Those Who Forget Never Learned Their History
By Mitch Berg
I hereby coin a new term; Kersten Delusional Disorder.
I originally thought “Kersten Derangement Syndrome”, but I think KDD is a more serious pathology.
When they got the word that the Strib was going to hire a conservative columnist (to put in the stable with DFL monkeys Lori Sturdevant, Nick Coleman, Doug Grow, Kim Ode, Pat Reusse and, well, pretty much all of them short of James Lileks), the local lefty pundocracy acted like someone had proposed giving them a rectal exam with a pool cue; her addition to the staff – a lone conservative voice in a room full of people with boy and girl crushes on Walter Mondale and Paul Wellstone – prompted the local Sorosphere’s most irritating conceit, the statement-as-fact that “The Strib is a conservative tool”.
Naturally, Kersten is pretty much right about everything, and is head, shoulders and ankles better than anyone else on the Strib columnist staff.
Last week, she wrote a column about Rep. Ellison’s “Department of Peace” proposal. Kersten points out the grim fact; institutional pacifism has a long record of abject failure to prevent war. She cites Norway, which, in the wake of the bloodbath of World War I joined Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and many other smaller European nations in declaring pacifism their primary line of national defense:
Norway’s commitment to what Ellison calls a “culture of peace” dates back to its founding in 1905, according to a 2006 report by Col. Karl Hanevik of the Norwegian Army. For decades, writes Hanevik, the country’s foreign policy was based on a firm belief that “international disputes should be solved via arbitration and international law.”
After World War I, Norway’s leaders placed their hopes for peace in the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, and let their military go to seed.
Norway declared neutrality when Hitler threatened in 1939.
Indeed, they officially resolved that all belligerents were equally wrong; that the Poles who were fighting for their lives, and the Brits and French who declared war in their support (but didn’t do much else) were equally as wrong as the Nazi regime that was bombing Poland’s cities.
Which is, indeed, one of the most corrosive conceits of today’s “peace” movement racket.
The country was wholly unprepared when Germany invaded on April 9, 1940…The German blitzkrieg rolled through Norway, and the king and government fled to England for safety…
Pretty thoughts didn’t work
Not only that, but the only reason King Haakon, his family and his cabinet were able to flee was because the only parts of Norway’s military that functioned as planned on that first day of the war – an ancient coastal fortress and a forty-year-old torpedo – sank the German cruiser Blücher and the German battalion that was supposed to cut off the retreat route from Oslo. And because the only squadron of Norwegian fighters that was capable of taking to the skies against the Luftwaffe broke up a German attempt to drop paratroops in the area.
Not, let us note, because of any pacifists’ actions.
Let’s make no mistake, here. Peace is something to strive for. Peace is almost always preferable to war. I said almost.
But pacifism is only tenable in a world where everyone believes in peace. Pacifists like to point out the examples of Gandhi and Martin Luther King as triumphs of “passive resistance”. But both of their successes depended entirely on their taking place in a context of the (general) rule of law, in areas controlled by liberal democracies who were, if not initially friendly to either of them, at least not actively disposed to kill both men and all of their followers.
So – Kersten was right.
And her critics?
Well…
AlphaBetty writes for MNBlue, the home of an endless stream of dozey conspiracy theorists and purple-faced rantmongers. And her take on Kersten indulges in the same kind of selective, self-serving, myopic ignorance that, by nature, has to be prevalent to believe in things like “Departments of Peace”.
While Ms. Alphabetty may seek “peace”, she commits violence against clarity and context:
Norway was asking for it? Katherine Kersten blames Norway’s aversion to war for Germany’s World War II invasion of that country.
Perhaps, she feels the French had the right approach. Pushing a fortress mentality, backed by ample defense spending, French war minister Andre Maginot figured he had German aggression licked. He was mistaken. The Nazis just marched around France’s line of expensive concrete fortifications.
Again with the historical ignorance. “Fortress mentality” is to “confronting violent evil” as “eating a Big Mac” is to “a nutrition program” (or for that matter, “passive resistance” is to “confronting violent evil”; it’s one of many approaches, one that seems historically discredited.
(For more on the historical ignorance, see the long screed on military history – which, as always, highlights pacifist myopia and ignorance – below the fold).
Popping a bully in the nose is a limited strategy in the school yard. That’s also true in the realm of international affairs. Sometimes you fight. Sometimes you circle your defenses. Sometimes you stand together and say as a group, this will not happen here.On this last point, the citizens of occupied Norway have much to teach us.
Onward:
If violence is not the path to peace, neither is passivity. In the face of brutal domination, Norwegians hung together. Risking arrest, they wore subtle symbols of solidarity, a paper clip on the lapel, a bright red hat or vest.Resisting anti-Semitism, they refused to speak German, pretending they didn’t understand a language as common in Norway at the time as English is today. In Oslo, commuters refused to sit next to Germans on the bus.Was it effective? The bus action clearly got the goat of the Deutsche(Germans). They declared it illegal to stand when seats were open. More importantly, the horrible effects of German domination, including Jewish deportation were somewhat lessened in Norway than in other occupied zones.
But the greatest bit of evidence that Kersten was right?
After the war, Norway – while honoring pacifism in its foreign policy – not only joined NATO, but built perhaps the largest military, per capita, in the alliance. During the Cold War, nearly every Norwegian male served in the reserves; like the Swiss, they kept their weapons and uniforms at home, ready to respond immediately to a Soviet attack. Norway – a nation of a little over four million – at the peak of the Cold War could muster 600,000 reservists; their military was built and trained to make an attack on, and occupation of, Norway prohibitively costly; Norway realized that while they might not beat the Soviets, they could make an occupation a miserable thing, and trained their military to fight not only as conventional troops, but as guerrillas as well.
They realized that wishing for peace without being able to enforce the peace – or at least deter evil’s aggression – is worse than worthless. It is a betrayal of ones nation’s duty to its people and its moral right to govern.
Kudos indeed to Norway – but not for the reasons Ms. Alphabetty thinks.
MILITARY HISTORY SCREED FOLLOWS:
Whenever people start talking about the “Fortress mentality” of the Maginot Line – the immense French fortification project of the 1920’s and 1930’s that turned the entire Franco-German border into a long underground fortress – you need to start digging beneath the surface.
For starters, remember – The Maginot Line served its purpose, as far as it went; no German attack came across the French border.
The Germans had to “march around” it, as Ms. Alphabetty notes. On the way, they “marched” through Belgium, another country that, like Norway, had embraced pacifism, disarmament and moral neutrality. The Belgians realized, with the invasion of Poland, that they’d erred; the nine months preparation weren’t enough to reverse two decades of pacifist wishing. Indeed, they fought ferociously; in Miracle at Dunkirk, Walter Lord cites a German staff report that graded their enemies in descending order of ferocity; the Belgians, the Dutch, the Brits and the French, in that order. But the Belgians and Dutch fought with antiquated weapons and leadership that had spent the interwar years policing the colonies and dealing with penurious, pacifistic budgets – and the French hadn’t built their fortresses along the neutral Belgian border.
And it’s myopic and ignorant to blame France’s defeat on the Maginot line; they also had the world’s largest tank fleet, and their tanks were better, tank for tank, than the German Panzers that overwhelmed them in June of 1940; they were hampered by a fairly hidebound leadership that sought to use tanks the way they were used in 1918, to support the infantry, rather than as a huge armored fist to blast into the enemy’s heartland – as, by the way, did the Brits and the US at the time.
The French were sensitive about casualties; 2/3 of their combatants in World War II had ended up dead, wounded or missing. The war left France morally exhausted, doubting its own moral worth, unsure about its own course. Think America’s “Vietnam Syndrome”, only vastly, vastly worse. The Maginot line allowed France to defend its industrial heartland on the relative cheap, at least in terms of manpower; a relative handful of middle-aged reservists could have held off a German frontal attack indefinitely, freeing up the younger troops to fight elsewhere.
The French didn’t lose because they were cowards (indeed, many French units fought ferociously in 1940; tens of thousands fled to the UK, Canada, the US or the colonies to carry on the war), or even because they invested in fortresses; the French lost because their national will to prevail as a nation got shot, gassed, bombed and stabbed into a pulp at Verdun in 1916, and all along the Western Front. It hadn’t come close to recovering by 1940.
In a similar, if utterly opposite, sense, countries like Denmark and Norway and Belgium lost the national will to carry on unreasoning, dogmatic pacifism in 1945; they realized that while they could keep their hearts focused on peace for those that would listen, they needed to keep their brass knuckles in hand for those who do not.
And they understand the difference today – at least, enough understand to make a difference.
Norwegian special forces have fought in Afghanistan since the very beginning. Danish and Polish troops joined US troops in Iraq (the SEALS reportedly have more regard for GROM, the Polish Navy’s SEALs, than any other non-US-or-Brit special forces group).
Pacifism is not an answer. At its best, it’s an approach. At its worst, its a national suicide pact.
February 11th, 2008 at 7:57 am
It’s a constant irritation to me, as a Norskiphile, that while the mythology of the French Resistance continues to be perpetrated, the actuality of the Norski Resistance continually gets short shrift — present company obviously excepted.
February 11th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum.
(380 A.D. -Flavius Vegetius Renatus in De Re Militari)
February 11th, 2008 at 9:03 am
“ike someone had proposed giving them a rectal exam with a pool cue”
Isn’t that one of the sexual minorities that the DFL panders to? People who put a pool cue up there rectum are just like Rosa Parks!!!
February 11th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Any tie-ins to todays St Paul paper article on NATO? The US is finally saying, if I understand it correctly, that most of the nations in the military alliance are useless.
February 11th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Joel, that would be Norsekephile”. We use the E pretty heavily.
February 11th, 2008 at 10:56 am
I’m always interested when people bring up Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and “peace”. I don’t think that’s what they were really about. They were about change. “Peace” would meant going home and NOT doing what these guys did.
As many analyses of British rule of India have pointed out, Britain was already on the way out as India’s rulers when Ghandi did his thing. If Ghandi had tried his stunts (and stunts many of them were – he got plenty of publicity) when the Brits were still in full-on colonial mode, he would probably have disappeared very quickly. No disruptions, no sandals, no robes. And no movie featuring Ben Kingsley.
King, I think, was much more courageous – this was a guy who was physically attacked, was seriously threatened many, many times under circumstances where there was no doubt about it – he was in danger. And he did press on, advocating disruption – but not actively-violent disruption. He was still picking fights, and he knew it. Some of them had to be picked, by someone.
So I’m not so sure these guys were really about “peace”. They were about raising hell, in their own way, for sure.
February 11th, 2008 at 11:13 am
The comment about how Sweden and Switzerland escaped invasion should be supplemented by information on how they were being helpful to Germany without the need for invasion. Switzerland did all sorts of dirty little financial tasks for the Nazis, including laundering cash, securities and gold stolen from Jews and the central banks of conquered countries. Sweden curried favor by allowing German troop trains to cross its territory between Norway and Finland. The Swedes also industriously produced ball-bearings for the Nazis, to replace those lost to Allied bombing raids, and many other critical finished products and raw materials.
February 11th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Mefolkes, keep in mind that in the previous century Sweden had successfully invaded and occupied many regions of what was to become Germany, and they had no love for those inhabiting the west coast of Scandinavia.
Being the dominant power in the north they had a vested interest in Germany’s occupation of Norway, as they had just recently been defeated in that country’s war of independence.
I’m not a fan of Sweden, then or now.
February 11th, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Sweden and Switzerland both had very fine tightropes to walk during the war.
Both were completely surrounded by Germany, Nazi-controlled or Nazi-friendly countries. Pragmatism was in order.
Both nations have spent decades dealing with the choices they made, and the moral quandary those choices were.
Both countries had business relationships with the Nazis – indeed, being surrounded by them, it was inevitable.
Both also took part in undermining them; Sweden accepted tens of thousands of refugees; they actively colluded with the Norwegian and Danish resistance movements in smuggling Jews and other refugees. And when the Germans tried to push the Swiss on their demand to overfly Swiss territory, the Swiss Air Force engaged them (and gave much worse than they got); the Germans actually backed down.
It was also revealed in the eighties that the Swedes ran training camps for Norwegian resistance troops, and helped funnel supplies to the Milorg.
Amgibuity is the rule when dealing with these nations’ records during the war.
February 11th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Oh, I know Sweden and Switzerland were in a bind. And I can recommend the books “Two Eggs on my Plate” and “Skis Against the Atom” for narratives of the resistance in Norway, and how vital Sweden was to it. The Swedish role was not completely brave and not completely duplicitous.
February 11th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Mefolkes, keep in mind that in the previous century Sweden had successfully invaded and occupied many regions of what was to become Germany, and they had no love for those inhabiting the west coast of Scandinavia.
My blood still boils when I think of how the German speakers suffered under the cruel oppression of the Danes in Schlesweig-Holstein. It’s a shame the Germans couldn’t name _two_ giant battleships after Otto Bismarck!
February 11th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Did not Sweden provide iron ore to the Nazi war machine? Good book out there on the liberation of the death camps. It said that when it became apparent that Germany was going to lose, Sweden started coming around and providing aid to refugees and then sent doctors to the camps upon liberation.
And Ghandi? He said the Jews were wrong to resist extermination. Sounds like his grandson is a chip off the old block.
February 11th, 2008 at 2:43 pm
It’s a shame the Germans couldn’t name _two_ giant battleships after Otto Bismarck!
I almost laughed water out my nose.
And Ghandi? He said the Jews were wrong to resist extermination.
To be fair, it was a statement of hyperidealized pacifism, not anti-semitism. Not that it made it any less stupid.
As Dinesh D’Souza said in quoting his high school history teacher, “If Gandhi had lived in Nazi Germany, he’d have ended up as a lampshade”.
February 11th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
when it became apparent that Germany was going to lose, Sweden started coming around
Not sure that I blame them for being careful. Remember – to their south was Germany and occupied Poland; to the west, occupied Norway; to the east, Nazi-allied Finland (and the USSR, which wasn’t going to be much help). To the north, 3,000 miles of tundra, ice and ocean.
The risk of national extinction can be a powerful moderator, and made the Swiss and Swedes (and, for that matter, Spain) very pragmatic about moral stances that seem pretty clear-cut to us today.
February 11th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
Yes, Mitch, but we Norskies shouldn’t pass up on any opportunities to razz Swedes. At least in The Great Scandinavian Joke War, I take no prisoners.
February 11th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
Ole came home one evening and shot his dog. When his
neighbor asked why, he explained, “Some vun phoned me
up and said my vife was fooling around vith my best friend.”
February 11th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
Not sure that I blame them for being careful. Remember – to their south was Germany and occupied Poland; to the west, occupied Norway; to the east, Nazi-allied Finland (and the USSR, which wasn’t going to be much help).
I picked up Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia a few months ago. Reading it was like a trip in a time machine. It’s easy to forget, in 2008, that in the 1930’s it was orthodox to believe that the future of mankind was totalitarianism of the left or right. Stalinism or Nazism, take your pick. There was no column ‘C’.