Rain Dances, Cowrie Shells, And Witch Doctors - A Conservative In Liberal Country

Parker Hammond lived in Fairmont Park, a leafy enclave of Northwest Washington, DC, a white, upper middle class, professional neighborhood, uniformly progressive and home of No Hate Resides Here, Black Lives Matter, All Are Welcome banners and lawn signs.  There were no chinks in the neighborhood’s armor, no doubts or second thoughts about the gender spectrum, affirmative action, redistribution of wealth, or the evils of capitalism. It was a homogeneous, hermetically sealed, committed place to live.  It was no different than the bland, plump, and prosperous suburbs of the Fifties.

The cars in Fairmont Park were all the same – Prius, Volt, Tesla, or hybrid Toyota.  The dinners were all ethnically eclectic, locally-sourced, and organic. No flags flew on the Fourth  of July or Memorial Day, no floats down Mass Ave in honor of the fallen.  Church on Sunday was desultory and prayer a parents’ thing.  If ever there was a neighborhood of surety and one that slept well, it was Fairmont Park.

For a conservative like Parker Hammond life was as simple, ordinary, and uncomplicated as that of his neighbors as long as he observed decorum, and respected received wisdom and political propriety.  His neighbors never suspected his radical leanings because the ethos of political homogeneity was so universal that they talked to him as openly as if he were one of theirs about the devilishly misogynist, homophobic, demented Donald Trump; about the rise of The Black Man, the heroism of the Transgender Woman, and the solidarity of the Congressional women of color.  They assumed tribal conformity and fidelity to tribal laws, and never expected a contrary word.

Parker had a number of friends whom he had known for the many years he and his family had lived in Fairmont Park, and during those happy years of pre-school, kindergarten, and elementary school talk of children, teachers, playgrounds, and trash pick-up was enough to fill a raft of chicken dinners; but when the birds had flown the nest, little convenient social glue remained, and the cracks in the friendships began to show.  Although Parker had been determined to keep his own counsel and to express his conservative views elsewhere, he was put upon. His neighbors caught the scent of contrariness, of a conservative in the guise of a liberal, and were not content until they had outed the outlier.

To keep calm and to preserve the familiar light chatter of childhood days, he became adept at deflecting pointed remarks about Critical Race Theory, black empowerment, the gender spectrum, and Wall Street greed; and turned every reference to the innocuous. 

“Speaking of curriculum reform”, he said, “what do you think of the new French teacher?”  Language studies were safe, neutral ground, or so Parker thought; but his friends pounced on even that.  “French”, they laughed, “the language of Bourbons, Louis XVI, and the colonialist post-Napoleonic hegemonists.  Why should we impose that language on our children?”

“Nice weather we’re having”, turned into a diatribe against conservative ignorance about global warming.  The unseasonable warmth was but the first step into an environmental Hades, a final, universal conflagration that conservatives not only did not accept but had caused. 

His comment about the beautiful new gym teacher – young, lithe, runway ready, and Hollywood primed, biding her time until her inevitable trip to the West Coast – was dismissed as antiquated, misogynist, pseudo-patriarchal abuse.  Her declared Hollywood ambition, her proud sexuality and vital sexual spirit she had translated into the grace and enthusiasm of acrobatics were ignored.  Her beauty was to be overlooked, dismissed as irrelevant, and inconsequential – despite the fact that all the girls in the school wanted to be her and all the boys wanted her.

Finally, and long overdue Parker spoke up.  He had had enough of his friends’ cancelling dismissal of the Tudors, the Romanoffs, and the Pahlavis;  their revisionism and historical dimness.  He was magnificent, a Williams Jennings Bryant or Frederick Douglass. He was a demon, a man possessed.  When he drew breath and looked around, he was satisfied.

The Fieldings were nonplussed.  They had, like all Fairmont Park neighbors, thought that science and politics were settled.  How could such unexpected, crude and antagonistic sentiments come from a friend? And how could they not have known or even suspected his true colors?

For his part, he had become increasingly bored with the Fieldings, their rattling on about old political saws, their intellectual insularity and lack of curiosity, their morass.  At his age, far nearer the end of life than the beginning, he was increasingly impatient with the chatter that had occupied him in the hot tub while the kids played on the swings but which the Fieldings continued.  Better a solitary life without meaningless interruption than a nattering one that passed for friendship.

All is supposed to settle as time goes on, find its proper level, which is what retiring and doing nothing is all about.  Reflection, re-consideration, a prayer perhaps; but nothing disruptive.  Life is supposed to end on a glidepath, not a rutted runway or foundered in a tangle of mangroves; so what was all this scrambling of progressive eggs all about?  Why the glee in upsetting apple carts? Or re-rearranging knick-knacks on the coffee table?

In such a community of closed doors, it felt good to slam them.  

Where political belief has become an article of faith, disagreement is a sin.  There can be no more difference of opinion about the rightness of climate action, gender fluidity, or the rise of the black man than there can about the nature of the Trinity.  No questions about whether Jesus was God and Man, all God, sometimes one and sometimes the other, borne of he Father, co-existent with the Father, or any of the other apostasies debated during the Second Century.  Life in Fairmont Park was like Christianity after the Council of Nicaea.  Right and wrong had been settled, inquiry and debate were unnecessary and tantamount to heresy.

So Parker was branded an apostate, a heretic, and an outlier.  He was no longer welcome. This isolation had a kind of purity – shedding snakeskin, the histogenesis of a moth, becoming someone neither defined by others nor by opposition to them.

It was initially hard to adjust to this new life, and each time he passed a front lawn festooned with rainbow signs or matrons still wearing COVID masks the old orneriness returned.  It was definitely orneriness since he had enough of a Tolstoian perspective of history to expect repetitive cycles of political fol-de-rol turned into true belief, territorialism, and war and not to get exercised either way.  Diffidence pissed people off more than deeply held belief ever did.

Diffidence – a layman’s nihilism – was the soft pillow of Parker’s later years.  We all die alone, said Tolstoy, so better get used to the idea, contemplate mortality and leave lunacy behind.  A hard prescription to follow but clarity would come, an ‘aha’ experience like that of Ivan Ilyich; but not yet, by no means not yet.

Toy Soldiers - Peace At Any Price, The Fanciful Dreams Of A Hopeless Idealist

Artemis Jones was a child of the post-war generation a woman who grew up in the heady times of American political hegemony.  The world was American in spirt, philosophy, will, and ethos.  Germany and Japan had been roundly defeated and the Soviets shown what would happen to them if they overstepped their geopolitical interests.  Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war with Japan to a consummate close, but more importantly they showed the Russians what to expect if they got out of line. 

 

Fourth of July parades meant something.  They were exuberant expressions or native patriotism.  There were few dissenters in post-war America, a few residual socialists in Wisconsin and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but by and large the Fourth was a universal celebration of national pride. 

Of course that nationalistic euphoria could not be sustained - the world has a way of intruding on idealistic hopefulness - and soon America was mired in an unwinnable war in Korea, followed by a disastrous misadventure in Vietnam, on the heels of which came the half-hearted military excursions in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

After the statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled in Baghdad Square, George Bush, tricked out in flight suit on the decks of an American aircraft carrier, declared victory, and time for the Iraqi people to determine their own, particular path to freedom and democracy. 

Whistlin' Dixie it not unexpectedly turned out, as Abolhassan Banisadr and his Islamist militias took to the streets to fill the power vacuum.  Leaving the political future to 'the Iraqi people', meant turning the country over to venal, self-interested terrorist groups, but the hard lifting had been carried out, and was time for Iraqis to man up. The result - political chaos. Extended military rule was proposed - stay in Iraq until true structural reform had been effected and all seeds of Islamic intent neutered - but America was having none of it. Time to move on. 

The same was true in Afghanistan - after years of a punishing, unwinnable war against the Taliban, let the people decide, American troops were withdrawn, and the country went back to a medieval caliphate. 

So, Artemis Jones, despite her earlier pride in America's defeat of fascism and imperialism, changed her tune.  War was no way to solve disputes, and was only a regressive return to Paleolithic barbarism. She had become a Neville Chamberlain 'Peace at any price' pacifist. 

 

It was hard for her college friends, all of whom had become conservative over time  - the old adage, 'Give a liberal enough time and he will become conservative' was never more true of her Seven Sisters, privileged social elite who had had their dalliance with progressivism but who had returned to the fold - to understand how Artemis, icon of intellectual brilliance and philosophical insight at Vassar, had come so beholden to a faded, discredited philosophy. 

'It's the right thing to do', Artemis said, 'the only thing', and she joined with her Yale colleagues in following the Reverend William Sloan Coffin in his One World peace movement - disarmament at all costs, reductions in force, and a return to civil sanity.  A failed incentive of course, given history's lessons of persistent, perennial aggression.  The Hundred Years War was just a trifle compared to the bloody military escapades of Genghis Khan and his hundreds of thousands of brutal-minded cavalry; and an afterthought to Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot, responsible for millions of deaths of innocent civilians in mindless attempts to establish communist hegemony. 

One would have thought that Artemis and her fellows would have come to their senses by the end of the Twentieth Century, one of the bloodiest in human history; but no, such is the persistence of idealism in the human breast - a simple, unproven belief in the natural goodness of Man and the ultimate outing of a verdant, compassionate, considerate, harmonious world. 

But no...she was as deeply committed to pacifism and the eventual coming of Utopia as fundamental Christians are about The Second Coming.  The world would see, sooner rather than later, that war, warfare, armed conflict, hostility, and competition are only social artifacts placed erroneously in the way of social and moral progress. 

When asked about WWII - after all a world dominated by genocidal, autocratic, hegemonic regimes could not in any way be acceptable - she demurred, happy with the outcome but retrospectively hopeful that a more peaceful solution could have been found.  She remained resolute that violence, no matter how appealingly logical it might seem at the time, only leads to more violence.  

It was her goal in life to assure that such world wars would never happen; but when questioned about powerful, unconcerned, and unintimidated regimes like those in Russia and China and whether military force could ever by contemplated, she once again demurred.  If we worked hard enough with enough moral authority, war would never be needed. 

The world is at war - Ukraine, Iran, Palestine, and the racist, Islamic incursions in Nigeria, North Africa, and the Middle East.  Western Europe, thanks to its ignoble assumptions of diversity, is awash in separatist, militant, radical Islam - a movement which if not deterred and neutered, will most certainly end in violence.  China is ready to unleash historic aggression against Taiwan if it continues to refuse re-integration with the Communist mainland.  Russia is as vigilant for an Islamic resurgence in the Caucasus. 

Yet and still Artemis held firmly to her principles of non-violence. Unless some stood up against the persistent and increasingly violent aggression everywhere, it would go on unabated.  Only she and her pacifist colleagues stood in the way between world mayhem and international civil order. 

The American Left in its increasing use of the term 'Hitler' to describe any conservative policy or political stance has done more to distort historical reality than any academic revisionist. The war against Hitler and Naziism was a just war - not only because it defied Hitler's overt attempt to create a thousand year Reich which extended from East to West, but because of his genocidal desire to rid the world of Jews.  Now that everyone with views opposing the progressive Left is condemned as a Hitlerian racist, evil and satanically destructive, the war to destroy Naziism loses its existential validity and makes 'peace at any price' acceptable once again. 

Artemis had trouble justifying the 9/11 terrorists - Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people and their denial of civil rights was certainly the root cause for Islamic frustration and anger, but such a bold, blatant attack on a civilian target was questionable at the very least. 

She never once withdrew her criticism of Israel for its armed response to Hamas terrorism or its attempts to eliminate Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.  Israel was and always will be seen as the racist aggressor.  The war in Gaza was entirely and unequivocally Israel's fault. 

Jesus was a pacifist and so were Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King - saints in the liberal pantheon, prophets of right, justice, and goodness - and their portraits were place above the mantlepiece in Artemis' living room.  Their spirit of universal brotherhood should never be forgotten. 

The best that can be said of all three is that their influence at least mitigated the horrors of war; but history shows that they had no influence whatsoever.  Not only were the Crusades sent to Jerusalem to kill Muslims in Jesus' name, but India was home to one of the most bloody communal violence the world had ever seen before Rwanda.  Millions of Hindus and Muslims were slaughtered in the name of religious equity.  Islam is not the religion of peace but the religion of violence.  Death to the infidel rings loud and clear now more than ever. 

Conservatives know that peace can be achieved in only two ways - armed standoff such as that in the Cold War where mutually assured nuclear destruction kept missiles in their silos for fifty years; and Pax Romana when one empire, the Roman, held absolute, complete sway. Peace as a concept is only academic, a result not of goodwill or best intentions but the result of geopolitics. 

Artemis sat in, knelt, marched, and protested for all her livelong days without one whit of impact or result.  Despite her many decades of peace at any price, the world has continued without interruption its violent ways.  Conflicts are still resolved in violence.  As Mao Tse Tung famously said, 'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. 

There are special plots in every cemetery for deluded, ingenuous, fabulists - idealists who no matter what the evidence or chronicles of history keep on believing that peace has a chance, that it can be the prevailing ethos of humanity, that it is possible.  The rest of the graves are for those who soldiered on in war and peace, taking life for the 'nasty, brutish, and short' sojourn that it is. 

Wars Are For Winning - America's Ignorance Of History, An Unwinnable War, And Ultimate Iranian Victory

The War in Iran should be over by now, but President Trump is still talking about negotiated deals, promises to denuclearize, keep the Strait of Hormuz open for shipping, recognition of Israel, and assurances that support of regional terrorists - Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, ISIS, and a range of other equally violent Muslim organizations which are committed to an Islamist caliphate - will cease. 

Whistlin' Dixie of course.  The regime of the mullahs has never once in its almost fifty years of theocratic rule backed off from its determination to annihilate the Jews and wipe Israel off the map, extend Islamic hegemony across the region, and continue to threated the United States, 'The Great Satan'.  Why would Trump possibly believe that the Iranians want peace and want to be brought back into the commonwealth of civilized nations?

So, against all historical advice from Machiavelli to Clausewitz to Kissinger, the American President with no clear objective in mind, launched attacks on the Iranian regime. While these attacks were successful - the Ayatollah was eliminated along with his inner circle of advisers - they did nothing to bring the country to heel.  Iran had tens of thousands of missiles and drones deployed throughout the country, hidden in deep underground silos which even with the best Israeli intelligence, escaped destruction. 

More important, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the real power in the country, is alive and well.  It is the force responsible for the murder of 30,000 peaceful protesters, a paramilitary army not stationed in barracks, encampments, and bases but scattered throughout the country and as effective as the Viet Cong as an enforcing, intimidating power.  The 'regime' may have been toppled but the wrong one. 

The attempts to eliminate the IRGC has been no different than America's attempts to destroy the Viet Cong in the War in Vietnam.  Rolling Thunder, a campaign in which thousands of giant B-52 bombers dumped their payloads on the critical Ho Chi Minh Trail, the main supply route from North to South, but the resilient Viet Cong simply went underground in tunnels and caves, waited until the bombers had passed, emerged, rebuilt the trail, and continued their effective village terror. 

The Iranian regime, however now it is constituted, is not alone in its fight against the United States.  America's arch-adversaries, Russia and China, let alone North Korea, continue to supply the country with thousands of drones and the wherewithal to produce missiles.  Iran is not a third world country without intellectual resources.  It is quite capable of building a nuclear capacity and a strong high-tech military. 

When asked what the purpose of the war is, the Trump Administration searches for answers. It is not regime change, they say, although after the first days of the war, the son of former Shah Reza Pahlavi went on national television to announce that he was ready to return to Iran and to oversee the building of a liberal democracy.  Only ridding the country of a regime responsible for the murder of so many innocent civilians would do. 

When that goal seemed impossible, the Trump Administration said that its purpose was to completely destroy Iran's military capability; but that proved to be just as hopeless.  Despite weeks of strategic bombing, Iranian drones and missiles were striking friends and foes alike. 

Then American attention turned to securing promises from the Iranians to keep the Straits of Hormuz open to shipping - an easy compromise since the Straits had always been open and under Iranian control; but the canny Iranians said that they would guarantee peaceful passage with conditions - unacceptable military and strategic conditions which would allow the regime to restore and rebuild. 

Finally, it has come down to 'a negotiated peace' which amounts to nothing less than a capitulation by the United States which was unable to topple the real regime, to destroy Iran's military capacity, and to extract concessions to cease and desist aggression in the Middle East. 

The media reported that the generals meeting with Trump in the War Room had even broached the nuclear option - do a Curtis Lemay and blow the whole bloody place off the map - but of course the calculus of nuclear warfare has changed since Harry Truman pushed the red button and unleased nuclear holocaust on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Wars are no longer for winning if civilian populations must be killed along with military personnel.   Hitler and Hirohito were considered existential enemies to the West and to the very code of freedom it espoused, and any measure to defeat them was acceptable. 

Iran and radical Islam are no less existential threats, but the Iranian population - at least in the eyes of American moral exceptionalists - is not complicit as was shown by the massive street demonstrations before the start of the war.  Blowing Iran off the face of the map would mean annihilating millions of faithful, good, democratic spirited, secular-minded civilians. 

So the war drags on with no end in sight, particularly with no good results for the Unites States.  No matter how the war ends, Iran will be the victor.  It will continue producing and shipping oil, it will slowly but surely rebuild its nuclear capacity, and will continue to support its claims to regional Islamic hegemony. 

'Never begin a war you are not confident of winning', Clausewitz observed. In this view, war is not an independent activity but a means to achieve political objectives. The use of force, coercion, and military action is necessary to compel an opponent to submit to one’s will. Clausewitz emphasized that the value of the political goal determines the sacrifices—military, economic, and human—that should be made to achieve it. If the cost of pursuing a goal exceeds its value, the goal must be abandoned. 

The problem with the war in Iran was that the Trump Administration never was even able to define what 'winning' was.  It is one thing to study the calculus of invasion - the costs of fighting and the value of victory - another thing altogether to struggle to define purpose; and in this indefinability, victory was conceded to the Iranians before the first bomb was dropped. 

The greatest leader in world history, Genghis Khan, knew exactly what he was about when he led tens of thousands of horsemen thundering out of the steppes.  He wanted to conquer the known world, to bring each and every tribe, region, territory and jurisdiction under Mongol-Turk rule.  In the end, his empire was one of history's biggest and most powerful, and he did it only one way - with the brutal force of arms 

Genghis Khan was a charismatic and fearsome figure.  He and his armies were known for their cruelty and barbarity, and the sight of them advancing across the battlefield in a storm of dust, the earth shaking with the thunder of 50,000 hooves, was enough to send enemies into retreat. The thought alone of this terrible, bloodthirsty, and mighty warrior was enough to rout enemy armies. Genghis Khan was a man of absolute will and power, a frightening presence of power and vengeance.  He was a horseman of the Apocalypse. 

 

There have been many successful armies in the world.  Julius Caesar, Scipio Africanus, Pompey the Great, and Marcus Agrippa were as brilliant generals as Genghis Khan, and brought Roman organization, discipline, and management to the battle.  They won because of superior ability, armaments, and military thinking; yet it was Genghis Khan who, with an almost untamed savagery, conquered the world.  At its height the Mongol Empire extended from far eastern China to the Danube, the biggest empire the world has ever seen. 

Genghis Khan was a brilliant strategist, canny politician who through tact, intimidation, and offers of great spoils, enticed the warlike Turkic tribes to join his armies, nearly doubling their strength.  However, it was not only the might of his imposing armies, nor his ability to manage, discipline, and control such a large and diverse military force; nor even his tactical acumen and understanding of calculated risk which assured victory.  It was his indomitable, absolute, unalloyed will. 

Khan had no qualms, moral reservations, or ethical hesitancy.  Wars were for winning, civilians were complicit enemies, and total annihilation of any opposition was his modus belli. Not only would defeated populations be without the wherewithal to mount a resistance or counterattack, they would never dare to incite the bloody, murderous, savage wrath of the conqueror.

We have come a long way from Genghis Khan.  Many say we have progressed and become more considerate, humane, and compassionate.  We should look to an end of war, not ways to improve it.  Many others say that the calculus - human nature - has not changed.  Wars will always be a feature of human society and as such should be fought with only one thing in mind - winning.