The first thing that inspired me about Barack Obama, other than the fact that he's the best American orator in at least 70 years, was his incisive, pragmatic, moral, and eloquently articulated opposition to the invasion of Iraq.
The invasion of Afghanistan, of course, has a different moral calculus. Opponents of invading Iraq were not hard to find (even if few people were concerned finding or listening to them) but you have to dig deep to find the equivalent for Afghanistan. The American war against Afghanistan was the most broadly accepted war since the war on Japan.
American action in Afghanistan was indeed just, BUT (and everyone has a big but, in the immortal words of Pee-Wee Herman) a just cause does not excuse a flawed policy.
Afghanistan was a legitimate target because the 9/11 hijackers were trained at camps in Afghanistan by a group whose leaders were still there in the wake of 9/11. But what did we do?
We sent but a handful of soldiers. Those soldiers were tasked with overthrowing the government of Afghanistan, rather than capturing or killing the members of the organization that had attacked us. THAT job, the job that I can say without pomposity or delusional grandeur that I would have given my life to, THAT job was left to local warlords.
So, we overthrew the government of Afghanistan and, accordingly, had to assume all the responsibilities for that country. But the guilty parties of 9/11? They melted away.
So for the past 8 years, America has been bleeding blood and wealth in Afghanistan in the "cause" of building a "stable Afghan government", which is akin to spending countless lives and dollars in the "cause" of building a solar-powered flashlight.
Instead of using the best-trained and best-equipped warriors in the world to hunt down the people who murdered 3,000 Americans, our military is being used to do something that has proven impossible over the last 3,000 years: governing Afghanistan.
And President Obama, despite his eloquence and sobriety vis a vis Iraq, is prepared to take the lure. The lure taken by Alexander the Great, the lure taken by the King of England, the lure taken by the Kremlin, and the lure taken by George W. Bush.
Obama is prepared to nearly double our troop commitment in Afghanistan. Obama aims to double down under the premise that flooding an insurgency-riddled, rubble-strewn, third-world country will work in Afghanistan despite the fact that Obama was one of the very few "wise men" who understood precisely that this was fantasy when applied to Iraq.
So what makes Afghanistan different than Iraq? or Vietnam? Because our cause in Afghanistan is more just than it was in the others? That seems to be the assumption of President Obama, but to believe that is to give into the lure of mistaking passion with common sense. And realist as I am, I am disappointed that my President is being seduced by this lure.
The mission in Afghanistan now is not to catch the guilty; it is a narcissistic and naive and know-nothing attempt to kill people who might someday BE guilty.
It goes like this: since bin Laden and Mullah Omar are LONG fucking gone, we have to hunt SOMEONE, right? So, we patrol. And we get shot at. Why? Did the guy that just shot at us have something to do with 9/11? No. He shot at us because he doesn't want us in his country. Okay. We better kill him them, because if he doesn't like us, then he doesn't like democracy. And if he doesn't like democracy, then he might try another 9/11.
This is a self-fulfilling and self-perpetuating and self-imposed hell that we are marching into. What is it, what is the allure, what is the lure, about the poorest country in the world that deceives everyone from Alexander the Great to Barack Hussein Obama into thinking that they can govern it?I suppose everyone wants what they can't have, even if it isn't worth anything.
There is a myth that has attached itself to the reality of the Holocaust. This is not the absurdist fantasy of Holocaust deniers, who hold that the act itself was a myth. No, this much larger, much more insidious myth is held by most people who acknowledge the overall facts of the Holocaust itself.
The myth to which I'm referring is the one that holds that the vast majority of the German people did not know, could NOT have know, would NEVER have approved of, could NEVER have directly participated in the greatest crime of all time, in the willful murder of babies torn from their mothers' arms.
The fact, which I've only just realized in all its awfulness (as if it were not already awful enough) is that the overwhelming majority of Germans assented to the extermination of the Jews and that millions of them participated in knowingly facilitating the murder.
When Germans in EVERY German town and city saw their Jewish neighbors arrested by their own government, saw other Germans move into the Jews' houses, and heard of thousands of Jews being shipped to the east from public train stations, where exactly did they think those Jews were going? Switzerland? Palestine? Someplace BETTER than the neighborhoods where they had lived for decades?
This is a difficult myth to unravel, perhaps because of how awful the findings are. Subconsciously, this must be why we cling to this myth, but it's really quite stunning how absurd the myth appears if we take a step back.
The myth tells us that what "happened to" Germany could "happen to" anyone, that any society could be whipped into a murderous frenzy given the adequate demagoguery and that the most "civilized" people can do unspeakable things in the name of "orders".
The myth tells us that the lesson of the Holocaust is somehow a lesson about the dangers of organized mobs or cold industrialism or a lack of civil liberties, the type of thing that could happen almost anywhere in a crisis.
The problem with this myth is that there are no Germans in it, and no Jews. The Germans tried to exterminate the Jews. No other society. Only Germany. The Holocaust happened because the Germans did it. And the Germans did it because their society was overwhelmingly antisemitic to a degree and depth that surpassed the most vicious strains of American racism.
The actual killing of the Jews is what one thinks of when one hears "Holocaust". But let's pretend that the Jews weren't actually murdered. Let's assume that World War II never happened. Let's assume that Hitler had swallowed up all the German territory he did and then had stopped. What would this alternate, "peaceful" Germany have looked like?
Well, Jews (far less than 1% of the German population, just to give you a sense of the pathologically disproportionate extent of the obsession) would have no legal rights. Jews would have no civil, political, or human rights. Jews would be forbidden from participating in society, would be spat upon and beaten in public, would be arbitrarily robbed and arrested, and would die either in a walled-off ghetto or a slave labor camp. But they would not be systematically murdered.
So, even if we leave out that "last" part, that part that makes it the Holocaust, what would we think of Germany? The circumstances described above are not really hypothetical at all; they existed in Germany when the war began. So, after all of these abuses were being heaped upon the Jews, in public, by private and public citizens alike, how can we think that "most" Germans did not know about the "final" solution?
As this becomes clearer, we begin to realize that horror of this hatred was simply common sense in Germany. We realize that Germans accepted the inherent evil of the Jew just as unblinkingly as Americans accept the inherent evil of dictatorship or the proposition that the earth is round.
We realize that the hatred that defined the German attitude towards Jews on the macro level was so ingrained that it is difficult to describe it as "evil", since that would seem to consign all of Germany to a Bushworld rendering of blanket guilt. But what else can we conclude?
A point of comparison helps any study, so let's think about American racism. American racism at its worst (let's say, Mississippi in 1850 or 1950) approximated German antisemitism in the sense that blacks and Jews were seen as "socially dead", incapable and undeserving of dignity and inherently separate and unworthy of citizenship.
But there was a fundamental difference. In America, blacks were meant to work. In Germany, Jews were meant to die. In America, mass media ultimately shamed the country into granting blacks full civil and legal and political and human rights, even if most white Americans still kept their distance from any actual black folks. In Germany, mass media ultimately was used to inspire the nation not to liberate, but to exterminate.
The evidence of mass murderous hatred is so clear, so obvious, so beyond rationale refutation, that it hides in plain slight. How could any person actually think that the Holocaust did not reflect the society that carried it out?
One must believe that Hitler single-handedly brainwashed the most literate nation in the world to do the most unspeakable thing in history and, what's more, he did so in a society that had no murderous predisposition towards the Jews before Hitler appeared as a Gorilla from the mist (and was elected Chancellor).
All this, of course, makes it more terrible. As if a man capable of brainwashing tens of millions of people weren't terrible enough, what of the prospect of tens of millions of people WILLINGLY doing what the Germans did? Because that's what happened.
Having recently indulged in the taboo of reassessing Germany's conduct in World War II, I was shocked at how legitimate the grievances of Germany were. What is truly tragic about the entire experience, however, is that Germany, at its heart, was sick. The Sickness is what killed Germany.
It was not invading the Soviet Union. It was not declaring war on the United States. Despite the delusional grandeur of Germany taking on the entire world, Germany STILL would have won their war. Except...
Germany lost the war because, as it pursued its legitimate military and political goals with unmatched organization and precision, it was all the while tearing the heart out of humanity itself.
Even as it tried to make war, German "soldiers" were occupied with murdering millions of women and children, including German citizens whose education and resources and (former) patriotism could have won the war for the Reich, had the Reich not been obsessed with mudering 1% of its citizens.
It happened. It happened because an entire society wanted it to happen and allowed it to happen and DID it themselves. The Sickness exists. And thank God I don't subscribe to the Nazi theory of racial determinism. Because I'm half German.
