The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Wednesday, April 30, 2025

Comments

1. Pogo says

   April 30, 2025 at 2:28 pm

   @More is more

   “Gordon Wood says his 15 minutes of fame came with “Good Will Hunting” (Interview)

   by Scott Porch

   Gordon S. Wood, a Brown University emeritus professor of history, has just completed a collection of 39 of the more significant pamphlets for the Library of America in the two-volume The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764‒1776. Wood is the recipient of the Bancroft Prize for Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (1969) and the Pulitzer Prize for History for The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992). We had a wide-ranging discussion about pamphlets, changes in the media environment, and the current state of historical writing, but we started with Wood’s cameo — or more accurately his name’s cameo — in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting…”
   https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/gordon-wood-says-his-15-minutes-of-fame-came-with-

   “The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to taking life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists, whose real though unacknowledged motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writing of the younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States …”
   ― George Orwell

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2. Ray W, says

   April 30, 2025 at 7:29 pm

   Perhaps many FlaglerLive readers find interesting the idea that Thomas Jefferson held hope for a future of “universal and perpetual peace” through a technological military innovation that he believed capable of destroying naval fleets at any place and at any time.

   The debate over the possibility of universal and perpetual peace through military might did not end with Thomas Jefferson.

   Barbara Tuchman, a widely acclaimed historian, wrote of such a philosophical possibility in her expansive work, The Guns of August:

   “The last two years of the decade while Europe enjoyed a rich fat afternoon, were the quietest. Nineteen-ten was peaceful and prosperous, with a second round of Moroccan crises and Balkan wars still to come. A new book, The Great Illusion by Norman Angell, had just been published, which proved that war had become vain. By impressive examples and incontrovertible argument Angell showed that in the present financial and economic interdependence of nations, the victor would suffer equally with the vanquished; therefore war had become unprofitable; therefore no nation would be so foolish as to start one. Already translated into eleven languages, The Great Illusion had become a cult. At the universities, in Manchester, Glasgow, and other industrial cities, more than forty study groups of true believers had formed, devoted to propagating its dogma. Angell’s most earnest disciple was a man of great influence on military policy, the King’s friend and advisor, Viscount Esher, chairman of the War Committee assigned to remaking the British Army after the shock of its performance in the Boer War. Lord Esher delivered lectures on the lesson of The Great Illusion at Cambridge and the Sorbonne wherein he showed how ‘new economic factors clearly prove the inanity of aggressive wars.’ A twentieth century war would be on such a scale, he said, that its inevitable consequences of ‘commercial disaster, financial ruin and individual suffering’ would be ‘so pregnant with restraining influences’ as to make war unthinkable. He told an audience of officers at the United Service Club, with the Chief of the General Staff, Sir John French, in the chair, that because of the interlacing of nations war ‘becomes every day more difficult and improbable.’

   “Germany, Lord Esher felt sure, ‘is as receptive as Great Britain to the doctrine of Norman Angell.’ How receptive were the Kaiser and the Crown Prince to whom he gave, or caused to be given, copies of The Great Illusion is not reported. There is no evidence that he gave one to General von Bernhardi, who was engaged in writing a book called Germany and the Next War, published in the following year, which was to be as influential as Angell’s but from the opposite point of view. Three of its chapter titles, ‘The Right to Make War,’ ‘The Duty to Make War,’ and ‘World Power or Downfall’ sum up its thesis.

   “As a twenty-one-year-old cavalry officer in 1870, Bernhardi had been the first German to ride through the Arc de Triomphe when the Germans entered Paris. Since then the flags and glory interested him less than the theory, philosophy, and science of war as applied to ‘Germany’s Historic Mission,’ another of his chapter titles. He had served as chief of the Military History section of the General Staff, was one of the intellectual elite of that hard-thinking, hard-working body, and author of a classic on cavalry before he assembled a lifetime’s study of Clausewitz, Treitschke, and Darwin, and poured them into the book that was to make his name a synonym for Mars.

   “War, he stated, ‘is a biological necessity’; it is the carrying out among humankind of ‘the natural struggle for existence.’ Nations, he said, most progress or decay; ‘there can be no standing still,’ and Germany must choose ‘world power or downfall.’ Among the nations Germany ‘is in social-political respects at the head of all progress in culture’ but is ‘compressed into narrow, unnatural limits.’ She cannot attain her ‘great moral ends’ without increased political power, an enlarged sphere of influence, and new territory. This increase in power, ‘befitting our importance,’ and ‘which we are entitled to claim,’ is a ‘political necessity’ and ‘the first and foremost duty of the state.’ In his own italics Bernhardi announced ‘What we now wish to attain must be fought for,’ and from here he galloped home to the finish line: ‘Conquest thus becomes a law of necessity.’

   “Having proved the ‘necessity’ (the favorite word of German military thinkers), Bernhardi proceeded to method. Once the duty to make war is recognized, the secondary duty, to make it successfully, follows. To be successful a state must begin war at the ‘most favorable moment’ of its own choosing it has ‘the acknowledged right … to secure the proud privilege of such initiative.’ Offensive war thus becomes another ‘necessity’ and a second conclusion inescapable: ‘It is incumbent on us … to act on the offensive and strike the first blow.’ Bernhardi did not share the Kaiser’s concern about the ‘odium’ that attached to the aggressor. Nor was he reluctant to tell where the blow should fall. It was ‘unthinkable,’ he wrote, that Germany and France could ever negotiate their problems. ‘France must be so completely crushed that she can never cross our path again’; she ‘must be annihilated once and for all as a great power.'”

   Make of this what you will.

   Me?

   Can it be argued that when Churchill argued to the American people in 1943 during an address to Congress that Prussian militarism must be “extirpated”, it was the philosophy of General von Bernhardi that was the target of his intent? And does the language emanating from the Kremlin in support of its war of aggression against the Ukraine mirror the language of General von Bernhardi? Is there in fact a philosophy of Russian militarism that differs little from Bernhardi’s Prussian militarism?