Antiwar.com Blog

The year is 1939, and the Soviet Union has just signed a non-aggression pact called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany. While the effects of this pact were myriad and far-reaching, what interests us here is the secret portion of the document dividing up the land in between the two rapidly growing empires. The tiny nation of Estonia, which only 20 years prior had successfully fought a war of independence against the Soviet Union, was handed back to the Soviets, and the Red Army marched in two months later to formally occupy and eventually annex it.

The Soviet military police were quick to root out (read: execute) opposition to their occupation, and a few months later, when the German-Soviet pact fell apart, the Red Army forced thousands of young Estonians into conscription. Estonia was the battleground of many violent German-Soviet clashes over the next few years.

Having twice fought Soviet invasions, and considering tens of thousands of Estonians were deported to Siberia in the post-war period, it is unsurprising that many people in Estonia don’t look back terribly fondly on their half century of Soviet occupation. It should not have come as a surprise then, either, when in April the Estonian government decided to move a large Soviet monument to the glories of the Red Army from the center of their capital city.

Perhaps more surprising is what happened next. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov condemned the move as ‘blasphemy’, and a resolution of the Russian Senate condemned Estonian officials as ‘neo-nazis’. All over a statue.

And that’s not all: the Russian Duma called for harsh economic sanctions and a few days later, as Moscow protesters hurled rocks at the Estonian embassy, the Russian government cut off oil and coal exports to the tiny Baltic republic. All over a statue.

And even that’s not the end of it. While Estonia and Russia continue to bicker over what ought to be a relatively minor matter, it spirals into an enormous international incident. The European Union has criticized Russia for its reaction, and NATO has warned Russia to crack down on the protesters. Russia, for its part, has lashed out at Western ‘connivance’ with Estonia.

Did I mention this whole thing is about a statue?

Geoffrey Perret discusses his new book Commander In Chief: How Truman, Johnson, and Bush Turned a Presidential Power into a Threat to America’s Future and how the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq and the consequences for Americans.

MP3 here. (16:57)

Geoffrey Perret was educated at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley. He was enlisted in the U.S. Army for three years and is the author of the acclaimed books Ulysses S. Grant and Eisenhower. He lives in England with his wife.

for women. Not only are military sexual assaults on the rise (there were about 3,000 assaults reported last year–up 24%), at the Department of Veteran’s Affairs woman’s trauma recovery program in Palo Alto, Calif., 78 percent of women being treated for PTSD were admitted with military sexual trauma. It is time to quit sending women to Iraq. It is also time to quit sending men to Iraq. Let’s bring the troops home to their families now.

Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-Md.) is no stranger to war. He signed up with the Marines in 1964 and went to Vietnam in the grimmest, bloodiest days of the war. He survived a shot to the chest, and spent the decades afterward studying foreign policy, history, and why nations go to war.

Gilchrest supported the 2002 authorization for war against Iraq: “Blessed are the peacemakers who freed Europe from the yoke of Nazism,” he said in a floor speech. “Blessed are the peacemakers whose save people of Kuwait from Saddam Hussein. It is not a matter for us as peacemakers of if we go into Iraq. It is a matter of when we do it, how we do it, and who we do it with.”

Within two years of that vote, after taking multiple trips to Iraq, Gilchrest repudiated that decision. He has become a member of the small but vocal antiwar Republican caucus in Congress.

Reason Magazine’s David Weigel has a revealing in-depth interview with Gilchrest today.

Remember how I dreamt of more national dialogue on the war from a sane perspective? It seems the Washington Post has the precise opposite hope: They want the antiwar candidates, Ron Paul and Mike Gravel, out of the debates. These debates are “cluttered,” apparently, by too much focus on the evil of US imperialism, which is bankrupting Americans, corrupting our culture, and recruiting more fanatics in anti-American terror groups.

After all, why confuse the American public with off-topic, taboo talk of how the maniacs of the War Party still want to nuke Iran, or talk about how the US shouldn’t be policing the world in the first place? Shouldn’t we instead hear the six or seven respectable candidates from each party, discussing the ins and outs of health care and trade policy that none of them understand, or waxing passionate and empty on who is the real champion of God, country, equality, family, the middle class, safe schools, safe neighborhoods, a clean environment and a strong economy?

Paul and Gravel actually say something important, and thus they are just too fringe. There you have it: The supposedly liberal Washington Post is as much a shill for the establishment, including the warfare state, as any other paper or network. Don’t rock the boat.

Those who know that there’s an alternative to this establishment press, a news source that understands that war should be a mainstream issue, discussed in every debate with more substance than “we should support the troops and win this thing by stopping it from being mismanaged,” can help keep the flame of truth alive by going here.

Thanks to Lew Rockwell for the Wash Post link.

Over the last few years, I’ve come to understand that the only meaningful difference between the New York Times and the New York Post is that the latter is occasionally good for a chuckle. The two rags take equally insouciant approaches to reality. Witness Patricia Cohen parroting what her Sociology 101 instructor told her about Herbert Spencer:

It is true that political interpretations of Darwinism have turned out to be quite pliable. Victorian-era social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer adopted evolutionary theory to justify colonialism and imperialism, opposition to labor unions and the withdrawal of aid to the sick and needy.

While the last two items are beyond the scope of this site (but read this and this if you’re interested in, say, facts), the bit about colonialism and imperialism is rich. Herbert Spencer was the premier anti-colonial, anti-imperial thinker of his age – perhaps of any age. If the great British classical liberal were around today, he’d make most lefties look like Bill Kristol on matters of foreign policy. Good grief, check out these lines from Spencer’s essay “Patriotism” (1902):

To me the cry – “Our country, right or wrong!” seems detestable. By association with love of country the sentiment it expresses gains a certain justification. Do but pull off the cloak, however, and the contained sentiment is seen to be of the lowest. …

Some years ago I gave my expression to my own feeling – anti-patriotic feeling, it will doubtless be called – in a somewhat startling way. It was at the time of the second Afghan war, when, in pursuance of what were thought to be “our interests,” we were invading Afghanistan. News had come that some of our troops were in danger. At the Athenæum Club a well-known military man – then a captain but now a general – drew my attention to a telegram containing this news, and read it to me in a manner implying the belief that I should share his anxiety. I astounded him by replying – “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves.”

I foresee the exclamation which will be called forth. Such a principle, it will be said, would make an army impossible and a government powerless. It would never do to have each soldier use his judgment about the purpose for which a battle is waged. Military organization would be paralyzed and our country would be a prey to the first invader.

Not so fast, is the reply. For one war an army would remain just as available as now – a war of national defence. In such a war every soldier would be conscious of the justice of his cause. He would not be engaged in dealing death among men about whose doings, good or ill, he knew nothing, but among men who were manifest transgressors against himself and his compatriots. Only aggressive war would be negatived, not defensive war.

Of course it may be said, and said truly, that if there is no aggressive war there can be no defensive war. It is clear, however, that one nation may limit itself to defensive war when other nations do not. So that the principle remains operative.

But those whose cry is – “Our country, right or wrong!” and who would add to our eighty-odd possessions others to be similarly obtained, will contemplate with disgust such a restriction upon military action. To them no folly seems greater than that of practising on Monday the principles they profess on Sunday.

Ponder that awhile, ye wimpy progressives and bloodthirsty wingnuts. For more of Herbert Spencer’s actual views on imperialism, militarism, authoritarianism, and corporate-statism, click here. For more ignorance and mendacity on every topic, keep reading the New York Times.