Column from the February, 2021 Greater Sturbridge Town & Country Living Magazine
The Prussian military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz is most famous for the quote, "War is merely the continuation of politics with other means." Might one turn it around and say politics is merely the continuation of war with other means?
Do the events of early January, 2021 resonate with the Clausewitz dictum or its opposite? Either way, it has been disconcerting.
Are we close to civil war? We asked our official think tank, The Long Hill Institute for the Study of War or Politics by Other Means (LHIftSoWoPbOM for short) if we are on the verge of intramural incivility.
The Institute put more effort than usual into the question, which meant we had to wait for their thoughts as the post deliberation siesta was longer.
Their grand verdict, "The beginning of a civil war is difficult to predict, but you will know you are in one when it's been going on for a while. Boy, will you know it."
One should be careful of how what happened at the capitol building is characterized, but such a convention has not been observed. Granted, the actions of the people who entered the Halls of Congress invited extreme comments, which is why it is important to be careful.
That said, your columnist admits to having had some hope when Trump came out of the woodwork to roil the nation's body politic even if his economic program was a mix of the usual and his name calling childish.
What appealed to me was of all the major party aspirants, he suggested getting along with a nuclear power who, with us, could incinerate the earth and make any worry about global warming irrelevant.
His statement that what might come in Syria would be worse if Assad lost was obvious if we look at all our Middle East adventures and how they've turned out.
With our 24-hour news cycle and social media, what was said during the 2016 presidential campaign is down the memory hole and for the people who ran against Trump, it is probably better forgotten.
Former Ohio governor, John Kasich said, "frankly, it's time that we punched the Russians in the nose." My memory is not perfect, and I cannot find that he was asked what he thought the Russians might do.
Chris Christie suggested we shoot down Russian planes which prompted Senator Rand Paul to say, "Well, I think if you're in favor of World War III, you have your candidate,"
The Democratic nominee, Hilary Clinton, also was for the no-fly zone idea, and why not? She had warrior cred from the ongoing Libya debacle.
Candidate Trump did have the Iran obsession which was a bad idea, but leaving Afghanistan and not bugging Syria would have given less scope for that foolishness.
So, the Donald won and did little of what he said he would do, but was artful in blaming others. His base, with some defections, stayed with him. Where were they to go? They were not courted by the Dems.
The 2020 election ended with recount theater. Election skullduggery has a long history, but the incumbent exhausted all possibilities in suits in various courts and it was time to go.
It was not to be. Either Trump had a rational reason to believe the validity of his case or he was beyond sense. How people reacted was based on partisanship, but the stage was set for the events of January 6.
Donald would encourage followers to go to the Capitol, bugged out and did not follow. After, he was relatively quiet and more or less hors de combat. One is almost reminded of historian Barbara Tuchman's book, The Proud Tower. The future World War I premier of France, Clemenceau said of a would-be dictator who chickened out by suiciding at his mistress' grave, "the man on horseback" was only "the soul of a second lieutenant."
In light of the Capitol invasion, it would be interesting to take a look at a historical event of extreme behavior in the life of a legislature. It was the day every senator was murdered by a mob.
The Senators refused to run and were slaughtered where they sat. All of them. Scurrying would've been beneath their dignity.
Surely, dear readers, you are thinking this never happened, and your columnist a fabulist. He begs you to remember that history does not begin with Lexington and Concord. Much came before.
The year was 397 B.C. The Gauls had just defeated the whole Roman army in one charge and entered Rome to rampage and plunder. The senators (i.e. the original senate, not our johnny come lately) were older men who had no intention of running.
Now, this is not meant as a knock on our senators or lower house members. Were I in Congress, I would have been first out the door. It was easier for the Romans to maintain gravitas, not having to deal with twitter, constantly thinking about re-election and how one looks on camera.
The mob at our Capitol was not the Senone Gauls who took Rome. They went in, vandalized, ran riot and left without firing a shot. Some of it was silly cosplay (yeah, that's redundant). Compared to Governor de Launay at the Bastille, it was a walk in the park.
How did it look abroad? Oxford professor Stathis Kalyvas:
"Not a coup, not even a riot (these guys are strolling inside the Capitol) but a dramatic, unbelievable failure of basic policing
Coups require others to take advantage of this type of disruption and move swiftly, immediately, and decisively. Nothing indicates such dynamics are at play here
Having said that, the symbolic shock is enormous and its consequences hard to foretell"
His comment about policing is correct. Capitol Police are a force directly under the control of Congress and the eye was not on the ball. That it was not even near a coup is obvious as there was no detachment of insurrectionists to secure anything else. As to the shock, it may turn out more than symbolic.
In this country, Mike Davis at the New Left Review blog was a little more salty in his column, Riot on the Hill:
"Yesterday’s ‘sacrileges’ in our temple of democracy – oh, poor defiled city on the hill, etc. – constituted an ‘insurrection’ only in the sense of dark comedy. What was essentially a big biker gang dressed as circus performers and war-surplus barbarians – including the guy with a painted face posing as horned bison in a fur coat – stormed the ultimate country club, squatted on Pence’s throne, chased Senators into the sewers, casually picked their noses and rifled files and, above all, shot endless selfies to send to the dudes back home. Otherwise they didn’t have a clue. (The aesthetic was pure Buñuel and Dali: ‘Our only rule was very simple: no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.’)"
No matter, there have been lurid stories of how it was almost a rightist putsch. They were shouted from the media rooftops, but quietly, if not obscurely, retracted.
The claim that Capitol Rioters wanted to capture and assassinate officials had to be corrected and were.
This prompted Max Abrahms, Associate Professor of Political Science at Northeastern University and fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (discussed in the August 2019 issue column, Strangers on a Peace Train) to observe,
"Over and over we’re seeing the media run alarmist headlines of right wing extremism since the Capitol attack that are walked back, retracted, or unsubstantiated in the report.
This is the same media that is warning about the dangers of disseminating unreliable information."
Professor Abrahms has also speculated that as the Bush Doctrine was, "We need to fight the terrorists there so we don’t have to fight them here." The Biden Doctrine will be, "We need to fight the terrorists here so we don’t have to fight them there."
I am not sure about that as Biden is taking on his team many from the Obama administration that gave us Libya and Syria as well as Yemen. Their specialty is foreign wars.
The new administration will also be taking on the usual suspects for most departments. No one can be surprised at Janet Yellen at Treasury.
All in all, it is the restoration of the "party of government." Trump changed nothing.
Let us all hope they know what they are doing. It would be a heck of a thing if they made the recent ancien regime look good.
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