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From the Diaries - promoted by Meteor Blades]
I'm sure you all heard that last week, Newt Gingrich argued the U.S. was facing World War III as a result of developments in the Middle East. I'm sure that most of you reacted as I did to this - with a bit of annoyance and disdain; "there goes Newt again," content to believe he is simply making a lame effort to rally flagging support for Republican policies.
But today, I have been reconsidering this. I think that what Newt has been saying is incredibly significant, and we ought to be paying it a great deal more attention than we have been.
What Newt is proposing is nothing short of the radical mobilization of the entire American nation behind a war effort led by the far right - that "calls for restraint would fall away" if Americans adopted his framing. It could become the pivot around which the GOP shifts into a very new, and extremely ugly, mode of governance - turning the nation into an all-out war state with repressive World War I-esque laws meant to silence dissent and force the population to work even harder to support neo-con policies without any option to do otherwise.
Frontpaged at My Left Wing
So far, Bush has been running the Iraq War and the bigger "War on Terror" exactly as President Johnson ran Vietnam. Like LBJ, Bush has preferred a limited war. Not limited in terms of what is considered acceptable on the battlefield, but limited in terms of what the American population is asked to sacrifice. Bush, like LBJ, has refused to raise taxes for the war, and has believed that he could promote his economic agenda without the war affecting it. LBJ did not want to mobilize the country as had happened during World War II, he knew there would be no support for it, and Bush has used the exact same thinking.
I believe that Newt wants to change that entirely. What he has concluded is that for the Republican Party to not only survive, but truly leave its stamp on this country, the "limited war" notion must be abandoned, and instead we need to reorient our society, politics, and economy around the war - World War III in his language. It is extremely significant to note what parallel Newt drew (as reported by the Seattle Times' David Postman, who broke the story):
An historian, Gingrich said he has been studying recently how Abraham Lincoln talked to Americans about the Civil War, and what turned out to be a much longer and deadlier war than Lincoln expected.
Like Bush and LBJ, Lincoln initially thought he could fight a limited war, that the South would be quickly crushed and that US society would otherwise go on like normal. You see this in the 1861 call for troops, the early strategy, the fact that in 1861-62 the Republicans pushed an ambitious domestic political program from the transcontinental railroad to homesteading - things that had nothing to do with the war.
After the disaster on the Peninsula in 1862, however, Lincoln began to believe that this limited approach was mistaken. In later 1862 and 1863 he began to mobilize the North for total war. Importantly, one major aspect of this was the clamping down on dissent. "Copperheads" - Northern Democrats who opposed the war - were harassed and jailed. Many rights, like habeas corpus, were suspended - it was a war, after all. Lincoln eventually won the war, but I suspect that isn't what Newt is interested in - instead he seems to be more intrigued by Lincoln's success in reshaping U.S. politics, in constructing a lasting Republican dominance.
If that isn't worrying you yet, let's fast-forward 50 years to World War I. Newt didn't make that parallel, and for good reason - if he had, alarm bells would already have gone off. I say we should raise that alarm, because the parallels are frightening.
In 1914, when World War I broke out, the U.S. was experiencing a wave of Progressive reform. Americans wanted to keep the war at arm's length, and not even the 1915 sinking of the Lusitania could change those attitudes.
But by 1917, things were changing. For reasons I do not yet fully understand, Progressive reforms had run out of steam, and the 1916 elections saw a resurgent conservatism. The result was that by 1917, American politicians had undergone a shift in thinking. By April 1917, President Wilson and most members of Congress had now believed that the war and Germany in particular posed a threat to America's very existence. There was no obvious provocation like the sinking of the Lusitania to cause this. Instead, it was a "sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought."
That quoted phrase comes from one of the most important essays of the 20th century - War is the Health of the State by Randolph Bourne. Bourne was a young liberal intellectual who watched in horror as a nation once at peace suddenly shifted into war mode. His reflections are worth quoting at some length:
With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war...
...The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.
The backdrop Bourne wrote that chilling description was one of a widespread government effort to silence all dissent. First an Espionage Act was passed in 1917 to silence those accused of helping wartime enemies of the U.S., but far worse was the 1918 Sedition Act, which
made it a crime to utter, print, write or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States' form of government
It was under this law that my namesake, Eugene V. Debs, in whose honor and memory I adopted this username 6 years ago, was thrown into prison for 10 years for speaking out against the draft. Though the law was repealed in 1921, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it in Schenck v. United States.
Along with the Sedition Act came the 1917 Immigration Act, which severely curtailed immigration from southern and eastern Europe (immigrants from those regions were scapegoated as bearers of poverty, criminality, and sedition). In 1918 and 1919 the Palmer Raids were conducted against the U.S. left, one consequence of which was the creation of the FBI.
World War II did not see these same events, but only because the war effort was promoted by a liberal Democratic administration. In fact, right after the war ended conservatives took control of Congress and began the Red Scare, silencing left-wing dissent in the name of anti-Communism.
Surely, then, you can see where I am going with this. Newt Gingrich is pushing a frame for Republicans to adopt politically, for Americans to buy into mentally and emotionally, a frame designed to radically reshape American politics and to crush dissent. Newt again:
There is a public relations value, too. Gingrich said that public opinion can change "the minute you use the language" of World War III. The message then, he said, is "'OK, if we're in the third world war, which side do you think should win?"
Ideas like that have dire consequences for us all. If the Republicans adopt Newt's strategy, we will see new Sedition Acts - in fact if not in name. As the nation is placed on a war footing, the creeping desire to silence dissenters that has characterized American discourse since September 11 will explode and be provided with a powerful new impetus.
And why would the GOP want to radicalize the nation, mobilize it for total war? To remain in power.
Realize that we are facing a protracted economic crisis and the likelihood of recession. We are also facing the strong possibility of Republican electoral collapse in November.
Republicans would be able to solve both threats with the adoption of a World War III language. It would allow them to convince Americans that only war - all out war - will bring economic prosperity back. Those reluctant to agree will be convinced on the basis of war - "we're in the third world war, which side do you think should win?" as Newt was quoted. And of course, it would allow them to solidify their political position - "we're in the third world war, so are you sure you want to elect Democrats in a time of war?" as we might assume Newt would say.
Remember the implicit point Newt is making here - the "war on terror" language is not sufficiently motivating Americans to vote Republican. Only all-out war and language reflecting it can achieve that.
If Newt is successful we could see a draft, new wars against Iran and Syria and others, Americans being coerced into taking jobs for the war effort (at lower wages in worse conditions at big defense contractors), a massive disruption of public life - and to top it off, a new set of laws and powers just like in 1862 or 1918 to ensure no dissent can become a political threat.
Of course, I could well be wrong, and Newt may just be pissing into the wind. But I think the road is open for Republicans to do this and do it successfully if they wish, and that means we must be extremely vigilant in preventing it.
One last parallel. In 1938, the Nazi leadership in Berlin began receiving reports that the German economy was about to go bust; the command economy Hitler had put into place, ramshackle to begin with, was on its last legs. Hitler and his advisers did not want to go to war until 1942, but faced with this information, they moved more quickly to provoke war. The Jews, whose roles had been circumscribed but tolerated, were now actively suppressed with Kristallnacht being the prime example. The German people were prepared to go to war - in war, Hitler knew, you could demand any amount of sacrifice from the population and they would never resist.
Is this parallel valid? I, for one, hope we never find out. But that means we must watch Newt like a hawk.