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The Long March

In 1947, the world was beginning to recognize that it was at the start of what would eventually be known as the “Cold War”. We in the West were faced with an aggressive empire bent on world domination was already at work subverting the will of democracies throughout Europe and the United States. Yet in America, after participating in and witnessing the effects of a war that that resulted in the deaths of 52 million people world wide and the applied concepts of genocide to an entire people in Europe, Americans were once again faced with the very real possibility that the war they had just completed fwas not as “over” as they had hoped.

Men of that generation expressed their primary reason for fighting and sacrificing everything during that war with a simple phrase;

“I fought so my kids wouldn’t have to”

The true cost of the failure of the world to deal with the First World War was not lost on the generation that had to fight the Second World War. They saw personally that to delay solving a problem or to even deny that the problem exists ensures that the problem becomes so big that the horror of war is the only solution left. Yet, a war that fought in the machine age would always result in the deaths of millions of civilians and members of the armed services. The days of Chivalry ended at Gettysburg, but it took two wars after that for the world to realize the truth. War was no longer limited to the armies in battlefield, in the machine age, the civilian in the factory was considered a combatant, the home they lived in a legitimate target for destruction.

In 1947, the free world was faced with yet another threat, a threat every bit as big as the threat it had just faced from Fascism. In those days, the future of the west was far from certain. Members of Western Academia and many in the political class, long enthralled with the concepts of socialism and the ‘sovereignty of the state’ over the rights of the individual opportunistically decried the “inequities of the free world, capitalism and the government of democracies” and proclaimed loudly that one day soon that it was all but certain that Communism would win in the battle of civilizations against the evil Capitalist world.

In 1947, if you had told anyone alive at that time that the “Cold War” would go on for another two generations, risk nuclear devastation on a global scale, cost hundreds of thousands of lives in wars all across the globe and cost trillions of dollars, what do you think that many of that generation would have said in response?

My guess is that many of those people would have said;

“Yeah, but do we win in the end?”

And when you tell them that yes, in the end we do win, that there was no global thermonuclear war and that Communism was eventually shown to be the false religion we all knew it to be, they would say “Hooray” and then ask what they need to do to get started. What people of 1947 knew is we have lost in ours; and that is the cost of losing. They knew the stakes of the battle at hand, but we cant quite get our minds around it. It wasn’t just expensive to fight the Cold War; it was expensive beyond measure to fail to fight the war. The long streams of refugees from Communism that came throughout the Cold War reinforced our will to continue the fight. That generation knew that to lose wasn’t just an inconvenience; it was a death sentence. We saw the refugees from slavery form their long sad lines throughout the Cold War; from Germany, Hungary, Vietnam, Laos and to Cambodia, the cost of losing was brought home to us in the faces of the broken people who had lost everything they had but hope.

They came to us as their last hope to live as free people rather than as slaves. We understood what they lost and what the stakes were if we were to lose.

The Cold War was long, it was expensive and it could have gone either way right up to the end. It took several years for me to even accept the idea that it really was over after it had ended. Long after Strategic Air Command had ceased to be and the missiles in their silos had stopped being aimed at our enemy, I still lived in reaction to what the Cold War had conditioned me to believe. It seems silly for me to say so now, but took years for me to stop thinking that it was some sort of trick by the Soviets to lure us into a trap.

I was a child of the Cold War, I awoke every single day with the thought that “today could be the last day”, that the Soviets were going to push through central Europe and the war that so many had worked to avoid would finally have come. I expected it. As a kid, I lived near a SAC base and I knew what an “Alert” was. I knew when the bombers suddenly flew out of the base in the middle of the night what it actually meant and what it could very well be the start of. I didn’t hope for the war to come, I dreaded the idea, but I did expect that it would come. From 1965, when I first became aware that there was something that my father did at work that involved some people shooting at other people in ships, until 1995 when I finally decided that the Soviets were really gone and they weren’t coming back, I expected the war to come at any moment.

Every.single.day; I expected it to come.

The decade long interlude that occurred between the “Jihadi War” and the “Cold War” seems like a “morning after” hangover memory of a wild party from long, long ago. At the time, the 1990s seemed like the arrival of a new golden age. It seemed that the rules we had all lived under for a millennia were no longer operative. War was suddenly and decidedly out of fashion, ideas were the new currency and you needed a five gallon bucket for a wallet just to keep up with the easy cash that was to be made on the shores of the “new internet world”.

That’s how I remember it anyway. I know it wasn’t like that, but that’s how I remember it. Historians will remember it differently; they will remind us all that the threat from Soviet Communism was almost immediately replaced by a threat from Islamic Fundamentalism which had been simmering during the cold war and once the cold war was over and several of the key Islamic fundamentalist states were no longer constrained by their former sponsors, they move wholly towards the cause of the “New Caliphate”, the core of which formed around the graveyard of the Soviet Armed Forces, namely Afghanistan.

While the west enjoyed its orgy of hedonism during of the 90’s and ignored the threat posed by the Jihadis, the threat grew exponentially every year during that time. We simply couldn’t be bothered to put down our drinks and stop to notice the forest fire that was occurring just outside our borders. Our fences were falling, our orchards were being overrun and we didn’t even stop to notice. They stuck Manhattan in 1993 and we laughed at the foolish little men who tried to get their deposit back after renting a van and using it to put a bomb in the basement. “The fools tried to knock down the towers” we said, and laughed at the name “Mohammed Salameh”.

They blew up our embassies in Kenya and people said “so what”.

Then they struck a destroyer in harbor and people said “ Why are we in that country anyway?”. At the time, we were worried about more serious threats, like the fear that our power grid was going to fail because someone in 1970 didn’t think to denote the century in their date stamps and as a result on December 31st 1999 all of our electrical power would end and we would all suddenly be living like the Amish. Yes boys and girls, we actually worried about such things. We spent billions of dollars fixing this problem, learned men who should have known better stocked up on gasoline and bullets, prepared for the end times that would surely come. Forget about those silly “turban wearing fools”, it’s the Y2K Bug you really must fear!

Then all of a sudden with a pop, the 1990s were over. The Champaign bubble economy had indeed crashed, but it had nothing to do with “old Cobol code”. It was the simple economics of it all that finally caught up with us. The rules of economic sense and logic that had existed for millennia had returned to extract their revenge on the current generation of Internet Argonauts.

In 2001, the war we had managed to avoid throughout the Cold War and its aftermath had come to kill us at home. They came to kill us in Manhattan, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. They used our tools, our freedom, or hospitality against us. They finally managed to kill us in our home. It was a threat that could no longer be ignored, yet as we would see, there would be a great number of people who still try.

In 2001, the President responded to the attack of 9/11 with these words:
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“We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail”.

I knew what he was saying. The war that we had just been forced into fighting would not be “over by Christmas”. Unlike the cold war, there was no “Al-queda-land” for us to bomb, no fleet to sink, and no armies for us to maneuver against.

But much like the cold war, we were fighting an idea as much as an Army.

I wonder though, how many of us understand that this war, like the cold war will go on for another two generations, risk nuclear devastation on a global scale, cost hundreds of thousands of lives in wars all across the globe and cost trillions of dollars to fight.

I wonder just how many of us understand just what the true cost of losing this war actually is. I wonder how many of you understood that this war, again much like the cold war, would also risk another civil war here at home.

Because I sure didn’t understand it.

I was prepared to go to war against the Jihadis. I was prepared for the eventuality that the war might spread beyond what was manageable, but I was never prepared to believe that the bulk of our fighting over the past few years would actually be with each other.

Once again, as we are threatened by the very real menace from an enemy who means to kill us all and we react to that threat by fighting each other, in a way giving strength and comfort the enemy who wants to kill us. All of us. It makes no sense, but suicide rarely does.

This war will go on for another two generations, risk nuclear devastation on a global scale, cost hundreds of thousands of lives in wars all across the globe and cost trillions of dollars to fight. But I’m not sad that we have to fight this war. That is the burden that every generation has had to pay for its freedom since Thermopylae.

I am sad that after 3,000 years, there are still so many people on our side who actively want to lose this war, believing that to surrender is to bring the peace they desire, when history repeatedly shows that path they wish to go down only brings more war and more destruction and death. World War II didn’t have to happen; the generation who fought it understood that to be the case. They also understood that the fight after the Second World War needed to be fought as well. Our generation, for reasons I cant understand, has fallen into the same trap that the academics of Europe and America fell into after the First World War, believing that simply wishing not to fight is enough to bring peace to the world, when in fact, it virtually ensures that war will come on a massive scale.

This war will be fought, whether we choose to fight it or not. The only thing that will change is the cost of the war. Our Ancestors said that they fought so that “their children wouldn’t have to”.

It is time for this generation to take that understanding of reality as a fact.

We are in this for the long haul. It will not be over by Christmas, and the "Butchers Bill" will only get larger every day we fight each other instead of the Jihadis.

Posted @ October 24, 2006 11:05 PM | Current Affairs

Posted by: disunreconnected at October 25, 2006 06:19 PM

Posted by: Frank Martin at October 25, 2006 07:21 PM

Posted by: John at October 26, 2006 12:12 PM