Saw this awesome lady last night at the Hamilton, my first time going, and she played this tune, variously known as “Clyde Waters,” “Drowned Lovers,” and “The Mother’s Malison” from her recent album taking on the Child Ballads:
This version’s pretty good too:
This piece by Jonathan Raab is heartbreaking and true:
It was a stock answer, and it came in many variations:
“I fight so my child won’t have to.”
It was a popular saying among soldiers during the Iraq-Afghanistan conflicts, especially the ones you saw on TV. It’s a soundbite-friendly philosophy that communicates a sadness for having been at war but a hopefulness in what that war could accomplish. It lent meaning to the drudgery of day-to-day soldiering, and gave people at home (not exactly the homefront by any means, but home, even if upon returning to it it was almost unrecognizable) an insight into the motivations of those who would volunteer to serve, fight, and even die in the name of the United States. …
While we can spin such stories into narratives of honor and family values, they are also a portent of a terrible new truth. We now live in a culture where perpetual warfare with nebulous objectives against an abstract enemy is the norm. We have a whole generation of young people who understand that the nation is at war, has been at war, and will be at war for the foreseeable future, but don’t understand what that really means—or should mean—in the context of a civil, democratic society. This is war without sacrifice, war by choice, war without end. …
Another war is upon us, and in this coming conflict, the seeds are sown for future destabilization and war. Americans seem content to launch war after war against “moral outrage”, but don’t stop to consider that the monsters we fight may be so horrible precisely because we made them that way.
Looking back on all the times my brothers and sisters in uniform said “I fight so my child won’t have to,” or any of its variations, I can’t help but feel a pang of despair.
We thought it would be over, eventually. Our government—in its perpetual funding and arming of our future enemies—has other ideas.
I say ‘lie’ because that’s what this is. Servicemen and women who convince themselves that their children won’t have to fight a war that the government regards as perpetual and unbounded are lying to themselves. Empire never takes a holiday.
We all want our children to grow up in a country that is not in a state of permanent war. The way to do that is not to fight endless, undefined wars now, but to fight the ideologues, war profiteers, and entrenched interests that have a stake in prolonging and starting new ones.
Not many years their rounds shall roll,
Each moment brings it nigh,
Ere all its glories stand revealed,
To our admiring eye.
Ye wheels of nature speed your course,
Ye mortal pow’rs, decay;
Fast as ye bring the night of death,
Ye bring eternal day.Ye weary, heavy-laden souls,
Who are oppressed and sore,
Ye trav’lers through the wilderness
To Canaan’s peaceful shore.
Though chilling winds and beating rains,
The waters deep and cold,
And enemies surrounding you,
Take courage and be bold.Though storms and hurricanes arise,
The desert all around,
And fiery serpents oft appear,
Through the enchanted ground.
Dark nights and clouds and gloomy fear —
And dragons often roar —
But while the gospel trump we hear,
We’ll press for Canaan’s shore.
Needed a week off after Scotland, but we’re back and more seditious than ever. For starters, if you haven’t read this, do:
Devolution—meaning the decentralization of power—is the geopolitical equivalent of the second law of thermodynamics: inexorable, universal entropy. Today’s nationalism and tribalism across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East represent the continued push for either greater autonomy within states or total independence from what some view as legacy colonial structures. Whether these movements are for devolution, federalism, or secession, they all to varying degrees advocate the same thing: greater self-rule.
In addition to the traditional forces of anti-colonialism and ethnic grievance, the newer realities of weak and over-populated states, struggles to control natural resources, accelerated economic competition, and even the rise of big data and climate change all point to more devolution in the future rather than less. Surprisingly, this could be a good thing, both for America and the world.
Adam Gurri’s on pluralism is a good companion piece to it. Honestly it’s a bit unsettling to see someone as unflappably congenial as Gurri get this pessimistic:
Pluralism is a state of ceasefire across communities which allows the number of communities and conceptions of the good to multiply as their members strive to find answers. The pessimist will see in this nothing but the breakdown in moral order. The optimist will see a broadening of perspectives, of available ground level knowledge, of the stock of stories and ideas available within our common culture. The optimist believes that conceptions of the good which can persist over time are bounded by human nature and by history, but that these bounds are actually quite large, and that exploring them morally enriches us all. …
All caveats aside, I consider myself a partisan on behalf of pluralism. I can see practical value in it. I also believe there is a moral value, and dignity, in conferring the freedom and the responsibility on every citizen to find their own way. But I fear that the historically contingent political ceasefire that makes it possible is necessarily a tense one, and that the boiling over of hostilities into active bloodshed is unavoidable. The only question is how long a timeframe peace and a liberal order can be maintained over, a question I’m not sure there can be an answer for.
*****
Ron Paul: More secession movements please; they’re as american as apple pie.
Dan McCarthy attaches a cautionary note to Ron Paul’s cri de coeur, noting it’s not necessarily a libertarian idea (a point this blog has been making for a long time):
The specifically libertarian case for secessionism is manifold: in fact, it’s several cases for different things that may not add up to a coherent whole. First, there is theradical theory that secessionism in principle leads to free-market anarchism—that is, secessionist reduction of states to ever smaller units ends with reduction of the state to the individual. Second, there is the historical claim that smaller states tend to be freer and more prosperous. Third is the matter of self-determination, which is actually a democratic or nationalistic idea rather than a classically liberal one but historically has been admixed with liberalisms of various kinds. What it means is that “a people” has “a right” to exit a state along with its territory and create a new state.
A fourth consideration is that suppressing secession may require coercion. And finally there is the pragmatic idea that secession is the best way to dismantle the U.S. federal government, the summum malum for some libertarians. (As an addendum, one can mention the claim that the U.S. Constitution in particulartacitly approves secessionism, but that’s a separate argument from cheering for secession more generally.)
It should be obvious that the first and third claims negate one another, and in practice the third overrules the first: real-world secession never leads to individualist anarchism but only to the creation of two or more states where formerly there was one. The abstract claim that every minority within the newly formed states should then be allowed to secede doesn’t translate into anyone’s policy: instead, formerly united states that are now distinct security competitors tend to consider the residual minorities who belong to the other bloc to be internal security threats. These populations left behind by secessionism may or may not be disloyal, but they are readily used as pretexts for aggressive state actions: either for the stronger state to dismember or intimidate the weaker one in the name of protecting minorities or for either state to persecute minorities and build an internal security apparatus to suppress the (possibly imaginary) enemy within. Needless to say, none of this is particularly good for liberty.
John A. Logan, and friends
According to news reports the fascist internationale’s conference in Budapest was cancelled by order of Hungarian President Viktor Orban himself, a man who’s said he wants to end liberal democracy.
So maybe what we’ve got is a right-wing strongman superseding a fascist movement, sort of like what Franco did with the Falangists.
Or is that quite right? The group in question was quoting civil rights hymns after being banned and vowing to carry on — apparently by holding private gathering that was broken up by the cops — could it be that we’re talking about a racial justice organization being suppressed by majoritarian tyranny? We appear to have a glitch in the matrix along these lines, with a Buzzfeed reporter tweeting that the detentions of white nationalists were “fast becoming a Hungarian free speech issue.”
Both interpretations probably give the conference too much credit. Both of their marquee partnerships pulled out or didn’t show; Jobbik and Aleksander Dugin (whom the conference organizer’s wife did translation work for). Though Jobbik still apparently claims it’s not a racist conference.
Anyway, Richard Spencer bet on Hungary, with a right wing among the strongest in Europe, as being hospitable to the sort of ideas that are expressed at your average NPI conference. This was not just incorrect, but as Jobbik pulling out seems to suggest, vastly unrealistic.
