A Prophecy

One look at the titles in my home library and you would notice, with a few exceptions, most of the fiction was written by writers who are no longer with us. The exceptions include such novelists as Mark Helprin, Gene Wolfe, Dean Koontz, V. S. Naipaul, Michael D. O'Brien, and a few others. I enjoy the work of authors who write well, who accept the reality of objective truth, and who believe in what T. S. Eliot called the "permanent things" that make us human beings what we are and lead us to what we are destined to become. You will find few atheists or relativists among the novelists residing in my modest library. I hear enough from them in the popular media.

Jane Austen and The Cottage in Chawton, Hampshire

I've written often of my fondness for that early nineteenth-century moral theologian, Jane Austen, a woman so unlike those dark, brooding Brontes. And I continue to enjoy and reread the work of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Anthony Trollope. In truth, these days I don't read Trollope but instead listen to him during my early morning walks, thanks to the good folks at audible.com and the Apple engineers who made my iPhone. Trollope is really quite listenable. And then there are the writers whose stories and novels make me laugh again and again, authors like P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) and H. H. Munro (aka, Saki, 1870-1916). I've also come to enjoy the somewhat strange novels of the late Alice Thomas Ellis (1932-2005) and the ghostly stories of Russell Kirk (1918-1994). I remember my surprise when I learned that Kirk, one of the intellectual fathers of the American conservative movement, also wrote these wonderfully spooky tales. 

A Young Mackenzie

All of this talk of authors and books has brought me to Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972), another writer in whose works I delight. I first encountered him about 30 years ago when I picked up a used copy of his farcical novel, The Monarch of the Glen, a book I thoroughly enjoyed. Since then I've probably read a dozen of his novels. But one day, while browsing in the aisles of my favorite Cape Cod bookstore -- Parnassus Books -- I picked up a copy of Volume 3 of Mackenzie's My Life and Times. I soon discovered that his autobiography was a massive work, filling ten volumes -- yes, that's right, ten! Each volume covers an "octave," eight years of this man's remarkable life. 

Since reading that third "octave", I have searched for and purchased the other nine volumes and, believe me, few lives are more interesting than Mackenzie's. He knew everyone from Kaiser Wilhelm to Winston Churchill, from T. E. Lawrence to D. H. Lawrence, from William Faulkner to Lawrence Olivier. The child of a theatrical family, Mackenzie graduated from Oxford, was a lifelong Scottish nationalist, converted to Catholicism, and developed a deep distrust of invasive government. He also liked cats, a odd trait which I can overlook.

Last evening, while reading Volume 8, which covers the war years (1939 to 1946), I came across something Mackenzie had written late in 1940. This was a most difficult time for the British. In 1939 Stalin and Hitler had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, an agreement conceived in hell, one that would last until broken by Hitler in mid-1941. It would be well over a year before the United States entered the war after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941. At the time Mackenzie was writing, Britain stood virtually alone against the most powerful army the world had ever seen. And that army had just blitz-krieged its way through France and the Low Countries forcing the British troops and a contingent of allied forces to evacuate at Dunkirk. Were it not an island nation, Britain too would have fallen, probably quickly.

Mackenzie's comments were published as the forward to a volume designed to raise money for a charity called the War Orphans Fund. Given that they were written almost 80 years ago, in the early years of World War Two, they are both insightful and prophetic. I have included some excerpts here.

"If would be more comfortable to believe that this great war was merely the result of the last Great War. We might then feel fairly certain of achieving a real peace, for we have learnt a lesson and are in the mood to benefit by it. If this war is part of an evolutionary struggle, whatever the result we cannot hope to see the world securely re-established, because our victory must in time be challenged again but our defeat would be final, at any rate for too long a period to make speculation worth while. 

"I believe that we may soon be witnessing the death agony of that habit of thought and system of economy which is too loosely called capitalism, too loosely as it seems to me because it overstresses the economic aspect and I am not a dialectical materialist who can accept Marx's theory that man's circumstance is entirely determined by this. I regard our period as the beginning of the reaction against the trend that was given to Western development by the Renaissance and the Reformation and the discovery of America, which led to an exaggerated conception of the rights of the individual and an insufficient appreciation of his duties. The process has been accelerated by the abuse of mechanical progress from printing to flying, by the corruption of the ideal of popular education, by the substitution of humanitarian theory for religious practice, by the continually growing power of money, and by the encouragement of an illusory freedom of thought at the cost of real freedom of action. The result has been that never in recorded history was the ordinary man so completely at the mercy of his environment as he is today. The liberty that seemed within his grasp at the beginning of the fifteenth century is now farther away than ever, and is likely to recede still farther as long as man elects to be the slave of self rather than the servant of God."

At this point Mackenzie refers to a drawing of the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt and writes:

"They too were refugees...but they are refugees at this moment. What that Holy Family stood for mankind is even now being driven more brutally into the desert by material progress than ever by Herod's violence...

"After the Great War of 1914-1918 people sat back and declared that another great war would mean the end of civilization. Pamphlets were published to warn the world what appalling weapons and poisons would obliterate humanity. Pacifism was feverishly preached on the text that war was too horrible; its missionaries forgot that only experience teaches and that a younger generation would be excited but not warned by books like All Quiet on the Western Front. Meanwhile for two fatal decades audiences sought a deliberate thrill from gangster films and plays and readers procured themselves a kick from tough novels.

"And then suddenly in September 1938 audiences and readers woke up to the fact that the thrills and kicks they had been administering to themselves, thrills and kicks more pernicious to moral stamina than any hashish or cocaine could supply, were expressions of such a zeitgeist as not even the far-sighted Goethe discerned upon the wing...

"In one last desperate effort to travel out of the respectable past into the disreputable present Neville Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden to allay the whispers of politicians who had betrayed their country out of laziness because it was easier not to disturb an electorate with warnings of a storm which after all might not break. To politicians willing to betray their country out of laziness it did not seem a grave offense to betray what Mr. Chamberlain called a 'remote country' like Czechoslovakia out of cowardice. Not that such cowardice was not immediately justified, let it be quickly said; war was impossible for Britain and France. Neither was ready..."

Neville Chamberlain and Adolph Hitler in Munich

Mackenzie goes on to address the muddled thinking of both the Left and the Right in the years leading up to the war, and then writes the following:

"The seat of the trouble was that confused thinking which led to the failure to recognize that Fascism and National Socialism were only different expressions of the same basic evolutionary drive as inspired Communism. Black ants or red ants, they are both ants. The initials of Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité provide the first three letters for the LEFT, and T stands for Totalitarianism...

"The Communist secure in a positive material creed declares the condition of Europe to be evidence that the death agony of capitalism has begun. The Catholic equally secure in a positive creed which transcends materialism .declared the condition of Europe to be the logical result of turning aside from the way of life God Himself indicated when He was Man..."

Interesting stuff by a man who served actively on foreign soil in British Intelligence during World War One. I look forward to reading more of his thoughts as he describes life during the war years.

Mackenzie who wrote upwards of 100 books, also penned a four-volume memoir of those years as an intelligence officer in and near Greece during Word War One -- something else to search for...

God's Peace, the only True Peace...

Declaration of War: an Anniversary

Today is the 74th anniversary of D-Day, when more than 160,000 Allied troops landed along a 50-mile stretch of heavily-fortified beaches of Normandy, France. This successful invasion of occupied France was the beginning of the end for Nazi Germany and its allies. We should honor all those brave men with prayers, thanking God for blessing them with the sacrificial courage they demonstrated on those beaches, especially those who sacrificed their lives so we could live in freedom today. Only a small remnant are still alive today.

D-Day at Normandy

On the Beach D-Day

But there's another little-known anniversary that was marked this week, one I believe is particularly relevant. June 4 was the 76th anniversary of the last time the Congress of the United States declared war. On June 4, 1942 the USA declared war on three nations: Hungary, Bulgaria and Rumania. At the time all three were puppet states, allies of Nazi Germany. We had already declared war on Japan (December 8, 1941) and on Germany and Italy (December 11, 1941). Prior to these six declarations during World War Two, Congress had declared war only five times: with Great Britain (1812); with Mexico (1846); with Spain (1898); with Germany (1917); and with Austria-Hungary (1917). Despite all the conflicts in which we have engaged since that declaration of war 76 years ago, Congress has not declared a state of war with any nation. 

Korean "Police Action"

There was no declaration of war with communist North Korea -- or their communist allies, the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union -- even though well over a million Americans took part in the conflict (1950-1953) resulting in nearly 150,000 killed or wounded. The Chinese communists actually fought alongside the North Koreans and the Soviet Union provided arms, training and air support to our enemy. President Truman called the conflict a "police action" under the auspices of the United Nations. And despite the fact that his stated objective was to free North Korea from communist rule, this was never achieved and today we are living with the results of that failure. No peace treaty was ever signed and the Koreas -- North and South -- have lived under a mere "cease fire" for the past 65 years. Thanks to President Trump, this may change. I encourage you to pray for peace on the Korean peninsula. Pray that the Holy Spirit enter the hearts of all who will take part in next week's summit and bring about a long-term solution.

President Donald Trump and Kim Jong In

Neither did we declare a state of war with North Vietnam, in a conflict that involved Americans for over 20 years, from 1954 to 1975. Vietnam was another conflict with ill-defined objectives and predictable results. Ostensibly we were involved to ensure the freedom of the Vietnamese people and yet the conflict ended with the communists overrunning the entire country. This was an American political failure, resulting from gross political weakness and a failure of leadership. It resulted in a strategic military failure despite the steady stream of tactical military successes by American troops. Of the more than 2.5 million Americans who served in Vietnam during the long conflict, over 10% of them were killed (58,169) or wounded (310,000). Vietnam, of course, remains a "conflict" since Congress never issued a formal declaration of war. Personally, I have always considered my involvement in the Vietnam conflict (I was a Navy helicopter pilot) as a particularly honorable part of my life. 

Vietnam: Helicopters Rule

Since then the United States has been involved in many other conflicts, including the so-called "Gulf War" (1990-91), our response to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. After the terrorist attack on the United States of September 11, 2001, we engaged in additional long-term conflicts in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite the wishes and delusions of many of our politicians, we remain involved in both of these conflicts along with several others spawned by our half-hearted "war on terror." Given what has been happening in the world, no one can honestly declare that we have won or are winning this pseudo war. 

Given all this I suppose one can make a reasonably good case for saying we have not won a major conflict since Word War Two, the last time the United States Congress declared the nation to be at war with an enemy. Would it make a difference if Congress actually declared war on all forms of Islamist Jihadism, on all groups or nations that use terrorism or support terrorists? A declaration of war gives the president very broad legal authority. He can stop the export of any products, even agricultural products; he can take complete control of the nation's transportation systems; and he can direct manufacturing plants to produce weapons and seize those that refuse. Such a declaration also makes anyone who supports the enemy an enemy agent and liable for prosecution. These are certainly substantial powers, but there is much legal precedent for granting the president such extensive powers during wartime.

The first problem is that a declaration of war presumes that the government intends to win the war, thus creating high expectations on the part of the electorate. Only Congress can declare war, but that means our senators and representatives must live with their decision and its results. And make no mistake, members of Congress prefer not to take responsibility for anything that might threaten their reelection. Without a declaration, failure can more easily be rationalized or simply ignored. 

The second, and perhaps greater, problem is that a declaration of war demands that Congress identify the enemy. One cannot officially declare a "war on terror" because such a declaration identifies no enemy entity. Terror is a tactic not an enemy. The real enemy is that segment of Islam that desires to destroy Western Civilization. Until our government and the people who put them in power can accept and declare this, we will continue as we have since Word War Two.