Not Anti-War But Anti-Tyranny

War can be hell. But it is also something that many young men look forward to so they can test their mettle, men like Alexander Hamilton, who in a 1769 letter to a friend wrote: "I wish there was a war." (He apparently had not yet mastered the subjunctive.) In times of peace, young men often wish for war. In times of war, all men wish for peace.

Here is a song by Leslie Fish explaining why the wish for total peace, if granted, would lead to tyranny. We all want peace, but not at the price of a one world government.

Is it wrong to long for a war to break out just to gratify one's personal wish to go to war? Well, it is if you start a war just to make that happen! It is if you conscript and/or tax others to serve in that war without their consent. But it's not wrong,  if you are a privateer or a mercenary, and you offer your services to those who want them and would be willing to pay.

Who should pay for waging war? Those who want to wage war. That way we can put a cap on it. But it is not wrong for a young warrior to long to serve. It is not wrong for men and women who have that calling to pursue it.

In the video embedded below, I read from Nathan Alterman's poem "אמרה חרב הנצורים" --"Said the Sword of the Besieged".  The poem is from the point of view of a sword being wielded in a hopeless last battle, in which the warrior is killed.

In the discussion that ensues after the reading, my father, Amnon Katz, says: "The sword's entire purpose is battle. And it is happy to fulfill its purpose. Even under these tragic circumstances. But we get the impression that also the one who wields the sword is privy to these values and to this experience, to the glory of this bitter and awful hour." Is it wrong for a young man to long for battle? To sign up for voluntary military service? To hope for glory?

Both Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton served in the American Revolution. Both distinguished themselves. But Aaron Burr wanted always to be on the front lines, so when he was offered a desk job by George Washington, he turned it down. Hamilton was ambitious for advancement, so he took that job.

Both Jean Laffite and Aaron Burr served the US as volunteers. Neither of them did it for a "free" college education or for a salary. Laffite was never reimbursed for his contribution or for those things that were taken from him by force. For years, Aaron Burr was destitute after being persecuted by Jefferson, but as a veteran he was not entitled to a military pension. Finally, when Burr was very old, President Jackson granted him a small pension.

Is all war bad? Or only some wars? Is getting paid for war always bad? Shouldn't our soldiers be paid?

There are some Libertarians who seem to have serious problems with the idea that military service could be entered into in the hopes of going into battle or for pay.  In the video embedded below. Austin Petersen and Larry Sharpe discuss a recent anti-military statement by the Vice Chair of the Libertarian Party.

Not all libertarians are anti-military or anti-war. "Did you agree to kill people for money?" Austin Petersen asks Larry Sharpe.  Sharpe replied "War is evil. War is bad. ...Would I join now? No. I'm also not 17 years old anymore."

But is it wrong to be 17 years old and long to serve? I don't think so.  Should soldiers expect always to be penniless and to go begging when they are in want?

Why do we honor our soldiers only when we see them as poor and without compensation for their service? Why do we think that they deserve less than teachers or doctors? Is it because we are uncomfortable with the work they do? Or is it because public funding for anything corrupts?

Let us honor our soldiers and work toward a free country where they can ply their trade with their heads held high and with compensation that is not dependent on taxation.  We do not want a standing army, but we do need to have warriors who are well trained and ready to fight for us. If we repeal the Neutrality Act and the Logan Act, we can restore the freedom that volunteer soldiers like Aaron Burr fought for in the Revolutionary War!

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http://theodosiaandthepirates.blogspot.com/2017/05/you-get-what-you-pay-for.html

Jean Laffite: American War Veteran

Today is Veterans Day, and everywhere we see pictures of people in uniform. People who served in the armed forces. Some of them died for their country, some were wounded, and all were part of the military branch of the government.  But it is important to remember that some of the greatest veterans who ever lived never wore a uniform.

The true heroism of Jean Laffite's independent contribution to the American war effort can be read in Pam Keyes' article, Commemoration of a Hero: Jean Laffite and the Battle of New Orleans.

Of course, Andrew Jackson was also there and also made valuable contributions. But without Jean Laffite's help, the Battle of New Orleans would have been lost. Quite possibly the entire war would have been lost. We would have ended being British subjects who were thankful for the services of the redcoats on Veterans Day.

One of the founding principles of the United States was having no standing army. Let us not forget that this is what the original founders fought for in 1776 when they resisted the British attempt to tax them to pay for the defense of the colonies.

It would be a shame to save the Union only to lose the constitution

Reframing the Context: The Secretary of War

Context is everything. When a certain group manages to reframe the context of a discussion, then the sorts of answers available to any given question seem to become limited to a specific number of listed possible responses.

The Seal of Office of the United States War Office

Take for instance the question of war. A long time ago, everyone understood that war was inevitable, and they talked about how to pay for it, who should serve and when to declare it.  In the cabinet of the president of the United States, there was a Secretary of War.

Under George Washington, the Secretary of War was Henry Knox. He had been the chief artillery officer of the Continental Army, and before the ratification of the constitution, he served as the Continental War Secretary.

At first, the Secretary of War was responsible for all military affairs, but in 1798 the separate position of Secretary of the Navy was created, and the Secretary of War's scope was reduced to cover only the army. After 1886, the Secretary of War was third in line of succession to the presidency, right after the Vice President and the Secretary of State. (I bet Al Haig knew that!)

Something rather big happened to the Secretary of War position in 1947, with the passage of National Security Act of 1947: the Office of Secretary of War entirely disappeared. According to the Wikipedia: "The Secretary of the Army's office is generally considered the direct successor to the Secretary of War's office although the Secretary of Defense took the Secretary of War's position in the Cabinet, and the line of succession to the presidency."

Why? Why did they do that? By eliminating the word "War" from the name of the office, did we eliminate war? No. There have been lots of wars in which the United States was involved since 1947. But none of them have been declared! This means that the Executive Branch has been free to wage war without the consent of the other branches ever since the word "war" was eliminated from our respectable statesman-like vocabulary.

Change the linguistic context, and you change the meaning of the constitution. Apparently, the requirement for a declaration of war went away as soon as we stopped calling it war.

Today, everybody seems to agree that war is a bad thing and we should avoid war at all costs. Everyone gives lip service to this idea. And yet it is easier for the president to start a war than ever before!

Reframing the context is a very dangerous thing. It would be better if we still called it war and had open  discussions about when it should be declared and who should pay for it and who should be asked to risk life and limb in waging it.

Can Small Children Think Deep Thoughts?

As a companion to the question: "Is this a book for children?", another reaction I have gotten to Theodosia and the Pirates: The War Against Spain is: "No child can possibly be as smart as you portray Jules to be. He can't be aware of all the things he seems aware of. Small children are oblivious to what the grownups are up to."

To some extent, maybe it is true that I make Jules a little more articulate than a child that age would be. But by and large, I disagree. Small children do have intellectual lives, and some of them think some pretty deep thoughts. Sometimes the piping voice, the unsteady gait, the poor hand eye coordination and the lack of sophistication in wording a question hide the real thoughts that a child has or the deep insights that have already been formulated. In my fiction, I do polish up the voice of the small child to make things clearer for readers, but I don't think I make him more sophisticated than a small child can be.

In my own childhood, the adults fell into two camps: those who underestimated my intelligence and those who overestimated it. I was not a genius, but I was also not the imbecile that some people assume every toddler or preschooler or first or second grader must be.

Now, it is not anybody's fault that they did not estimate a child's intelligence just right. Nobody can read into another person's mind. We are bound to make mistakes in one direction or another, but it was very telling in my mind at the time, who tended to think more of my abilities and who thought less. You did not need to question them about it. Their actions spoke louder than words.

Here is an example. One day,  when I was three or four, I accidentally stepped on a toy playpen made out of sticks that someone had given me. I was sorry about it, and I got a lecture about needing to be more careful. But meanwhile, without thinking much about it, I started to arrange the broken pieces into a pattern on the floor.

My father saw the pieces so arranged and recognized that I was making a picture of a human figure, albeit a crude one. He was so impressed by this that he found some way to preserve the temporary art work by gluing the pieces to a cardboard folder. Now most parents would just throw the broken pieces away, but my father preserved this primitive art form for all time.

My experience was that the more tuned in someone was into my intellect, the less nurturing they were. The more nurturing they were, the more they tended to discount my intellect.

Every person has both an intellect and an emotional life, as well as a body with crude needs and an intermediate playful, animal being. My experience throughout my life, ever since early childhood, is that people are clued in to either your body or your soul, your intellect or your lesser animal being, but they are seldom equally attuned to all aspects. As a child, most of the people in my life were all too attuned to my animal self, wanting to feed me and cuddle me and heal me when I was sick and keep me safe from harm, while totally ignoring the fact that I was also a person with a mind. On the other hand, those people who have been tuned into my mind usually tended to discount my physical needs and limitations. Since they saw me as an adult thinker, they didn't pay attention to the reasons I could not always keep up physically.

This problem is not unique to me. It's called the mind/body dichotomy, and it is a problem that all western culture experiences. Hence we have men who can relate to  a woman as a body and men who can relate to a woman as a mind, but seldom can they relate to both at once in the same woman. So they segregate certain women off for intellectual platonic relationships, while choosing other women for the repository of their animal pleasure. But did you know that children and chimpanzees are also treated this way by educators, parents, social workers and physicians?

Some people see children as innocent, cuddly beings with no abstract intentions or long range plans and very few thoughts of their own beyond getting their immediate animal needs met  -- some kind of noble savages. The same sort of people also look at chimpanzees that way. They often try to save chimpanzees from people who relate to them in any other than the crudest way.

 Very small children are capable of abstraction. They can have deep thoughts. They think about many things beyond the immediate range of the moment. They philosophize. They theorize. So do chimpanzees. The theories can be wrong. The thoughts can be mistaken. The model of the universe can be over-simplified, but there is thinking going on.

I used to be a very honest child, and the lies that I told before the age of ten could be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Here is the fist lie I remember telling. It happened like this. We were at the beach. I was about four. My father and his friend were going swimming. The friend was an amputee, but I did not know this. He had served in the Israeli war of independence and had lost one leg below the knee. However, he was always in long pants and wore a prosthesis that worked rather well. He was an athletic man, and he continued to be very active, flying, swimming. skiing and always challenging himself despite what many people would consider a disability. But I was shocked, because I had never seen him without the prosthesis, and nobody warned me.

I lay down on the sand and closed my eyes, and when my mother asked me what was the matter, I lied. I said I was tired. The idea of amputation was too overwhelming for me to face at that moment. But since I lied, I now considered myself a liar, with all the moral ambivalence that goes with that. Anybody who told even a single lie was considered a liar in my mind at the time.

About three and a half years later, I wrote a story that began like this:

Once a father came from war. He had plastic legs. His child did not know it. She jumped on her father, and he fell down. The child's mother said: "Honey, he has plastic legs from war. He cannot stand you." The father went to his room, and the child asked her mother why her father didn't run away like the man from the story. The mother said: "But you remember, the man from the story died."

In case you want to see what the actual manuscript looked like, here it is:

The picture at the bottom is of the mother standing, while the child and father fall to the ground

As you can see, the spelling is very bad, the hand eye coordination is also crude, and the lines slant very badly, but as soon as you regularize the spelling and manage to put yourself into the spirit of the thing, you can see that the topic of this story is rather abstract.

This is not simply a story about a double amputee whose daughter caused him to lose his balance by jumping on him. It is a story that explores the issue of conscription versus desertion. Is it better to avoid war by failing to serve, even though deserters are shot? And who is braver, someone who serves because he was drafted or someone who risks death for desertion? (The man in the story referred to in the text was a deserter who was shot. I just naturally assumed any reader would know what story I was talking about.)

Now, admittedly, this is not good writing. The command of English is crude. English was my second language that I had learned the year before, and I was in second grade, somewhere between the age of seven and eight. But the theme of the story is quite abstract. It represents issues that bothered me and that I thought about between the ages of four and seven. (Everything I write about is usually a delayed reaction to something that happened quite some time earlier, with the plot reworked for maximal dramatic effect.)

So here is the next page of the story:

In the picture at the bottom the girl is talking to the doctor in the hospital

The child said: "But you said Pop was brave." The mother lied and said: "He did run away from war." The child said "Oh", but did not believe her mother. So she went to the doctor in the hospital and asked: "Did my father run away from war?" "No," said the doctor. "Thanks," said the girl. She was so happy to hear that her mother was a liar, because she was beautiful, and the child was a liar herself, and the child wanted to be beautiful, too. 

This story has no title, but years later, when I reread it as an adult, I labeled it as "Is There No Truth in Beauty?", because now we have strayed into an even more abstract area of inquiry: why do the beautiful people we know on average lie more than the less beautiful people? Does lying make you beautiful? Or does being beautiful make you lie? Or what exactly is the nature of this correlation. (You may not even agree that there is such a correlation, but I had found it to be true in my life at the time I wrote the story.)

This story goes on and on and culminates with the girl being locked up in  a cage by her parents. But I will spare you the rest of the pages. Suffice it to say that for those people who believe children never explore abstract themes, this is a counterexample.

The point is that small children, however poorly they may express themselves, can think deep thoughts. They are capable of abstraction at a young age, if they are the sort of people who think deeply as adults. But those who only relate to children on the animal level of basic needs and wants may never find this out.

There is a bias to every written work.  But there is also a bias to every person and every reader. If a reader has never related to a child as an abstract thinker, they may disagree that any child is capable of such thinking.

As for me, you can see that I have returned to the same themes that preoccupied me in second grade: how war should be waged and who is braver: the obedient conscript or the free agent. But I would venture to say that the writing has improved with time, and the answers to some of the questions have deepened.

http://www.amazon.com/Aya-Katz/e/B004EKEM6A/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1

I also have a better illustrator. 

When did Privateers Fall Into Disrepute?

Today's blogpost  is a transcript of a conversation  I had in the outer pen this afternoon, as depicted in this video.

When did privateering go into disrepute? I would say that it happened sometime after the War of 1812. And I would say that it wasn't a coincidence that it happened then, and that it was part of a concerted effort to change the way Americans looked at those who provided them with protection and military service.

Prior to the War of 1812, it was understood that while there was going to be a standing navy, there would not  be a standing army. And the Navy itself was  to be much smaller than the navy of a large empire, such as Great Britain. The idea was that the services provided by the American Navy could be supplemented by private enterprise, by private ship owners, private captains and private warriors who would perform the same services as the military of the competitors of the United States without affecting the taxpayer, without affecting the civil rights -- the civil liberties -- that were protected in the bill of rights. And that was why prior to War of 1812...

 -- Can I borrow this book, Bow? I want to show the people the book, okay? --

This is my second book in the Theodosia series. Bow was reading it, but he took very good care of it while he was reading it. And this is where you see the transformation happen. All of a sudden, privateers are not the good guys, anymore. And it's not just Jean Laffite, although he certainly was a victim in this change in the way the wind was blowing. But there were other privateers, American privateers, who were suffering the same fate. All of a sudden it was decided that only the government was going to be waging war, only the government would be involved in major defense or offense efforts, and that anyone who wanted to compete with the government was not welcome anymore -- even if that person, like Jean Laffite, saved the United States in the past.

[Bow starts to protest.]

--Okay. You can have the book back. You're welcome.