommy still sums up the British attitude:

For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool — you bet that Tommy sees!

As a sometime Army wife, I know this all too well.  For a long time, thanks to IRA activity, British soldiers were advised to wear civvies when off duty, and it is indicative of something bad that the first reaction of some of the Top Brass to the brutal murder of Drummer Lee Rigby was to suggest that soldiers might want to revert to that; it is indicative of something right that our soldiers give the old two-fingered saute to such nonsense.

But there’s bound to be a divide between civilians and the military in times of peace when you have a professional army. Although the analogy with Monks might raise an eyebrow or two, there is a parallel (no, not that one).  Soldiers live a life apart. They are trained to do things which ordinary people don’t do, and probably don’t want to do.There has to be a high level of commitment, and at times the dedication to duty means that a soldier puts everything else to one side. Although no soldier’s wife worth her salt would dream of saying so, we all wait in terror for the knock on the door or the telephone call from the CO. Every time we kiss and wave good-bye, we know that for at least one of us, it is the final good-bye. And if your marriage doesn’t come to that honorable end, well the stress and strains on your man and marriage may make it come to another sort of end. The price soldiers pay to serve us all is huge.  But they also serve, who only stand and wait – and love.

Yes, here in the UK on 11 November, Armistice Day, we all remember our armed forces and the glorious dead, and we have pubic ceremonies where we celebrate and congratulate out Armed Forces; but what about the other 364 days? Well, unless there is a particularly horrible series of death, we forget – the ‘we’ being the vast majority of the population who know nothing and care less about our soldiers sailors and airmen.

I don’t know whether it is different in the US, but here, the armed forces are very much the Cinderella services – except when they are needed. Kipling, as ever, said it best:

Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, ‘ow’s yer soul?”
But it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll.

But how thin does that red line have to be before it breaks?

Is the Past a Foreign Country?

Is the Past a Foreign Country? In many ways it is. One of the things that often is done is to project our beliefs onto our forebearers. In this country that’s often done by race-baiters in connection with slavery, and especially with Thomas Jefferson. It is, of course, hard to get beyond our own beliefs, but to understand history correctly, we must.

This came up because I was watching a TED talk the other day. You, most of you anyway, have probably heard of them. Short talks about all kinds of subjects by some of the leading people in the field. This one is an independent one, done at St. Paul’s School in England. It’s by Suzannah Lipscomb, who is a historian, and from what I gather a quite good one, specializing in Tudor England.

I found it quite interesting, and hope you do as well.

Tell me what you think, in comments, both about whether you want more of these, and her thesis.

Related articles

• Suzannah Lipscomb’s Oxford: My Kind of Town (telegraph.co.uk)
• Census figures show Christianity in sharp decline whilst belief in Islam dramatically increases (independent.co.uk)

 

Accountability

The Wall Street Journal (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A short but important post for today. This is from a 1952 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, and comes to us with a hattip to Villainous Company

On the sea there is a tradition older even than the traditions of the country itself and wiser in its age than this new custom. It is the tradition that with responsibility goes authority and with them both goes accountability.”"This accountability is not for the intentions but for the deed. The captain of a ship, like the captain of a state, is given honor and privileges and trust beyond other men. But let him set the wrong course, let him touch ground, let him bring disaster to his ship or to his men, and he must answer for what he has done. He cannot escape….”

“It is cruel, this accountability of good and well-intentioned men. But the choice is that or an end of responsibility and finally as the cruel scene has taught, an end to the confidence and trust in the men who lead, for men will not long trust leaders who feel themselves beyond accountability for what they do.”

“And when men lose confidence and trust in those who lead, order disintegrates into chaos and purposeful ships into uncontrollable derelicts.”

 

From a 1952 editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

 

Related articles

• Absence Of Accountability (channel3000.com)
• The truth still matters (3) (blogs.redding.com)
• 5 Ways to Create a Winning Culture (inc.com)

Amazing Grace.

Slavery is recognised by most people as an evil thing. Yet it still exists in the world, and it always has. There is not a nation in modern Europe which did not have it. I cannot recall the last time anyone got fired up about what those dreadful Normans did to my ancestors – not least because at this distance in time, there will be some Norman ancestors in my family tree somewhere. It was ubiquitous in the ancient world, as it was in Africa. On the east coast the Arabs did a good trade taking slaves to the markets first of Rome and then of the Ottoman Empire. They did not, as people sometimes thing, so in expeditions to capture slaves, they had no need, they bought them from other Africans who had conquered them in war. The same practice obtained on the west coast from the sixteenth century, with the biggest market becoming the American colonies. This last type of slavery tends to be the one which gets the most attention. Yet it was the one which was stamped out most swiftly; by the early nineteenth century it was dead.

What killed this evil? Christianity. It was Wilberforce and the Evangelicals who campaigned long and hard against it. It offended their consciences as Christians. It is easy to forget that their cause was deeply unpopular, challenging as it did powerful vested economic interests. There was no great outcry against the practice in most quarters, it was just a fact of life, as it had been for millennia. But that was no excuse, and Wilberforce defied convention and put a promising political career aside to rid Britain if the scourge.

One of the most moving testimonies was that of John Newton, the author of that wonderful hymn, Amazing Grace. A Slaver himself, he came through the Grace of God to see the abomination he had been part of, and not only to repent, but to campaign for the abolition of the evil trade.  Who is the Islamic John Newton, which Ottoman notable came to the same conclusion?

The truth is that the slave trade could not have existed without those African chiefs who made money out of it. Back in 2009, the Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria has written to tribal chiefs saying: “We cannot continue to blame the white men, as Africans, particularly the traditional rulers, are not blameless”. But, of course, nothing has happened. The British and the Americans have apologised, but without those who sold them the slaves, there would have been no trade. Europeans had no immunity to the many African diseases, and they  depended on other Africans for the supply line. That is not to mitigate criticism of Western Christians, it is to say that they weren’t the only ones involved. It was a vile trade, but it was not ended by the Africans, it was ended first by the British thanks to the efforts of Evangelical Christians. If we are going to take a balanced view, let us bestow praise as well as blame.

Civic Virtue and the Republic

One of the Republican (as in Roman Republic) virtues which the US has exemplified is independence of spirit.  Men took responsibility for their actions; it was not unknown for senators to fall on their swords if they dishonoured their office. The ideal of the Roman world was Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (519 BC – 430 BC) (and the answer to the question is yes, it was named after him). When his son was convicted of a crime and absconded, Cincinnatus had to pay a huge fine and retired to his small farm. But when the State was threatened by the Volsci, the Senate called upon him to lead the State. He laid down his plough and returned to high office, which he discharged with great distinction; after victory was assured, he returned to his farm. In later life he returned once more and did great service; once again, he retired into private life. He became the beau ideal of the Patrician Roman. A man to whom service to the Res Publica – the common weal – was all.

Your American history has many such men, from the great George Washington, through Jefferson and Lincoln and into more modern times, a man like Eisenhower or Truman. These were men of almost Cincinnatan virtue. They were men who gave to the State and asked for little and ended by being loved by the people.  Has there been one such since Ike?  And if not, is that not a sign of something?

As America came onto the world stage, she did so as a Republic which disdained and distrusted Empire. Yet, did her defence of world freedom end by forcing her into imperial attitudes in some ways?  Should the USA have done what Cincinnatus did – retire back to its farm when it had saved the world?  But do men of power easily surrender it and its privileges?  I don’t recall Washington, Jefferson, Truman of Ike cashing in on their time in office; I can’t recall many recent presidents who haven’t once they retired.

A Republic is a difficult form of government because it depends on civic virtue; it needs men of power to restrain themselves as Cincinnatus did. For a Christian America that act of renunciation was perhaps easier, as it is part of the Christian message. That is not to say non-Christians cannot exercise civic virtue, but it is to say that the Judeo-Christian heritage provides a context in which such virtue is not just its own reward.

A large military costs. An interventionist foreign policy costs. The notion of empire in all its forms is corrupting of civic virtue, because you have to start off believing in your right to intervene in another country and tell its citizens what to do; you start with the belief in your own superiority. This corrupts. However much you do what you think it right for those other people, you are not them and you are assuming the right to tell them what to do in their own country. Well, if these people attack you, you have to attack them. But you don’t have to rebuild their country. You can help them, but they must do it for themselves – and that was the ‘white man’s burden’ about which Kipling spoke. But its problem was what it remains – that if you treat other people like children, they will not grow up, and you will find yourself with an expensive foster-child.

Has power and the temptations of empire corrupted the American Republic? I think there is a case for saying it has damaged it, but my faith in the instincts of a free people is stronger than my fear.

The fall of the Republic?

If you hadn’t noticed, I am an Americanophile.  I was brought up not to forget one thing – that the freedom that I enjoyed had been won by the blood of others; and that key to that blood not being spilled in vain was the courage, the sacrifice and the money of the United State of America. It also dawned on me as soon as I started studying history that those things had continued to be gifted to us after the Second World War; Communism had no enemy fiercer than the United States. I lived in Missouri for a year when I was a child, and I learned then how much Americans loved their country; that seemed, and seems, admirable to me.  I could, and will on another occasion, say something about how little some Europeans appreciate what the USA has done for us all, but here I want to ask a question about the price America has paid.

This is not about economics, about which I know little, it is a question about history, about which I know a little. Your first President warned about entangling alliances and going abroad to find dragons to slay. You were in origin and intent a Republic, and the architecture of your capital shows the debt owed to the Roman Republic. But your Founders were mindful of what had happened to that agrarian republic; it ended as an Empire. It may have been a great and glorious Empire, but it was not a republic, and those who slew the great Julius Caesar did so because they feared he intended to make himself king.

It won’t do to pretend that the Roman Republic was a democracy, it wasn’t, but it was a place where to be a Roman citizen was the greatest honour possible, and service to the citizens in the Senate was a duty which a man took seriously. Few left office richer than they entered it, because service was costly; but it was considered the duty owed by a man to the Republic. Service in the army was onerous, but again, it was something a man did in the name of honour. The Empire had a bigger army, and citizens were relieved of the need to serve by the employment of subject peoples; the citizenry grew fat and comfortable, and it demanded its bread and circuses; and service in the Senate was a path to money.  None of this mattered, because the Empire grew bigger and citizens grew richer; where there had been a citizen army and citizen service, there was a great Empire.

It strikes me that America has undergone a similar process in its bearing of the burden of the defence of the free world. The cost of a great standing army means high taxes, an expensive foreign policy has given extra powers to a Commander in Chief who now resembles an Imperial President.  The simple service of a Senator is now a pork barrel feast, and the lobbyists grow fat whilst the people grow thin..  The citizen has his bread and circuses and is assured that his country is great in the counsels of the world.  A professional political class makes decisions on behalf of an electorate which knows that something is wrong, but knows not how to fix it.  Faith in politicians and politics is at a perilously low ebbs – and still the power-brokers in Washington don’t get it.

Can anyone watch the climactic scene of ‘Mr Smith goes to Washington’ without an uneasy feeling that what Jeff said then is right now – but that ‘Mr Payne’ is not doing to try to shoot himself or ‘fess up?