Flags

Much brouhaha in the United States right now over the Confederate flag — more properly the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia — and whether it should be flying over the statehouse in South Carolina, or anywhere for that matter. Walmart and Sears stopped selling them last week. In typically stale and unthinking reporting, successive journalists have described the debate as one that pits those who see the flag as a symbol of racism and oppression against those who see it as a symbol of history and heritage, as if it can’t be both.

Back when I taught American history I would sometimes get confronted by enormously self-assured students who told me that I had it wrong. The American Civil War wasn’t about slavery, it was about states’ rights. They learned this in high school. In a sense, they were correct. The Civil War was indeed about states' rights, of which the only one worth going to war over was the right to own slaves. The Union did not go to war in 1861 to free slaves, but the South most assured did go to war in order to keep them. If the Confederacy had won the war the institution would not have died in 1865.  Having lost the war, however, the former Confederate states mobilized politically to replace slavery with legal forms of racial discrimination that endured for over a century, and whose social and political legacy remains deeply entrenched. 

The “Confederate flag” is a symbol of all that, and its opponents are right to insist that it belongs in a museum, not over a statehouse, or in Walmart, or on a bumper sticker.

But how selective our righteous indignation can be. I wonder how many flags aren't symbols of cruelty and oppression for some group of people, or even very large groups of people? Certainly not Old Glory. Or the Union Jack. Or Japan's flag. Or the Republic of China’s. Shall we count bodies of the innocent? In reverse order from the list above, we would start with about 40 million.  

Amazon is no longer selling the Confederate Flag, either. Whew. Wouldn’t want that symbol of oppression to fall into the wrong hands. Buy one of these instead. 

Addendum: shortly after I posted this column, South Carolina took down its Confederate flags from the state legislature. I approve but, remember: when they de-Stalinized the Soviet Union, the point wasn't to confront the past. It was to bury it.

#JeSuisCharlie

Feeling more aggrieved than usual, your unbending author interrupts regularly scheduled programing to clear his throat in defense of civilization. 

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Yes, I tweeted #JeSuisCharlie. Yes, I put the hashtag on Facebook. Yes, I even put it on the wipe board on my office door, which isn’t really my office door, hence the “even.”  #JeSuisCharlie is a small thing, but not meaningless, a gesture of solidarity with victims of religious fascism. As someone who makes his living in the world of thought and ideas and written expression, I found the murders at Charlie Hebdo particularly poignant even though far worse acts of violence against innocents were committed elsewhere in the world that week.  Boko Haram murdered several hundred people in the town of Baga around the same time as the Paris shootings, and despite what some people seem to think, I am not ignorant of the one if I care about the other. 

The very minute I saw the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag, I knew that the backlash against it would begin with a couple of days or so. Sniping of the kind I just described was inevitable. Even before the Ice Bucket Challenge (remember that?) reached its zenith last summer people started saying, “Why all the attention about ALS? Don’t people know that heart disease kills more people?” And so on.  If you’re ever giving a eulogy, try that line of reasoning out. “Well, sure, this guy is dead. But, come on. A lot more people than him died this week. Don’t you people care about them? What kind of monsters are you?”  See how that goes over. 

So the backlash against #JeSuisCharlie has taken on a perfectly predictable form and has come from perfectly predictable people, including a number of journalists who make a living writing Op-Eds that wouldn’t make the cut for emergency backup columns on Measure of Doubt.  To those people, I say: just how stupid do you think I am?  Did I anywhere claim that posting #JeSuisCharlie is an act of bravery? That it constitutes a serious blow against religious fascism? That it mitigates the need for vigilance about freedom of expression in my own country? Does it mean that I am unaware or uncaring about other acts of violence, including some committed by the government of France in the past? Does it mean I am not aware of the complexities and nuances of the political, economic, and cultural conflicts that underpin the attacks? Does it mean any of those things about anyone who posted it?  To listen to and read many cranks you’d think so.

There’s another distressing side to this, too, even though it was equally predictable. You wouldn’t think you’d have to defend the idea that people ought not to be murdered for hurting the feelings of the kinds of people who murder people for hurting their feelings, but you do. There are hordes of people saying right now, “Well you poke the bear…” or “I’m against murder, but…” and so forth. We've been listening to that noise since The Satanic Verses pissed off people who never read it. So, here’s the thing. Am I committed to freedom of expression? Yes. Do I understand the nuances and complexities of the statement I just made? Yup, some of them. You can explain the rest to me if you feel the need. But will I post any of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons here? No. Why not? I already told you, and it’s not because I’m afraid of terrorists. 

Remembering

I don’t want to trust a seventeen year old memory very far, but I think it went something like this. I was watching a debate on CBC or CTV about Canada’s involvement in Kosovo. They assembled a panel: a journalist, somebody from a peace group, an RCAF veteran from the Legion (for some reason), and finally a political scientist, because in a debate it’s a good idea to have one person who might know what the hell is going on. I don’t recall much about the debate, but one thing is lodged in my memory. In rebuttal to the one panelist’s opposition to Canada’s participation in the air campaign, the veteran  said, “This young lady should go watch the first twenty minutes of the movie Saving Private Ryan to learn what soldiers sacrifice for freedom.” 

This might seem like a non-sequitur and a particularly incoherent one at that, but au contraire. Have Canadians had any societal debate in the past century that hasn’t witnessed an effort by one side or another to imbue their position with the sanctified suffering of The Fallen? Back in the day, when I read actual newspapers (and worked for one) I used to keep a clip file. In it were examples of people deploying mawkish memories of our own “Greatest Generation(s)” into debates over everything from multiculturalism to same sex marriage to educational reform to indoor smoking bans, as if the worldview of the dead – and especially the war dead – were entitled to hold dominion over the living forever. And it happens in debates over history, too. We needn’t look far for examples of historians or historical institutions who have been bullied into silence by people that Paul Fussell called “the loony patriotic.” 

I’ve written before about my growing unease with Remembrance Day, and especially about the day’s tendency to blur the distinction between commemoration and historiography. Historiography is evidence based, skeptical, and provisional in its conclusions; commemoration is subjective and emotional. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t mind so much, if it were only for a single ceremony and for an hour. One doesn’t go to a funeral and expect to hear the unmitigated truth about the departed, after all.  But when have our circumstances ever been normal? Not since September 2001, to be sure, fourteen years in which we’ve seen the Western powers engaged in perpetual low-level war, turning the world upside down and killing – even if not intentionally – far greater numbers of innocent people than ever were killed on 9/11. 

“Oh, stop,” I’m told. “The day’s not about that. The day is simply about remembrance, not politics.”  Oh, please, I reply. What does that even mean? Remembering is not simple – not cognitively, not socially, not historically, and remembering for commemorative purposes complicates it still further. It is most decidedly not apolitical. Commemorate what? Those who fought for freedom? Tread lightly, friends, around so subjective a term: not many of those who went to war in 1914 or 1939 shared your conception of freedom. Victory, then? So am I to exclude the enemy, many of whom were, to quote Bertrand Russell, “fellow sufferers in the same tragedy as our own”?  Commemorate all combatants, then? But that would include perpetrators of hideous war crimes, and you’ll forgive me if I choose not to spare a moment to reflect on those who served that the Holocaust might continue. For starters. 

Okay. Maybe you need a moment to “just remember” (whatever that means) and you can cut through the cognitive dissonance. Maybe you don’t cringe when you hear “fought for our country” when you know damn well that sometimes they fought for our government; maybe you don’t clench your teeth when you hear “fought for our freedom” when you know that sometimes they categorically did not.  So, do what you need to on November 11th. Commemoration, like funerals, are about the living, after all, and the stories we tell ourselves so that we can carry on.  I’ll go, and reflect on victims of war and especially on those who died to defeat enemies for whom martial virtues were the only ones worth having. But I’ll also reflect that, too often, our own commemorations tread too close to that terrain, terrain where there is an implicit contempt for civilian life; terrain where there is no distinction between serving one’s country and serving one’s government; terrain where it is assumed that there is an inherent nobility in military service, regardless of the cause in which one served; terrain where, as C.P. Stacey put it in a different context, the golden haze of historical romance combines with the fog of war to reduce visibility to zero.

 “Support our troops” doesn’t mean support every stupid and immoral thing that our government wishes to do with them, and people who can’t understand the difference shouldn’t be allowed to play with soldiers.

Overlord

Note: this is a heavily edited version of a column that first appeared on Measure of Doubt five years ago.

 "War is Not the Answer" says a poster on a bulletin board where I work. Well, it depends on the question, doesn't it? The problem in the 1930s was not that peaceful negotiation failed, it was that peaceful negotiation was attempted for far too long. Negotiation is not possible when confronted with an ideology that regards peace only as a pause in the preparation for war, and war as the desired outcome of politics, an instrument for imposing "racial purity" on a vast scale. Nazism could not be appeased, contained, or co-existed with: it could only be destroyed, and its destruction was, as the late Stephen Ambrose put it, "the supreme accomplishment of the first half of the 20th century." 

Seventy years ago today, a combined Anglo-Canadian-American force fought its way, inch by bloody inch, up the beaches of Normandy in what was probably the single most complex military operation in history: Overlord. In the following ten weeks, they would utterly destroy two German field armies in the Battle of Normandy, decisively proving that the Nazis and their subsequent admirers were wrong to believe that totalitarian societies are better at war than democracies. Sufficiently aroused, the power of free people and capitalist economies to wage war proved to be far greater than that of the dictatorships. While fighting in Normandy, the Allies simultaneously conducted vast campaigns on land, sea, and air on many fronts across two major theatres of war, while all the while supplying — crucially, as we now know — logistical support to the Red Army through the auspices of the Lend-Lease  program. As the civilians of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were to learn, the fury of democratic societies, aroused to what was for them the very unnatural state of war, was both awesome and terrible. Allied bombers had reduced nearly every major Germany city to rubble and ash before the Red Army — carried, incidentally, on American trucks — set foot on Germany soil, while the Japanese were to suffer the immolation of dozens of their towns and cities, acts of vengeance culminating in the atomic incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

All those who fought and died in that terrible war deserve to be remembered, but historians have to remember them for what they actually did. This October will mark the 70th anniversary of a large-scale prisoner uprising at Auschwitz-Birkenau, but no moral person will spend that day in somber commemoration of those Germans who gave their lives that the Holocaust go on. Their uniforms are not totems that protect them from moral scrutiny. Their sacrifice is rendered worthless by the hideousness of their cause. The fact that they may have thought they were in the right is of historical interest but morally irrelevant, because they were objectively wrong. If this raises uncomfortable questions about the commemoration of Allied soldiers who may also have been complicit in atrocities, so be it. Uncritical veneration belongs to the realm of evangelical religion, not history.  Some historians will reply that we cannot make moral judgments about the past in the first place. That being the case, I can only assume that such people are indifferent about the outcome of D-Day, and indeed about the whole Second World War. Axis victory or defeat, Holocaust or no, in fact every atrocity in the history of the world: all must be met with shrugging indifference. Who am I to judge? Just report what happened and move on: the historian as glorified clerical worker. But nobody really believes that, so their position is incoherent.

So it is with the position that "war is not the answer." War is a dreadful thing. But it is not always to be avoided nor at all costs, nor is it true that there are no winners in war or that nothing good ever comes from it. Pacifism is morally defensible only when it is a choice you make for yourself. The pacifist who allows himself to be beaten has made one kind of moral choice; if he allows someone else to be beaten, he has made another one entirely. Sometimes we must fight. The destruction of National Socialism and of Japanese militarism was necessary for the safety and survival of free societies throughout the world. For all their faults and foibles — and these are, as we all know, numerous — the liberal democracies were and are clearly better than the monstrous regimes they fought. Today, we are the healthiest, wealthiest, safest, and most culturally prosperous people in the history of the world, and in large measure because a previous generation had thrust upon them the dreadful duty to fight those who would have enslaved us all.

Earth

(Speaker Crackles) Uhhh...good morning, on behalf of myself and the flight crew I’d like to welcome you to day 1.6 trillion aboard planet Earth. Our current cruising speed relative to the sun is 100,000 kilometres per hour. We’re expecting a smooth flight today with occasional bumps along the way. Temperatures will reach a high of +44 celsius and a low of -62, and we’re currently experiencing periods of sun, rain, flurries, cloudiness, and periodic nighttime. Special welcome to passengers Broad and Hunter, celebrating the anniversary of their inaugural circumnavigation of the solar system today along with 20 million others. I’ll turn things over now to the flight attendants and thank you once again for flying planet Earth. 

(Pleasant Female Voice Begins) Welcome to planet Earth. At this time we would like to draw your attention to absence of emergency exits. Please refrain from destroying the biosphere. Ride bicycles, carpool, or take public transportation wherever practicable. Pick up after yourself. And please do not adjust the cabin temperature.

Passengers are reminded that killing one another, especially over matters of faith, is expressly prohibited. We ask that you be courteous to your fellow passengers at all times, even if they look different than you. A further reminder that all human passengers are born equal, regardless of sex or race, and that nonhuman species and should be treated respectfully as well. Local administrators are required to abide by these regulations.

For your comfort, food, shelter, and clothing are provided. First class passengers are encouraged to share with passengers in economy class.

Earth is pleased to offer a variety of recreational activities including art, literature, film, music, and sport, and encourages local administrators to extend public funding to such activities.

Employers are required to pay their employees decent wages and to provide safe working conditions. Employees should refrain from being smug, self-satisfied, passive-aggressive know-it-all jerks in department meetings.

Please do not play your headphones so loud that everyone else can hear your music, too. The same goes for music in your car or back yard. Avoid participating in sports-related rioting. Young human passengers are encouraged to keep their sticky fingers off of things that do not belong to them and to attempt to behave like rational people when in public. Teenagers are reminded that everything will work out okay and he/she wasn’t right for you anyway. 

If you choose to procreate, please avoid taking babies to weddings, funerals, nice restaurants, the opera, theatre, or the movies. 
 
Please do not date someone who has seen all of the Fast and Furious movies.

Passengers are asked to avoid texting while driving. In addition, do not text while on a date or while out with friends. Do not text when your teacher is talking to you. In fact, just put the goddamn phone away and have a look around because the world is pretty freaking fantastic if you’d bother to check it out for the six or seven seconds that you’ve reduced your attention span to. You’re the product of millions of years of accumulated adaptive advantages and this is what you do with your time? Why don’t you just move into your parents’ basement, learn Klingon, and play World of Warcraft for the rest of your life?

(Pause). 

Ahem.

At this time, the flight crew would like to reiterate that persistent rumours of another world on standby after the completion of this trip are not verifiable and must therefore be treated with the utmost of suspicion. In consideration of other passengers, please desist from spreading such rumours.

For the comfort of your fellow passengers, a reminder that Earth is a smoke-free environment. For the convenience of passengers wishing to shorten the duration of their trip by approximately a decade, a smoking section is provided on the dark side of the moon.

Finally, would passengers Coulter, Ford, Palin, Putin, McCarthy, and O’Reilly please report to the shuttle bay for immediate deportation?

Thank you, and we hope you enjoy your flight on planet Earth.

Doom

Back in the day, I used to participate in message boards on AOL. We discussed history, politics, and whatnot. It was fun, you got to talk about your hobbies to people who actually cared, spar a bit over points of disagreement, and even occasionally become friends (or, indeed, enemies) of a sort with the other participants. Some list-serves – the kind that came to your e-mail box – followed. But my participation in such discussions fell off rapidly in graduate school, where there always seemed to be real people to argue with.

Nowadays, nearly every page on the Internet has a message board affixed to it, and some – like Facebook – are basically nothing but. Make no mistake: these boards do not exist in order to democratize the media or any of that nonsense. They exist to generate page views, information about viewership that can then be sold to potential advertisers. Over time, I found myself drawn to reading the comments in a "can’t look at it, can’t look away" sort of manner. Sometimes I even posted a comment of my own, and then felt like taking a shower afterwards. And so I decided to conduct an experiment. For about a year I partook in discussions on a variety of different pages. I posted, in all, six or seven hundred times (rarely more than twenty or thirty words at a time) and probably read ten times that number of posts. My intent: report my findings on Measure of Doubt when I eventually revived it.

I approached this with some rules. First, I’d use my real name, not a pseudonym. Second, I would never lie. Third, I would mainly respond by pointing out errors of fact and/or argumentative errors in the articles on which I was commenting and/or in the posts of others. Fourth, I would never resort to name calling or ad hominem of any kind. (Only once, near the end, did I break this rule. A poster suggested that he didn’t care if texting while driving endangered others – it’s a free country and he ought to be allowed to do it. I replied that we needn’t be worried in his case, as one needed friends in order to have anyone to send texts to in the first place. He replied, predictably, that he would be texting my mom. I said that, in that case, he ought to be careful, as texting on a flip-phone was hard enough, let alone while driving a late-model Datsun and when spelling isn’t your forte.  Ding, ding, ding: and the winnah by knockout...) Fifth, I decided that my natural tone would be ironic. The Rob Ford business gave me both motive and opportunity to really sharpen these skills, which had grown quite dull and rusty sheathed in their scabbard since about 2005. Sixth, when participating in a discussion that lasted more than three exchanges back-and-forth (and on some boards, like CNN, the messages poured in so fast – literally dozens would arrive every second on big stories – that no “discussion” was possible at all) I would always thank my interlocutor for chatting, no matter how badly it went.

After a few months of participating on various boards, I reached certain conclusions, some of which I believe, and some of which (marked with an *) other people believe. Here they are, in order.

1) Humanity is doomed. I have no words to describe how totally, viciously, and horrifically boned we are as a species. My odds-on favourite for possible outcomes at the moment is some sort of global nuclear holocaust resulting from environmental catastrophe, followed by the total collapse of civilization. The survivors on the political right will turn to cannibalism and burn the contents of our libraries and museums in a forlorn attempt to stave off freezing to death in the nuclear winter.  The survivors from the political left will say that civilization had it coming anyway and talk about the need for solidarity. Then they’ll get baked, try to (finally) make it past page five in Das Kapital, and plan for some sort of direct action tomorrow. 

2) People are horrible. They are ill-informed, irrational, bigoted, tribal, tasteless, tactless, petty, self-interested, self-absorbed, and just plain mean. No part of the political spectrum has a monopoly on stupid;  civility accrues nothing in your favour. My grandmother was right: people are garbage. Stay away from them.

3) No one works hard except for the person currently posting.* Everyone else is overpaid, underworked, and suckling at the bosom of the nanny state. Especially teachers. In addition, no one knows how to drive properly except for the person currently posting.

4) I have it on good authority that if it’s cold right now where you live, global warming is a hoax.

5) People who begin a sentence with a phrase such as “I’m not a racist, but...” are always racists. There are a lot of them.

6) Arguing with a Creationist about evolution is like arguing with a Big Mac about vegetarianism.  Too. Far. Gone.

7) Bush is Hitler.*

8) Obama is also Hitler.*

9) Stephen Harper is worse than Hitler.*

10) The only political leader ever who is not Hitler is Hitler. Mention Hitler anywhere and hordes will rush to his defense.

11) But they’re “not racist.” They just want "white pride."*

12) Countries that aren’t the United States are permitted to kill, torture, and generally knock about pretty much anybody they want. Everybody gets a free pass because of what the United States did in Vietnam, to the natives, and because of slavery. Slow clap.*

13) Things used to be great. But now we have lost our values because of either a) immigrants or b) big corporations. Or both.*

14) Jesus is coming back soon. We’re not kidding this time.*

15) There is a cure for cancer, but they aren’t telling you what it is.*

16) There is also a cure for obesity, and the person posting knows what it is.*

17) Everything everywhere has been cured but they don’t want you to know.*

18) Educated people don’t know anything about the “real world.” They “can’t see the forest for the trees.”*   People who make this argument often have difficulty distinguishing between “your” and “you’re” and “it’s” and “its”. 

19) Misogyny is real. For proof, read the message boards on IMDB where they discuss Sex and the City and Girls.

20) The moderators of any particular message board are trying to silence at least one of the people currently posting, usually because the person they’re trying to silence is the only one exposing their lies.*  Such statements are often accompanied by metaphors about emperors not having any clothes on.

21)  Nobody hates Star Trek more than Star Trek fans. The principal holds true for obsessive fans of everything from other science fiction franchises to sports teams.

22) Except for Ayn Rand fans. Ayn Rand fans are the most rabidly indoctrinated sociopaths in recent history, with the possible exception of parents who rioted to get Cabbage Patch dolls for their children. They are probably the same people, I suspect.

24) Humanity is doomed. Mainly because of Ayn Rand fans.

Firestorm

Note: this is a heavily revised version of an Op-Ed piece that originally appeared in the London Free Press in 2009.

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"The aim of the combined bomber offensive should be unambiguously stated as the destruction of German cities, the killing of German workers, and the disruption of civilized life throughout Germany...the destruction of houses, public utilities, transport, and lives, the creation of a refugee problem on an unprecedented scale...are accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy. They are not by-products of attempts to hit factories." 

- Arthur Harris, October 1943. 


February 13th to 15th is the anniversary of the Allied firebombing of Dresden, a horrific series of fire raids that killed 25,000 civilians and left much of that beautiful medieval city a smouldering ruin. With the exception of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no action by the Allies in the Second World War has generated so much moral condemnation. Ever since, critics have charged that the city was defenseless and of no military value. Neither of these claims is true, but even Winston Churchill conceded that the attack, conducted when victory was imminent, represented a serious “query” against the moral conduct of Allies.

Area bombing — usually described as the indiscriminate bombardment of towns and cities — was a tactic adopted by the RAF’s Bomber Command in 1941. It was an inevitable decision at the time, when the British were without major allies and confronted by a totalitarian enemy that had conquered much of Europe. Without the technology to hit military and industrial targets precisely, Bomber Command aimed at what it couldn’t miss – whole towns and cities. Make no mistake, civilians were made the deliberate object of attack, although contemporary authorities sometimes disguised this with such euphemisms as "dehousing" and "breaking morale" – euphemisms that modern historians are too often wont to take seriously. But at the time the meaning was clear: you break enemy morale by burning down their houses, with them in them. Or does anyone really suppose that Bomber Command thought the occupants would be out for the evening?

As its navigational and targeting abilities improved steadily over the course of 1943 and 1944, Bomber Command increasingly raided oil, transportation, and other such enemy assets, too, but in absolute terms the tonnage dropped in area raids continued to grow, peaking in February 1945. For months after there was any prospect of German victory, British heavy bombers continued to reduce towns and cities to rubble and ash. Almost forgotten, to give one example among many, is the February 23rd attack on the small town of Pforzheim, in which as many as 17,000 people – a third of town's population – were killed. Bomber Command raided the town an additional eight times after that.
 
Major anniversaries of this kind always stir up a brouhaha,  but the controversy over the strategic bombing offensive has been simmering away for decades now. Historians and military scholars of unimpeachable patriotic credentials have been raising serious questions about the campaign’s efficacy and morality ever since the first bomb fell. Today, most scholars agree that the Anglo-American bomber offensive forced the Germans to devote huge resources to air defense, destroyed the Luftwaffe, cracked civilian morale, and dealt crippling blows to Hitler’s war industry.   

But were the attacks moral? This is a different question entirely. Historians tread lightly here, for they are wary travelers in the realm of moral philosophy. Some people would argue that historians have no business making moral judgments at all, but clearly this will not do. No one would deny us the right to condemn Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or the 9/11 terrorists. (And surely the only thing more chilling than a Holocaust denier would be someone who admits that it happened but refuses to say it was wrong.)  Nor should we submit to the temptation of moral relativism, for we cannot judge monsters by their own monstrous standards. By what standard can we judge, then? The philosophy of ethics provides us with many possible answers, but historians don't often read moral philosophy. What about judging by the moral standards of the time? Again, we must be cautious. There was no consensus about the morality of killing enemy civilians. Polls, including the Mass Observation reports in the UK, showed surprising levels of opposition to killing German civilians. Allied propaganda consistently downplayed the fact that it was happening and indeed had to: the same propaganda vehemently condemned the Germans for their inhumanity when they did it. Can we judge? Of course. How do we judge? There is no easy answer. But where the moral debate over the bombing of Dresden goes awry, in my opinion, is in focusing too much on the actions of the Allies, and not enough on the guilt of the enemy.

In about sixty days in the late spring and early summer of 1943, the Second World War turned decisively against the Germans. In May 1943, they effectively conceded defeat in the Battle of Atlantic by withdrawing their U-Boats from convoy routes. Then, in July, a succession of haymakers sent the Axis reeling: the German offensive against the Soviets at Kursk was repulsed with catastrophic losses; the Allies invaded Sicily and Mussolini’s government fell; and a dreadful firestorm immolated Hamburg and perhaps 40,000 of its people following a series of heavy raids by Bomber Command. After the summer of 1943, and certainly no later the D-Day, a year later, it was no longer possible for any rational person to doubt what the eventual outcome of the war would be. The Nazis’ continued resistance was explicable only in light of their pathological addiction to redrawing the racial map of Europe by violence. This is too often misunderstood, and the Allies instead are chastised for their insistence on "unconditional surrender" and their heavy handed prosecution of a war that the Nazis started and then refused to end. After the Holocaust itself, this is the worst of the atrocities that the Nazis and their very willing collaborators in the German armed forces committed: their refusal to surrender unconditionally, even long after it was clear that unconditional surrender would be eventual outcome anyway. How many millions died, in the final months of the war, to satiate their insatiable bloodlust?

We cannot know. But the thousands of German civilians who died by fire and asphyxiation at Dresden were victims not just of the remorseless logic of Allied area bombing, but also of the death fetishism of a government that many of them had once cheered on to victory.

Smallpox

In 1967, the year Sgt. Pepper came out, it killed two million people, more than were killed in the entire eighteen years of the Vietnam War.   

In 1948, the year it was founded, the World Health Organization estimated that smallpox was infecting fifty million people per year, and in some regions killing as many as a third of them, and leaving millions of survivors blind.
 
So smallpox killed more people in the twentieth century than the World Wars put together, two or three times over.

It had been with us since the beginning of civilization and perhaps longer. It made no distinction for rank or social station. It killed Ramses V, Pharaoh of ancient Egypt.  It may have killed Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman Emperor. It nearly killed Elizabeth I of England, fourteen hundred years later. It did kill Tsar Peter II of Russia in 1730, and the Emperor Komei of Japan in 1867, and the Emperor T’ung Chih of China in 1875. Abraham Lincoln contracted an unusually mild case after giving his famous Gettysburg Address. He survived, but not before passing it on to a White House servant, who did not.

The infected suffered fever, damage to their internal organs, and above all the hideous eruptions – the pox – that covered the body and burst. For hundreds of generations, millions were powerless before it. They prayed and died; died wondering why their gods had abandoned them and were punishing them.  When Europeans introduced it to the New World at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century it tore through the indigenous people. Thousands of years of isolation from the rest of the human race had left them without so much as a shred of resistance to it; it shattered their social cohesion at exactly the historical moment when they needed it most to resist the invaders. They prayed and they died.

It killed and it killed, for ten thousand years or more. And then it was gone. Two million people in 1967. None at all ten years later, and not a single solitary human being since. Not one. It had been in decline in parts of the world for nearly two centuries, but had persisted in spite of progress for a long time, mainly because people – who are by nature not rational – superstitiously and irrationally feared the cure more than the disease. But in the end reason triumphed. And how was this ancient scourge, this killer among killers, this dread disease that the Aztecs called the Great Fire, finally overcome?

Not with prayer. Not by strengthening our immune system in "natural" ways with herbs or homeopathy. Not with chiropractics or chi kung.

No, they wiped it out, eradicated it from the face of the Earth, the good old-fashioned way.

With vaccination.

Atheism

The worst thing is when people try to talk me out of it, as if it’s just something soft I’ve gotten stuck in. "Stalin was an atheist," they say. Okay. And? What do they expect to me say? "Stalin was an atheist? I had no idea. In that case, I do believe in God." And yes, I’ve heard of Pascal's Wager, and Paley’s pocket watch on the heath, and every other variation of the argument from design. These things do tend to enter your consciousness after three decades of daily study and reflection.

And yet my personal progress towards disbelief involved no turning points, revelations, or eureka moments. It simply began with a gradual realization, in boyhood, that my school’s daily prayers and Bible readings were just white noise to me. I stopped believing in God by the time I was about twelve and this early, intuitive disbelief has been buttressed by three subsequent decades of study, all of which has deepened my conviction that there isn’t enough evidence to support the God hypothesis.

There’s no reason to get all uppity about it, but people tend to. This was the second or third column I wrote for Measure of Doubt, nearly five years ago, but it’s the 109th that I’ve actually posted. I keep hesitating for a simple reason. I've found it’s best to keep quiet about my disbelief because it’s a stigma. I'll say that again: disbelief is a stigma. I almost never discuss it with family or friends. This is the first time I’ve unequivocally professed my atheism in public, and I raise the issue now with serious trepidation. 

Oh, I know that some believers think of themselves as the persecuted minority, huddled around the flickering candle of faith in the encroaching darkness.  Well, maybe. But it must be crowded around that candle, what with ninety percent of the population elbowing for room. The assertion, made by some conservative believers, that atheists aggressively dominate the public discourse on religion is based on the worst sort of hyperbolic selection bias. 

And I really don’t see what the problem is. Why would anyone be bothered by my skepticism, let alone offended by it? I don’t think believers are delusional, I think they’re wrong. Why would anyone be offended by this? It's precisely what they think about me.  Moreover, I assume that most Christians reject most non-Christian beliefs. Presumably they don’t believe that God has taken human form on many occasions, that First Nations have occupied the Great Plains since the beginning of time, that we’re bound to an endless cycle of reincarnation unless we follow the Eightfold Noble Path, or that the Qu'ran is the final and perfect revelation of God. That being the case, they too are atheists – about other peoples' religions. Again, I fail to see what the problem is.

Admittedly some people are faithful in a more amorphous way, arguing that all religions are just different versions of the same truth. When they consider such things at all, they say that they believe in some sort of "divine spirit" a warm and fuzzy though sometimes disapproving God: a celestial Oprah. Confess your sins. Jump on the living room set sofa forever and ever.

 "Maybe God is just the word we give to love," I heard a liberal theologian say on TV one time.  "Oh, please!" I shouted. I nearly dropped my copy of The Satanic Verses. And yet the amazing thing was that this purveyor superficially conceived, cloyingly sophomoric ooze got a free pass from the fundamentalist on the same show. "At least she believes in something," he said. By contrast, the atheist on the panel, who professed a thoroughly considered, rigorously examined, and continuously re-evaluated disbelief was told he was going to Hell. The fundamentalist described how he himself had always suffered persecution for his faith. Incredible: he goes around telling people they’re going to be tortured for eternity but says he’s being persecuted when they defend themselves. Incredible.

Well, I don’t think anybody’s going to Hell. In fact, nothing follows automatically from my atheism, and certainly not any conclusions about religion as a social institution. I don’t believe that it "poisons everything" as the title of a recent book put it. Personally, as I’ve grown older, I’ve taken far more interest in religious studies and my respect for certain aspects of religious institutions has grown, even as my atheistic convictions have solidified. I was very irritated not long ago to hear someone remark with pride, "I’m an atheist and I’ve never been in a church in my life." That’s a shame: he’s missed out on some great architecture and a pile of history. Comparative religion is one of the cornerstones of a good liberal education and I insist that my students know something about it. But people often mistake the meaning of all this.  A few years ago, on a teaching evaluation, one student wrote, "Prof. Broad seems very religious." I should have framed it.

Moreover, I teach at an institution with a religious affiliation.  Why?  Well, for many reasons, not the least of which is because it is an excellent liberal arts college with a superb faculty.  But it is also because that institution is actually far more amendable to the serious discussion of religion than the secular university I graduated from, where legions of the self-righteously politically correct maintain that the critical discussion of religion is the exact equivalent of racism. Their position – that ideas have rights – is both insipid and insidious, and is one that, moreover, they do not themselves believe, as they are perfectly willing to hurl stones in the direction of the Catholic Church, for example, when its precepts on matters concerning abortion, the ordination of women, and same sex marriage differ from their own.  Let us be very clear about this: you hear that academe is dominated by atheists. It isn’t. I can count on my fingers the number of real ones I’ve met. It’s dominated by moderately secular liberals, most of them positively popping with New Age spiritual beliefs. They're just mad about organized Christianity. Criticize other religions and they’ll haul you before a human rights tribunal. I tremble slightly to type those words.

Friends among the faithful, it's not the nonbelievers you should worry about. They just think you’re wrong. It's the devout of certain other religions and denominations that should concern you. They think you're wrong and that you're going to Hell for it. Some of them even believe that they are retribution's earthly instruments.  And since even the largest single denomination can claim no more than a fifth of the world's population as even nominal adherents, it is undeniably the case that, regardless of what faith you profess, the majority of the world's population thinks you’re wrong, that you’re guilty of some degree of theological or liturgical malpractice, and indeed from countless thousands of temples, mosques, and churches there emerges an even stronger claim from millions of truly devout believers.  They know in their hearts that you are not just wrong, but are wicked, sinful, and destined to spend eternity in damnation.

 So I'll see you there. 

Remembrance

The brouhaha about white poppies is back and boring again, this year exacerbated by a seething campaign of fake indignation mounted by the herd of hacks at Canada’s worst newspaper. Well, it gives them something to do in the brief period before they begin to seethe with fake indignation about retailers who say “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas” and all that portends for the imminent collapse of civilization. This year, Ottawa’s Rideau Institute produced something like 2,500 white poppies versus the Legion’s 18 million red ones and yet to read the populist piffle in the Toronto Sun (and its various unwilling progeny) is to get the impression that this insidious commie plot, well, portends the imminent collapse of civilization. Can’t make a living as an ideologue if you don’t have a crisis.

More and more each year I find myself discomforted by Remembrance Day, and especially by the efforts of some organizations to impose a singular interpretation on the memory of the wars and how we should feel about them.  As an historian of the home front, I find the most remarkable thing about Canadian society in wartime to be the disjuncture between propaganda that stressed unanimity and common purpose and the actuality of what went on. Political, social, and economic debates were not set aside for the common good in wartime: they intensified as virtually every group with an axe to grind surged forth to argue that their cause had greater urgency than ever before. Propaganda, persecution, and misty-eyed patriotism tended to to paper over the unpleasantness (and this time of year it still does), but the fact is that some of the most divisive social and political debates in this country’s history occurred during the world wars. The generation of Canadians that fought them did not agree about why they were fighting, how they should fight, and what they wanted when peace resumed. And so it is positively incredible that some groups seem desperate to fix the meaning of remembrance after the fact, as if we could find consensus where wartime generations could not.

On Monday, though, we will hear about how the generation that fought the world wars fought “for us” and “for our freedoms.” But did they? Fight for us? Fight for our freedoms?  Surely they fought for their world, and if they fought for freedom at all it was almost certainly not for our conception of freedom. We may grow misty eyed over the grave of a young man, cut down in his prime in 1918, but reflect that, were he typical of his generation, he would hold attitudes on matters of (for starters) gender, race, and sexuality that many of us would consider positively repugnant and indeed totalitarian today. What would a typical soldier, killed at Amiens, having died without ever having heard the radio or seen a colour photograph, think of the world a century a later? Think of our secular, smoke-free, multicultural, Canada? Think of women in Parliament, a black man as President of the United States, of same-sex and interracial couples, Breaking Bad, Twilight, and hip hop?  Even the idea of a fully independent Canada might very well repulse him.

An eminent colleague of mine believes that, on November 11th itself, such questions of politics and history should go by the wayside and instead the day should be dedicated to the simple act of remembrance of those who fell. But what does this mean? Remember who? Remember what? And how? The act of “remembrance” – and in the context of Remembrance Day that almost always means "veneration" – is not simple. Consider even the question of "who": am I just remembering Canadians? And what does that even mean, prior to 1947? A great many of the 65,000 “Canadians” killed in the First World War weren’t born here, and probably didn’t think of themselves as Canadians at all. What about those who fought badly, were cowardly, or who even betrayed their comrades? And am I remembering our allies, too? The French? The British? The Americans? All their wars? Even the cruel and stupid ones? Even the Red Army, which brutalized its way across Eastern Europe, the spearhead of a totalitarian state whose cumulative death toll exceeded Hitler’s?  And am I remembering the enemy fallen, too – remembering those who fought against  “our freedoms”? Tread carefully here.

Consider, if you will, the rifleman in the infamous photograph above, about to gun down a woman and her infant child and then, presumably, the others, huddled defenceless, terrified, and weeping, perhaps begging for their lives. Very probably he was killed or maimed in subsequent fighting on the Eastern Front. Should I “remember” him tomorrow, merely because he wore a uniform and fought for a cause he believed in, even though that cause was objectively evil? Even though the success of that cause would have spelled the end of European civilization as we know it? Is his uniform some sort of totem that grants him moral absolution, regardless of his actions or the cause in which he served?  I find the notion that it does positively fascistic – a sign that no small part of his ideological worldview has, in fact, not merely survived eradication, but actually emerged victorious from the war. I know some people reading this will disagree.

But that's my whole point. I object. I object, I object, I object. I object to the idea that there is single, simple meaning to “remembrance” – that there is a correct way to remember the wars that has been passed down to us from the generation that fought them. Above all I object to the idea that the worldview of the dead – even assuming that a unitary worldview belonging to the past generations could be located – must somehow determine our own. We impart meaning on the act of remembrance, we write history for our own purposes and for the benefit of our own society.

So there I will be, tomorrow,  with a red poppy on my lapel and a white one in my heart, unsure about what to think of any of it. And perhaps that’s the real reason why I’m there – because of that uncertainty. Because if the liberal democracies succeeded in accomplishing anything in the world wars, it was in defending at least one part of the world from consensus. 

Leadership

The really absorbing spectacle in Toronto news over the last few days has not been the revelations regarding Rob Ford, as anyone who has been paying attention knew that was coming. No, it has been truly epic meltdown of Canada’s worst journalists at Canada’s worst newspaper, the Toronto Sun, where they have in the past seventy-two hours revealed hitherto undiscovered ways of back-pedalling, equivocating, deflecting, denying, and dissembling. What remains is a quivering pile of populist goo, oozing about the ankles of the “sunshine girl” du jour.

I try not to read this stuff for the same reason I try not hit myself on the head with a hammer. But it has the morbid appeal of a car wreck and ambulances by the side of the road – can’t look at it, can’t look away.

Anyway, they had a good run. Apart from elected office, journalism is about the only profession where you can be paid to spew at the mouth once a week on matters about which you have no expertise, so they’ll always have their memories of that, at least. And one or two of them have shown real integrity in the past few days, by which I mean, they’ve at least been consistent in their lack of integrity where Toronto’s absurd mayor is concerned. At least one continues to insist that the whole thing is a “left” conspiracy (how they love to throw that word "left" around), while another,  Anthony Furey – I confess to never having heard of him before – rose to the occasion and condemned not so much the mayor, but his critics.  “The left,” (there’s that word again), he wrote, "is not outraged that Ford might be using hard drugs...no, the bottom line is they don’t like that a fat, red-faced football coach with a working-class way about him is mayor. They don’t like that he’s not “people like us.” That’s all it’s ever been about.”
 
Guilty as charged. Well, sort of. I actually don't want "people like me" as my leaders. I want people who are better than me. I don't want just plain ordinary good-ole aw shucks folks to be Prime Minister, Premier, and Mayor. I want the best and brightest in political office. I want people who are smarter than me. Better informed than me. More articulate than me. More literate and better read than me. I want leaders with vision. I want leaders who are people who set examples in all things – including moral behaviour. I want leaders who are truly exceptional, the kind of people who can inspire us and who we can aspire to emulate. And my question for people who want “joe average” as their leader, who want crude, crass, mean, mendacious, slovenly, stupid, rude, racist, and reactionary boors as their leaders is...why? What happened to our country, to our polity – and this question goes out to Americans, too  – that “elite” became a pejorative term and mediocrity became the measure of a man or woman aspiring to political office? 

As a society, we are faced with real and complex problems. We need serious people with serious answers if those problems are going to be solved. Electing populist hooligans who make you feel good about your own inferiority complex isn't the solution.

Re-runs

Author's note: our regularly scheduled blog post has been replaced in our programming lineup by a special repeat broadcast of Measure of Doubt's most read and most requested column, Hell, a 666 word rumination of the topic of damnation from 2011.

Hell

A parable.

So, there ’s Gordon. In Hell. His crime? Religious dissent. On Earth, we call governments that punish religious dissenters totalitarian, but he has long since learned to let that go — eons of torture and burning tend to take your mind off of things.

Gordon is holding a tray and is in a long, long line in Hell’s Cafeteria. The air conditioning is on the fritz again, and it's hot as Hell. Over the speakers, they're playing Muzak arrangements of Barry Manilow ("Mandy", 24/7, for eternity) and they're serving fish-sticks, again, for the hundred-trillionth day in a row. As he approaches the counter Gordon notices a small sign, written in blood. His blood. "Tomorrow’s special: fish sticks." Bastards: they think of everything.

Time has no meaning here, but Gordon keeps a day-planner anyway, because he’s always been a planner sort of guy. For today, it says:

8 AM burning
9 AM drawing-and-quartering
10 AM hanging
11 AM dismemberment
12 PM lunch (poisoned)
1 PM the rack
2 PM root canal
3 PM drowning
4 PM re-runs of The Golden Girls
5 PM buried alive
6 PM beating
6:30 PM dinner (fish sticks - poisoned)
etc.

He flips forward a few pages. More of the same, although on Thursday he has an hour of cardio-kickboxing. He makes a mental note to get that changed to burning.

Gordon looks up. Ahead of and behind him, queuing with their trays, are the teeming billions of the damned. They are of every race, ethnicity, social station, and period in human history. Some are warlords, murders, rapists, and thieves; some are adulterers, some are liars, some liked the new Star Wars movies better than the old ones. But the majority are quite ordinary people who never hurt anybody. The ones from Gordon’s time lived their lives, went to school, read a few books, watched TV, cooked meals, raised their families, drove their kids to soccer practice, gave some bucks to charity, some even went to church now and again, but, wouldn’t you know it, they were improperly religious and consigned to Hellfire for eternity. There are also countless millions of truly, deeply, sincerely devout followers of literally thousands of different faiths that turned out to be false, and even devout followers of the Right Religion who were guilty of theological or liturgical misconduct.

Gordon hears different things about what the Right Religion is, about what he should have believed or how he should have behaved. Some say faith in a certain prophet alone. Some say sacraments. Some say accepting that a particular iron-age book was the final and perfect revelation. Some say that there are four truths and an eightfold noble path, and they can’t quite figure out what this eternal damnation business has to do with them. Some even say there was nothing to be done – that the game was rigged from the get-go. There are all sorts of ideas. He even heard that the correct answer was a life led in conformance to the will of the Goddess Maat, which would explain why pretty much everybody except ancient Egyptians seem well represented here. Who knows? Inwardly, Gordon shrugs. What does it matter now? There’s no reprieve. There are billions of people here who knew in their hearts that they were right and then — poof — fire, brimstone, perpetual torture, fish sticks, and Barry Manilow. Sucks to be you. Forever and ever. Amen.

Anyway, directly ahead of Gordon in line is Adolf Hitler. But Gordon has been in hell for a million trillion billion years already— that’s zero percent of his sentence, incidentally — and his memories of Earth mostly have faded. So while Hitler seems somehow familiar, especially with his postage stamp of a moustache and swastika armband, Gordon can’t quite place him. He’s about to ask him if they’ve ever met when Hitler looks over his shoulder and decides to strike up a conversation first.

"Gootentag," Hitler says. "So: what are you in for?"
"Skepticism," Gordon replies. "And you?"

Commemoration

Today is the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States, in which three thousand people perished in flame. Judging from the many hostile e-mails I received to my blog post about visiting La Cambe, many people will be spending a portion of the day in quiet commemoration of those nineteen terrorists who made the ultimate sacrifice for a cause they believed in. After all, they must say, in order to be consistent, who are we to say that what they did is wrong?

Q.E.D. 

Desecration

I used to teach Kurt Vonnegut’s funny, sad, and important novel Slaughterhouse Five in my American history classes, but gave up after being met by seas of incomprehension and even outright hostility. Why was I teaching a novel in a history class, they wondered, as if novels weren’t written in the past or in historical contexts. In this, the most expansive of disciplines, students too often have been straightjacketed into thinking that history is merely a bill of facts about war and politics to be committed to memory. And there is no shortage of historians who want it that way.

Above all, I was distressed by the inability of history students to think coherently about the very thing that almost invariably is most important to the people we study – morality. Slaughterhouse is about an American POW, Billy Pilgrim, who in 1945 witnesses the firebombing of Dresden only to be abducted by time-travelling extraterrestrials called Tralfamadorians, beings whose response to every moral catastrophe in the history of the universe — including the entire universe’s eventual destruction at their own hands — is the same: they intone the phrase, “So it goes.”

Unwittingly, I had handed my students what many of them thought was an ideal philosophy of ethics. “So it goes.” A way to shrug and say, “Oh, well. Can I get back to Facebook now?”  Vonnegut himself later said he was distressed by the ease with which so many readers accepted the legitimacy of what is self-evidently a hideously immoral proposition. “So it goes” – not stoicism in the face of history’s cruelties, but indifference; not acceptance, but apathy; “so it goes” – the proposition that we are not moral agents, that we make no choices, that we bear no responsibility for the consequences of our actions, whether it’s firebombing Dresden or blowing up the universe, or, at the very time Vonnegut was writing, waging war in Vietnam. 

On Measure of Doubt and its briefly extant sister blog, Suspended Judgment, I wrote on several occasions that the biggest problem with our education system is that we’re good at getting students to memorize facts but not good at getting them to think about facts. Despite all our protestations to the contrary, most of our education system consists of telling students stuff and getting them to regurgitate it, what one colleague of mine inelegantly calls the "binge and purge model of education." Even in universities the lecture – a tool for conveying facts – remains at the core of our methodology, although students who steadfastly refuse to read anything are partly to blame for this. 

Over the years, I have attempted on many occasions to initiate conversations in class concerning the great moral questions of the Second World War: the Holocaust, Japanese atrocities in occupied China, Allied area bombing, and so forth.  Year after year, these discussions take on a predictable and depressing sameness. They run the usual gamut from soft moral relativism and all its attendant confusion (“our side was just as bad”, they would say, as if this empirically false claim were somehow relevant even if true) through to the positively fascistic view that military service must automatically be accorded the deepest reverence, regardless of the cause in which one served. But at least those students articulated a coherent worldview. The relativists basically said: “Who am I to judge? Not for me to say what’s right or wrong. Everyone has their own way of looking at things. We shouldn’t be biased.” Blah dee blah blah blah. So it goes. Generation meh. 

All this brings me to the case of the German cemetery at La Cambe, in Normandy, France.  It is the resting place of many young men who were caught up in the lunatic asylum we call the Third Reich, teenagers forced to fight for a totalitarian regime that sought to redraw the racial map of Europe through war. Their graves are important reminders that few countries suffered so much because of Adolf Hitler as Germany itself.  But La Cambe is also the burial place of a large number of straightforwardly wicked men who were enthusiastic supporters of the Nazi program. Among them is Sturmbannführer Adolf “Otto” Diekmann, an SS officer who ordered a hideous crime against humanity at Oradour, France. Diekmann’s troops massacred 642 men, women, and children – the men were shot in the legs and then burned alive – for no military purpose whatsoever a few days after D-Day in the summer of 1944.

In early June, I visited La Cambe, not certain if I should. I’m not sure what possessed me, on that cold and damp morning, to venture off, alone, into the far corners of the cemetery in search of Diekmann’s grave. It might have been morbid curiosity. Or perhaps it was a desire to gloat slightly over another exemplar of the absolute failure of the worst system of governance ever devised. Anxious and distinctly unsure of myself, I stumbled about for ten minutes, looking for the marker, half-hoping not to find it, when suddenly it seemed to appear before me, flat and rather disappointingly innocuous against the ground. 

I reflected at once on the words of A.J.P. Taylor: “I come to history not as a judge, but to say what happened and why” – outright hypocrisy from one of the 20th century’s most judgmental historians. What do historians do except judge? The whole enterprise is a process of gathering, evaluating, weighing, assessing, in short, judging evidence for one position or another. Above all, to say “I cannot judge” is itself a moral judgment of the very strongest kind. Not one moral relativist, while themselves being murdered, would calmly accept death with a shrug and say, “Who am I to judge this murderer?” but they will do it when other people are being or were murdered. Appalling. Appalling.

I reflected, too, that historians are wary travelers in the realm of moral philosophy, not because they know it to be dangerous, but because they’re lost.  We pass our moral confusion onto our students. The problem isn’t that most historians are abstaining from engaging their moral sensibilities – that would be a considered position. The problem is that their training has left them unprepared to assess moral issues at all, even from the perspective of the period they’re studying. With nearly three thousand years of moral philosophy before them, the best most of them can do is shrug and mouth, “Well, who’s to say?”  So it goes. 

I also found myself thinking about the firmest conviction I have as a teacher: that education, like physical exercise, should hurt a bit. It should destabilize the intellect and force it to adjust to new demands. It’s not a teacher’s job, of course, to tell students what to think – even if the teacher actually knows what to think. But it is a teacher’s job to get students to think. This involves more than just holding up a mirror to youthful vanity and awarding gold stars for sharing. Good teachers make students understand that extracting knowledge from information takes serious effort. 

Here was a teachable moment, but there was no one teach. So I must have stood there for five minutes or so, above Deikmann's little plot, wondering what to do or say. I do not believe that the dead are conscious of the living, so having words with the man seemed rather pointless. It was, moreover, getting on, and there was a schedule to keep. I walked off, briskly, troubled by all this. Then I surprised myself.  Well, hell, I thought. Why am I debating historical theory with myself? I’m an historian for maybe forty hours a week. The rest of the time I’m a human being. And my human obligations come first.

So I stopped. Turned around. Returned to Deikmann’s marker.

And spat on his grave.

May he not rest in peace.

Anniversaries

Do you hear that? That ticking sound? Of course you do. That’s the sound of the clock running out on the human race, and it began winding down 69 years ago today.  On the 16th of July, 1945, at 05:29 local time, the world’s first nuclear weapons test occurred in the New Mexico desert. They called it “Trinity". That’s it there, in the corner, a few milliseconds after detonation. It’s probably the most written about of all the 2,084 or so known nuclear tests, and there are breathless descriptions all over the place about the size and power of the explosion, invariably capped off with Robert Oppenheimer’s now quite cliched reminiscence of how a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” occurred to him at that moment.

In fact, the bomb was a baby as nuclear weapons went, and less than ten years later the Americans were testing nuclear weapons with quite literally a thousand times the explosive power. In the early 1960s the Soviets tested ones with two or three thousand times the power. For a couple of decades, in the 50s and 60s, both countries were popping them off in the atmosphere like kids with fireworks. In the early 1960s, a study found trace levels of Strontium-90, a rather nasty radioactive isotope that affixes itself to bones in the human body, in the teeth of every baby they could find who was born in 1963. Babies born in 1950 didn’t have that. That was one reason why some protesters gently suggested that if the superpowers wanted to screw with a planet maybe they should get their own. 
 
Admittedly, the Americans built the bomb in the first place for a good reason – they were afraid that Hitler’s Germany was building one, too (it was) and they dropped it on Japan to end a terrible war that the Japanese started and refused to end. But the nuclear arms race that followed the Soviet Union's first test in 1949 demonstrates the normalization of a genocidal mentality that gripped the leaders of the great powers in the postwar period. Around the time that I was contemplating just how much hair gel would be required to produce a satisfactory mullet every day (a lot, so I never did it), global nuclear arsenals peaked at around 60,000 deployed weapons, which was enough to kill, well, everybody. They called this “national defense”, but really it was a suicide pact that great powers made with their enemies. And everybody else, whether they wanted in on it or not.

Every culture has had apocalyptic myths, stories about the end of the world and how it will happen. But the nuclear age is different, in that we possess a certain means of making it happen, so over the years we have vested control of apocalyptic weaponry in the hands of wise men like Leonid Brezhnev and George W. Bush. The good news is that there are far fewer nuclear weapons in the world today than thirty years ago, and fewer still actively deployed. Serious strides towards nuclear disarmament in the great powers has taken place, despite the best efforts of Republicans. But there are still a lot left. Even a small, regional nuclear war would have devastating global consequences. Just a few hundred would probably suffice to kill a billion people or so, and their continued existence makes a mockery of so much intellectual activity in the community of military theorists and civilian defense experts. By all means, have your wargasm about your F-35s, protecting Canada’s high arctic from the incursion of obsolete Russian bombers. And if the war comes, they can knock those bombers down and then fly back to the radioactive pile of rubble left by ballistic missiles.

We’ll probably never go to war with Russia, of course. But the basic problem isn’t Russia, or China, or North Korea. The problem is that the nuclear genie can’t be put back in the bottle. Nuclear weapons are the technology of the mid-40s and early 50s, older than colour TVs and Elvis records. Sooner or later, any country that wants them can have them, so trying to enforce non-proliferation is a pipe-dream in the long term. Arms control can only delay their eventual use, while deterrence is just an utterly absurd delusion that strong countries are left at peace.   We were lucky to avoid a nuclear war in the 20th century. What will happen in the 21st? The 22nd? The 23rd? It is incredible to think that we can avoid eventual nuclear armageddon by the present means of trying to do so.  But there is a solution. It’s one everyone has to agree to, so people will say that it’s a phantasm. Well, okay: enjoy the fallout. It will be pretty, like snow at Christmas. Anyway, here’s the solution. You won’t like it, but I think it’s the only way we’re getting out of here alive. 

Pacifism. 

Violence

A true story. On the 24th of November, 1326, four horses entered the marketplace at Hereford, England, dragging behind them Hugh Despenser the Younger, recently convicted of treason, while the Queen, Isabella, and the assembled crowd of courtiers and commoners hooted and jeered. Already wearing a crown of nettles and disfigured by crude tattoos of verses concerning matters of retribution from the Old Testament, Despenser was stripped naked and “half-hanged” — that is, hoisted by a noose until semi-conscious — at which point they cut his genitals off. This was considered very fitting by all assembled since Despenser was known to have been the lover of the King, Edward II (himself to die the following year by means of a red-hot “trumpet” thrust into his anus, according to at least some accounts.) 

The writer Alison Weir recounts that Despenser then emitted a “ghastly, inhuman howl”, but his punishment was very far from over. Weir then picks up the account of a contemporary chronicler who wrote, “Then his belly was split open” – this while he remained conscious — “and his heart and entrials cut out...when the other parts of his body had been disposed of, Sir Hugh’s head was cut off and sent to London. His body was then hewn into quarters, which were sent to the four next largest cities in England.” You can see the event depicted, above. I bet nobody accused Isabella of being soft on crime.

Despenser was no saint. Weir speculates he may have raped the Queen. Certainly he had tried to bribe the French into killing her, as she was herself plotting against the King. All this is part of the point I'm trying to make, so bear with me.

Grisly though it was, Despenser's execution was kid’s stuff by Medieval standards. Consider, if you will, the words of the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas who recounted that Spanish conquistadors in the New World would “hang 13 natives at a time in honor of Christ Our Saviour and the 12 Apostles.  Straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive.  They took babies from their mothers’ breasts, grabbing them by their feet and smashing them against rocks.  They would cut an Indian’s hands and leave them dangling by a shred of skin and threw others to the dogs and thus were torn to pieces.”

Well, that’s (late) Medieval justice for you, a fact that Shakespeare was very much aware of when he had his hero Henry lay the following threat onto the governor of the French town of Harfleur in his great play Henry V.

    Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
    Take pity of your town and of your people,
    Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
    Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
    O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
    Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
    If not, why, in a moment look to see
    The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
    Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
    Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
    And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
    Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
    Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
    Do break the clouds

It’s Shakespeare, yes, but historically accurate: Henry really did make a threat like this and the actual execution of such threats was commonplace throughout the Middle Ages. Indeed, the people of innumerable towns and cities have suffered similar fates from ancient times through to Nagasaki and beyond.  But this particular passage was excised in the 1944 Olivier film version: it wouldn’t do in 1944 to have a Shakespearean hero employing Gestapo methods against England's enemies even though at that very moment, the planes of Bomber Command were burning German cities and the people in them to the ground, night after night.

And what do all these people have in common? These crowds who cheered for the drawing and quartering of a homosexual? The medieval kings who ordered their men remorselessly to rape and murder their way through towns and villages? The conquistadors who actually did spit naked infants upon pikes?  Well, for one thing, they were all Christians, devout believers of utterly unshakable convictions. And, why not, really? In the Old Testament, Mr. Tough-on-Crime himself orders all manner of massacres and whatnot.  Yahweh is not merely vengeful and jealous but is also fiendishly diabolical in the manner of a James Bond villain. In 2 Kings 2, verses 23-24, He sends a couple of “she bears” to rip apart forty-two children for making fun of Elijah’s baldness. Do not mess with this cat. Seriously.

Am I saying that religion is the problem, that it “poisons everything” as a recent book put it? Certainly not. The claim that “religion poisons everything” is an empirical one, and until such time as we have studied religion in relation to, well, everything, we can’t possibly reach that conclusion. And there is, moreover, the undeniable fact that, in absolute terms, the secular (and in some cases aggressively irreligious) dictatorships of the 20th century: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Mao’s China, killed perhaps 100 million people between them. Indeed, Stalin, the foremost mass murderer in history, studied for the priesthood for only about four or five years so.

Here’s the catch, though. In absolute terms, the 20th century was undeniably the most violent in history. But there were also a lot more people to kill, and I am very far from convinced that, in relative terms, the 20th century was necessarily more violent than any of a number of centuries that preceded it.  For Americans, the death rate from their Civil War, fought amongst themselves in the 1860s, was about six times greater than World War Two; a Frenchman was more likely to die in the wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars than during the World Wars;  the average person living in early 16th century “Germany” during the Thirty Years War, was almost certainly more likely to die from violence than the average German living in the first half of the 20th century, and all these wars were fought amongst Christians. We could go on and on. Need I even begin to enumerate the catastrophic death toll of the Atlantic Slave trade?

Anyone who studies military history long enough eventually reaches the conclusion that there is basically nothing that people won’t do to one another. There is no act of betrayal or violence or cruelty so profane that people will not do it to their fellows in order to impose their will, and every human religion, doctrine, or philosophy can be and has been utilized to sanctify acts of unfathomable cruelty. But history also shows that people are often selfless, will sacrifice themselves for one another, and will die to defend the lives of otherwise defenseless people who they have never met and from whom they can earn no reward. As historians, we need to devote greater efforts to understanding what motivates actions such as these, in addition to understanding the everyday kindnesses, of which there are a multitude, that go unrecorded and unnoticed in the annals of history.