Some short takes today. In his book on Winston Churchill, Paul Johnson reveals the secret of Churchill’s strength as wartime leader: He didn’t treat military brass as the oracle at Delphi and Solomon combined. In World War I, Johnson notes, reverence for brass and dislike for civilian leaders made it impossible for the government to conduct war efficiently. As Churchill put it, “The foolish doctrine was preached to the public through innumerable agencies that generals and admirals must be right on war matters and civilians of all kinds must be wrong. …”
Get where I’m going with this?
For years, the Right has taken its cues on war policy directly from the Pentagon, often from Gen. David Petraeus, always from “our commanders on the ground.” For example, if they don’t approve of big troop cuts in Afghanistan, such cuts are wrong.
This reflex to embrace everything the military tells us seems less to represent political agreement than outright deference to what is perceived as a higher authority.
Personally, I think President Obama’s decision on troop cuts in Afghanistan is wrong because it doesn’t represent the reversal or acknowledgement of the cataclysmic Bush-Obama policy of nation building in the Muslim world.
But the larger point is that our constitutional republic, such as it is, is not supposed to be a junta. Generals are fallible. The record of this current crop is, at best, charitably speaking, on a good day, mixed. When we depend solely on their counsel we short-circuit and shortchange our duties as citizens — and prolong two wasteful, costly wars.
Let it be on Lennon:
So, John Lennon was a Republican wannabe who admired Ronald Reagan? That’s what Fred Seaman, Lennon’s “last personal assistant,” says, reports the Toronto Sun. “It was pretty obvious to me he had moved away from his earlier radicalism,” Seaman says in yet another Beatles documentary.
Seaman continues: “He was a very different person back in 1979 and 80 than he’d been when he wrote `Imagine.’ By 1979 he looked back on that guy and was embarrassed by that guy’s naivete.”
From “Imagine” to the unimaginable. This revelation, if true, is a curiosity on a par with Bob Dylan’s confession that, as he put it in his 2004 memoir, “had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of. I was fantasizing about a nine-to-five existence on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard. …”
The ex-Beatle, who was assassinated in 1980, might have become embarrassed by a radicalism the folk-bard of the counterculture claims not to have shared, but I wonder:
If they both hankered after the traditions they did so much to undermine, did either of them ever regret the radical sensibility they both profitably enshrined in every generation since their heyday?
Made in China?
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao trotted the globe this week to paste a happy face over China, but the leering, totalitarian monster showed through just the same.
“Tomorrow’s China will be a country that fully achieves democracy, the rule of law, fairness and justice,” Wen said in London on Monday. That same day, the Danish newspaper Information began publishing a series of blockbuster articles based on secret documents leaked from the very highest levels of the communist Chinese government.
They reveal what we already know about but rarely get to see in black and white: an outline of government plans for a crackdown on speech, the Internet; increased surveillance of the population and controls on foreign media; and renewed internal and external propaganda campaigns to ward off democratic influences.
Does “Made in China” still look like a good bargain?
Examiner Columnist Diana West is syndicated nationally by United Media and is the author of “The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.”
