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Hollywood Doesn't Get It A Case of the Economic Shivers

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First You Need An Army

by Christopher Chantrill
May 28, 2006 at 7:01 pm

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ONE THING THE situation in Iraq is demonstrating rather clearly. If you don’t have an army, you don’t have a country. Fortunately, the United States has always had an army, right from the start when George Washington first set siege to the British in Boston in 1775. On Memorial Day that is something to be thankful about.

Not that the US Army was much good at first. The Revolutionary War was mostly spent in retreat. The Civil War was a bloody mess, the first instance of the modern lethal battlefield. In World War I the doughboys had too much money. In World War II the GIs were overpaid, over sexed, and over there. But in Iraq, a British general has said, the US Army is showing that it is the best in the world.

You need an army to found a nation. The French Army was born as the nation in arms defending the Revolution from the crowned heads of Europe. The British Army is descended from Cromwell’s New Model Army. The Soviet Union was founded upon a bloody civil war won by its Red Army. Chairman Mao, whether or not he spent the Long March reclining in a litter, founded modern China on the power of his Red Army. And the Germans achieved their unification on the back of the most popular institution in the North German Federation: The German Army.

Why then do our liberals insist that war never solves anything? It is because, uniquely in all history, our liberals came to power without having to fight for it. In their first outing, during the Progressive Era, they staged a wrestling match with the evil robber barons. But the contest was as fake as a professional wrestling match, because the robber barons really weren’t interested in political power. Rockefeller was too busy founding the University of Chicago and funding medical research into hookworm; Carnegie was too busy building libraries and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and J. Pierpont Morgan was too busy serving as unofficial central banker to the nation during the Crash of 1907. Liberals came to power in 1932 after the Progressive Era Federal Reserve System had failed to act as the lender of last resort after the Crash of 1929. So they blamed the disaster on Progressive politician Herbert Hoover. Who needed an army when you could get political power the easy way?

Even so, it is curious that even as liberals have reviled and marginalized the brave men and women of the United States Armed Forces they have lionized the lefty thugs who never appeared except in army fatigues: Mao and Castro. Then there was that chap in the beret. What was his name?

Whatever may be the truth about wars and violence, liberals don’t like our army and they don’t like our soldiers. They understand that this does not win elections so they direct their distaste not at the soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and coastguard directly , but obliquely at the “Pentagon.” In liberal books and liberal cartoons the armed forces of the United States are represented by the scheming Pentagon general with his chest of medals and his square, flat face.

The liberal war against the armed forces is part of their war against the nation state. The thinking goes something like this. The nation state equals aggressive nationalism, aggressive nationalism equals Nazism, therefore the national army is the instrument of fascism.

If you strip out the hyperbole, they have a point. The nation state is supported by the national idea. And if the national idea gets a little too enthusiastic it can be rather aggressive. When the nation state gets into a bad patch then the people of the nation look for strong leadership to lead them back from disaster to triumph. The chaps auditioning for “strong leader” may turn out to be Roosevelts and Churchills, or they may not.

But is the nation state such a terrible idea? On the contrary, far from being an atavism, the nation state is an advanced idea, the one political idea thus far that has persuaded ordinary people to loosen their loyalty to tribe and clan—that is, the instinctive tie to blood kin—and replace it with loyalty to a larger unity, to the abstract nation unified by the artificial and abstract idea of a national culture and a national language.

As we remember the fallen this Memorial Day let us all be proud of the advanced and civilized concept that they died to defend. They died in the name of a nation state that has been mixed together out every race and tribe in the world, a mongrel nation that is the prototype of the world society. Our nation state is defended and secured by the armed forces in which they served and fell. It can be no other way.

Every soldier who fell to defend the United States and its city on a hill is owed a debt by the nation that can never be repaid. The least we can do is to keep alive the memory of their service and their sacrifice. It is the only way to honor the loss that their families feel every day of their lives.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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