The Battle of the Bulge + 75

Today is the 75th anniversary of the beginning of one of the most decisive battles  of the Second World War — the Battle of the Bulge, Germany's last desperate effort to turn the tide of the war which by then Germany seemed certain to lose. Early in the morning on December 16, 1944, over 200,000 German soldiers unexpectedly broke through the dense Ardennes forest of Belgium and Luxembourg, deeply penetrating the Allied front line. Fighting with the 186th Field Artillery Battalion, my father was one of the many GIs caught up in what has been come to be considered “the worst Christmas for American soldiers since Valley Forge” [cf. Stanley Weintraub, 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944].

The above photo shows a map my father made of his service on the European continent between June 8, 1944 ("D Day +2"), and May 9, 1945 (two days after the German surrender in the West). My father was very proud of his service in the war, but he seldom spoke about it in any great detail. Most of my uncles were war veterans too. Like my father, they were proud of their service, but seldom spoke of it in generalities. So one result was that I knew there had been a Battle of the Bulge, but I had little appreciation of its decisive significance until much later in life.

Of course, ever since Richard Nixon ended the Draft, few Americans actually serve in the military, which means fewer fight our wars, which means the public interest in those wars is much less than it was in our great 20th-century conflicts, from World War I to Vietnam. (Compare the interest in The Pentagon Papers with the relative lack of interest in The Afghanistan Papers. Perhaps we all need to review and reflect upon the traditional concerns in political theory about the different impacts of professions versus citizen armies.)

The Battle of the Bulge was very important, although Hitler's last offensive effort was inevitably doomed to failure in the long-term. It shows how even when the eventual outcome is virtually certain there is still the danger of short-term difficulties and defeats along the way, and no victory should ever be presumed, because no victory every comes easily.

Finally!

It ill behooves an American to interpret an election in a foreign country, unless he or she has a lot of expert knowledge about that other country and also can resist the natural temptation to interpret everything in the world in terms of domestic American politics. Keeping those cautions in mind, there are, however, a few things that anyone can venture to say about yesterday's amazing election in the UK.

First and foremost, it was decisive! FINALLY, after years of coalition government and minority government, parliamentary gridlock, and Brexit stalemate, Boris Johnson's Tory party now has a decisive majority in the House of Commons and can begin the process of returning to normal governance. In addition to "getting Brexit done" and resuming regular legislation on other important topics, normal governance might well include repealing the Fixed-Term Parliament Act and curbing the expansive aspirations of the recently invented Supreme Court, both of which are constitutional novelties which have gotten in the way of traditional parliamentary government. (Those of us who, over the decades, have praised parliamentary systems of government should be happy when parliamentary government resumes functioning in the traditional manner. that made it so attractive int eh first place)

Secondly, the election ratified the 2016 referendum and reinforced the democratic notion that government ought to be responsive to the will of the electorate - even when the will of the electorate is inconvenient for London-based elites (and their equivalents in other countries).. The fact that so many traditionally Labour constituencies (Labour's northern England "Red Wall") voted Tory in part reflects the pro-Brexit, justifiable euro-skepticism of the traditional working class, whose interests have not been properly prioritized by the party that has traditionally claimed to represent them.

Third, it confirmed the widespread consensus that the prospect of Labour Leader Jeremy Corbin as Prime Minister is simply unacceptable to most people. While one factor among many, the Chief Rabbi's recent intervention calling out the increasing danger of anti-semitism sent an important message in this regard.

Bill Clinton rightly recognized in the 2016 Brexit vote a sign that the conventional political landscape was changing. Boris Johnson is a "one-nation" Tory, a very different type of "populist" from Donald Trump. It is dangerous to try to draw too many parallels between the two leaders and between the two sets of political parties. But one clear lesson is the apparently irreversible awakening of voters who have felt their interests have been neglected and their values disrespected. Elites with different interests and different values would be well advised to start learning how to take other people with other interests and values more seriously. 

O Christmas Tree!

Last night - about an hour after the space station passed overhead, racing across the night sky, resembling an airplane much more than the Star of Bethlehem - we finished our carol festival with "O Christmas Tree" and lit our parish Christmas Tree. (Thankfully, no local equivalents of the anti-"pagan" protesters who threw the indigenous images into the Tiber during October's Synod in Rome showed up to protest!). 

Of course, Christmas itself is a christianized version of pre-Christian pagan holidays. So it is hardly surprising that so many traditions and decorations so widely associated with Christmas have remoter origins in indigenous European pagan practices. The Romans used evergreen branches to decorate during the feast of Saturnalia, a December week of good cheer and gift-giving that recalled the "golden age" of the god Saturn (Kronos), father of Jupiter (Zeus). Northern Europeans likewise decorated their homes to counteract the dark of the winter solstice season. Supposedly it was Martin Luther who christianized the evergreen tree and made it a centerpiece of German domestic Christmas feasting. And, as everyone knows, it was Queen Victoria's consort, Prince Albert, who famously made the German Christmas Tree an English tradition, from which it soon spread across the Atlantic to capture the American imagination.

Christmas has always been my favorite time of the year, and I love all the familiar Christmas customs, whatever their pre-Christian pagan origins. I do detest artificial Christmas Trees (more like a post-Christian pagan custom!), but even so I would prefer an artificial tree to no tree at all. Ten years ago, I introduced the tradition (as I suppose it has now become) of setting up a Christmas Tree outside the church and formally lighting it during the week of our parish's patronal feast. I hope that whoever walks past it - or sees the tree's lights from a distance driving by - experiences, however modestly, some of the gift that Christmas is.

The virtual universalization of Christmas (at least the commercialized variation of Christmas) has given almost everyone some access to the joy of this festival. And that is all to the good! Inside the church building, the nativity scene (perhaps the only Christmas custom not of pagan origin) will display God's great Christmas gift to us. (In his recent Apostolic Letter Admirabile Signum, Pope Francis called the  nativity scene "a living Gospel rising up from the pages of sacred Scripture.") Meanwhile, outside, the light of the Tree expresses our community's desire to share God's great gift of himself with all the world.

More Papers About Another Problematic War

As Karl Marx famously wrote in his 1852 essay, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. ... He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce." (And it would be a farce instead of tragedy were it not for the lives lost, injuries inflicted, and societies disrupted!)

Marx's famous line is an irresistible analogy, nonetheless. In this instance, the first time was The Pentagon Papers, the second time is what The Washington Post in a recent expose entitled "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War." (The above photo shows the front page of The NY Times on Sunday, June 13, 1971, the opening salvo in the release of The Pentagon Papers.)

Now I only know what I have read in The Washington Post and heard about on the news. But it really does sound a lot like a repeat performance of The Pentagon Papers - a collection of government documents, "Lessons Learned," intended to examine the history of the now 18 years-long US war in Afghanistan, including interviews with many who were directly involved, an internal government study that seems to confirm that the entire effort has been fundamentally and fatally flawed. If the accounts about these documents are accurate as presented, then like The Pentagon Papers from another failed war of the last century, they illustrate sadly how few lessons really have been learned.

I have always been wary of the isolationist wings of our two political parties - both the isolationist tendencies in the Democratic party that helped Obama's rise as an "anti-war" alternative to Clinton in 2008 and the isolationist tendencies in the Republican party that Trump played to in 2016. Still, the most effective argument against a continuing and substantial American involvement in its role as the major power in the world has long been the failures of a certain sort of American international adventurism and the failure of so much of the political class honestly to acknowledge and reckon with the consequences of these military and moral disasters.

Admittedly the American war in Afghanistan had a clear, coherently articulated, and eminently justifiable purpose when it was launched in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks by Al Quaeda (then apparently based in Afghanistan with the acquiescence of Afghanistan's fanatical and tyrannical Taliban  government). But the sense one gets from accounts of the contents of these documents is that all that changed as the war dragged on - seemingly without end and without any clear strategy to lead to an end. “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing," one army general is quoted as saying, in what may be the most widely quoted line in the early coverage of these documents.

In the wake of such a study, obviously, there needs to be a properly nuanced, non-ideological, non-partisan investigation and accounting (all overshadowed at the moment, of course, by more partisan preoccupations on both sides).  But the greater damage has already been done - a long war with an unconscionable number of military and civilian casualties, with tragically little to show for it, and another deadly blow inflicted on trust in government and the culture of truth which needs to underlie that trust.

Articles of Impeachment

The House of Representatives has moved closer this week to carrying out its constitutional function to adopt Articles of Impeachment against President Trump. Two Articles have been proposed for the Judiciary Committee to send to the full House - the first. on the President's abuse of the power of his office and the second on his obstructing Congress in its investigation of his conduct regarding Ukraine. For the complete text of the two articles, with commentary by Peter Baker of the NY Times, go to 

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/10/us/politics/articles-impeachment-document-pdf.html

Based on the already known public evidence, it would be hard to challenge the conclusion that the President "by such conduct, has demonstrated that he will remain a threat to the national security and the Constitution if allowed to remain in office, and has acted in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law." Perhaps more than any previous president - more than Johnson, more than Nixon, and certainly more than Clinton - Trump has acted in a manner that has warranted this extreme sanction impeachment, although given the almost certainty of acquittal in the Senate it is the impeachment itself which will likely represent the full extent of the sanction - a far cry from the full constitutional sanction of "removal from office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust, or profit under the United States."

The reality remains, moreover, that every previous presidential impeachment (or attempted impeachment in Nixon's case) may well have done as much or more harm than good, and that such a sorry consequence could likely be our outcome once again.

Andrew Johnson's was the most obvious example. A truly terrible president who opposed Congress's program of real Reconstruction, Johnson definitely deserved to be impeached and removed - although not for violating the (unconstitutional) Tenure of Office Act. The result of his famous acquittal - by one "profile in courage" vote - made Johnson an object of subsequent sympathy. In the long run this may have further helped the Confederate, anti-Reconstruction cause, and delayed African-American civil rights for another century. It also discredited the impeachment process, which made it that much harder to resurrect it against Nixon in the 1970s.

The Nixon impeachment (and the entire Watergate imbroglio of which it was a part) helped foster and nourish out ultra-adversarial political and journalistic culture, focused on personality and scandal - a high price to pay in the long-term for the short-term goal of getting Nixon out of office. The Clinton impeachment - an utterly unjustified partisan exercise - set the precedent that impeachment is one more weapon for a political party to use when it controls the House and the President is of the opposite party. 

None of this has been good for the country. So, if indeed Trump does deserve to be impeached, his almost certain acquittal in the Senate could conceivably strengthen his political position among his partisan supporters, while discrediting the constitutional process even further and certainly reinforcing the already destructive divisions in our society, in which (unlike with Nixon the 1970s) Americans are much less mutually persuadable by factual evidence and rational argument.