DEMOS LO VOLT!:

Happy Birthday Abe, Pass the Blood (Spengler, 2/10/04, Asia Times)

The North and South of the US have agreed to perpetuate two sets of self-consoling lies about each other:

1) Southerners were simple patriots fighting for love of their home states.
2) Kindly Abe Lincoln went to war only when the rebel Confederacy left him no choice. [...]

A cloud of myth protects Americans from the truth about bloody Abe Lincoln. His statue sits in a mock-Greek temple like the statue of Zeus at Olympus. Chiseled into the marble are Lincoln's words to the nation weeks before the war's end, an abiding source of horror for European tourists: "Fondly do we hope - fervently do we pray - that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

It sounds like a sort of religious fanaticism that would make the mild Methodist George W Bush hide under the bed-covers. Yet that is how the Northerners sang as off to war they marched: "He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat/He is sifting out the souls of men before his judgment seat/O be swift my soul to answer Him, be jubilant my feet!"

A noteworthy conclusion is that America fought the bloodiest war in its history (and a bloodier war than any in Western Europe since 1648) in order to prevent an imperialist war, that is, out of fanatical religious principle. Americans find it too painful to think about; should they by some means re-establish the frame of mind of 1860, may God help their enemies.

Looked at from a different perspective, this messianic American blooodthirst is why it's pretty silly to talk about the prospect of our losing the war against radical Islam. If push ever did come to shove we'd not bat an eyelash as we irradiated the entire Middle East. But Spengler is wrong to lean too heavily on greed or glory as the main motivations for our tendency to extreme savagery in pursuit of our aims. The real culprit is probably democracy itself. If a king, dictator, theocrat, whatever, takes his country to war, others in the society will wonder whether their own interests are being served. But when a democracy marches off to war the citizenry is hardly going to second guess itself. Your cause may be unjust, but how can mine ever be? And, since the ends we seek are just, what means can be denied us?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 9, 2004 8:42 AM