I.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
–Spurious quotation, often attributed to George Orwell
A common fate is suffered by those who write not only well, but also with a journalist’s skill at putting big ideas into as few words as possible. (Most journalists rarely run the same risk, as they are an idea-free breed in general.) Sometimes things they didn’t exactly say get credited to them.
For a lot of people, George Orwell’s supposed quote about rough men—soldiers—ensuring the safety of our beds is as much Orwell as they know, think they know or need to know for their purposes. It’s a line that’s easily and effectively flung into the faces of either pacifists who oppose all wars or those who, for the moment, oppose the particular war into which their country has blundered. Its effectiveness stems not just from being true—which it is—but also from its alleged source, someone whose left-wing credentials are nailed into place. Quoting or even misquoting Orwell is as much to say, “Look, this guy’s one of yours, and he doesn’t have a problem with going to war.” So knock off that defeatist whining and let the real men go about their business, free of interference.
Of course, 1984 and Animal Farm get used the same way. Of course, to read Orwell in full is to realize that his allegiance to anything, other than the poor bastard at the bottom of the ladder, was always conditional and temporary. Those who quote his admiration of the common soldier as an endorsement of war might as well say that since Orwell had no problem with shooting fascists (actually, he did on occasion, refraining from plugging one caught literally with his pants down), then he probably thought it was a good idea to shoot everybody.
It’s no surprise that Orwell’s “rough men” one-liner has shot up in popularity recently—this is wartime, after all, not that you’d notice by driving around the streets or sauntering through the shopping malls. It’s probably set to eclipse “All animals are created equal, but some animals are created more equal than others” and the image of the future as a boot endlessly stamping a human face. If pacifists are uncomfortably stung by that particular observation, it’s more than likely because it’s true. Our easy living gets paid for by others, often with their sweat, but in the case of soldiers, too often with their blood.
To the degree that Orwell gets it wrong, it’s with the word “rough.” That makes it sound as if the ones doing the fighting and dying are in it for the love of the brawl, out there on the battlefield because their souls are so armor-plated, their senses so brutalized, that they can’t get their kicks anywhere else or by any other means than blowing shit up and making defenseless others suffer their swaggering and sneering. There aren’t many deep-down pacifists or other antiwar types who believe that, though. The image of soldier as Hun, subhuman bloodthirsty thug, is warmonger propaganda, a cartoonish depiction of that unknown bastard on the other side of the trenches, who must be stopped before he bayonets your babies and rapes your sister.
If anything, it’s the rest of us, the noncombatants, who are the armor-plated ones, so cynical and dead-souled that we’re immune to all the corny patriotic crap that motivates someone so soft and malleable that he can still be made to believe that the country in which he was born is somehow worth dying for. Greater love hath no man, that he should lay down his life for his brother? What a sap. Nobody had better try to run that number on us. We’re out for No. 1, and if we can convince somebody else to take the hit for us, to buy for us our easy consumerist lifestyle with his own blood and skin and bone, it only goes to show what smart dealers we are. If we have any moral qualms about this one-way bargain, we can usually ease them by reminding ourselves how heavily our current (and past) fighting and dying forces are weighted with exactly the kind of rural white Toby Keith fan that urban hipsters such as ourselves have decided are responsible for every evil from uncool music on the charts to global warming. Early on in the Iraq war, Al Sharpton and his clones thumped a predictable drum about nonwhites carrying the cannon-fodder load—but while one African-American or one Hispanic or one of any other ethnic group dying uselessly is one too many, the actual percentage numbers cut the stage out from beneath that particular song-and-dance. Trampy, undereducated white trash Lynndie England becomes the poster child for the unspoken conviction that the people getting killed in Iraq are exactly the ones who should be on the front lines. Or at least we tell ourselves so, rather than admit that those people are better than us in some fundamental way.
But the higher moral ground upon which soldiers have stood for centuries, if not millennia, comes not from sacrifice—the throwing away of something important, the instinct toward self-preservation at all costs—but from entrusting it to us, the civilians. The soldier says, “I will die for you if necessary.” To which we reply, if we have any decency at all, “We will not needlessly require that of you.” Few soldiers want to die. They trust another to decide whether they should be sent into battle, their commanding officer or their commander-in-chief. A president who, on our behalf, initiates pointless slaughter also violates the contract between ourselves and the soon-to-die. That’s not what they signed up for—but then, it’s not what we agreed to, either.
That’s the moral dimension of the principle of civilian control over the military. It’s not just good politics that civilians rather than soldiers decide whether wars should be fought or abandoned; it’s good militariness, to coin a word. A nation’s army can’t exist without that principle in force. (Though the army of an empire, looking to accomplish rather different things, might be able to, at least for a little while.) What good man would sign up if he knew his life would be thrown away?
Soldiers are always ready to fight—or usually so—complete with trash talk about how they know they can win, no matter what the odds. That’s not bravado but the armor with which soldiers furnish themselves. A soldier who doesn’t think he can win, or even survive, is a demoralized soldier, and a demoralized soldier (other soldiers will tell you) is one of the marching dead, even if he does manage to make it back home. Soldiers say they can win because to say otherwise is battlefield suicide.
A soldier’s assessment of the odds is not what we should base our own calculations upon. He’s free to gun his engine, trusting that we’ve got our foot upon the brake. Ex-soldiers are even less reliable in this regard, for no other reason than that they disagree as to what can be won and what should be fought. For every vet down at the American Legion Hall, gung ho on continuing the war, you can find another, less enthusiastic one in the antiwar movement. The Review-Journal gave us exactly that kind of Dueling Vets face-off back on April 24 and continuing since then, with the Republicans rolling out those whose comments supported their position, and the Democrats doing the same. Of course, in our post-Swift Boat era, things don’t end in a tie at that point; now we get to watch one veteran call another a traitor, a rhetorical attack mode that would have been unthinkable even just a few years ago. All we’ve managed is to make the pretense of a discussion even uglier and more pointless, with no one’s mind changed, one way or the other.
Or did we accomplish something else in this last go-’round?
II.
There would be many crimes and errors which it would be beyond his power to commit, simply because they were nameless and therefore unimaginable. And it was to be foreseen that with the passage of time the distinguishing characteristics of Newspeak would become more and more pronounced—its words growing fewer and fewer, their meanings more and more rigid, and the chance of putting them to improper uses always diminishing.
–George Orwell, Appendix to 1984
That the real goal of the debate was apparent to just about everyone could be seen in how quickly the appropriate neologism was coined.
The L-word.
As the R-J reported, “There has been no shortage of attempted political point-scoring since [Harry] Reid uttered the L-word on Thursday [April 19]. He has not said the word ‘lost’ again since ...” Rather the point, wouldn’t it seem?
And not quite the same as that other ongoing national discussion, in which a different word has been made taboo. There’s no great loss in conducting a dialogue on race without using the N-word, except to the extent that a certain degree of efficiency is achieved by allowing people to codify everything they have to say in two syllables. (Though whether they should be prevented from doing so is part of the discussion about censorship and free speech.) Those who describe as “Orwellian” the attempt to remove the N-word from our collective vocabulary mistake what Orwell was writing about. If anything, racists can even more effectively get their notions across by talking with a veneer of politeness, minus the one word that would get most people, black or white, to immediately stop listening to them. If rhetoric is the art of convincing other people through language, throwing out the N-word is like discarding the burnt umber crayon from the big 128-color box; it wasn’t that useful to begin with.
Something else happens when the word “lost” is, well, lost. Those who wish to remove it from the language, at least when we’re talking about war, also wish to excise our ability to even conceive of that to which the word refers. If there are only two possibilities, and one of them no longer exists—in the true Orwellian sense of no longer being able to think about that for which we have no word—then only the other remains. If there is no such thing as the L-word, then we have magically ensured our victory. Mission accomplished.
As the R-J reported one Nevada resident saying, “Let me assure you, lose is not in the vocabulary of my son and the United States Marine Corps.” Though actually, Marines—elite military professionals that they are—can realistically assess their chances of winning or losing, even while continuing to fight. The specter of defeat that would cause nonsoldiers such as ourselves to say, “Game over; I’m through,” doesn’t provoke the same reaction from those who have prepared themselves to die. Before that point is reached, however, professional soldiers are always capable of admitting that not all battle plans work out, that not all hills are taken, not all lines are held, and not all campaigns carried to a successful conclusion.
When the L-word is made verboten, it’s a sure sign that the soldiers are no longer in charge of how the fighting is done, and the Rumsfelds and Cheneys and other amateurs are firing orders from behind their desks, whenever they’re not posing in front of the mirror with clenched jaws and steely General MacArthur squints. The history of the world would be sadly different if the German generals had been listened to back in 1941, when they had used the L-word to describe Operation Barbarossa. If General Paulus had been allowed to retreat from the stubbornly held gates of Stalingrad, the Germans’ Sixth Army could have regrouped and applied its still massive forces against some more strategically productive target, rather than just pointlessly freezing and starving to death in the Russian snowdrifts. And then we would probably all be speaking German now, except for those of us who had gone up the crematoria chimneys as smoke. But the V-word—verloren—was ordered out of the generals’ language, with predictable results. Human beings might need words to talk about disaster and utter ruin, but mute reality doesn’t.
If the Marine father quoted above had said that the word “surrender” isn’t in his son’s vocabulary, he might have had a point. But it’s another Orwellian rhetorical tactic to attempt equating a failed military campaign with the act of surrendering, just as though admitting that it was a bad idea to go into Iraq in the first place would be the same as American troops laying down their rifles and being marched off, hands on head. A major result of admitting that this war is over—and we didn’t “win” the occupation that followed—would be to prevent American soldiers winding up as either corpses or POWs, instead of the mustered-out veterans, reunited with their families, that they deserve to be.
We don’t admire the Spartans for winning the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C.; they were slaughtered, albeit in the defense of their homeland rather than on some misguided imperial adventure. (Plus the advance of the Persians was sufficiently delayed to allow the Athenians to prepare for the Battle of Salamis, which they did win.) The Spartans go down in history as warriors who carried out their orders, no matter what the cost, just as ours have done. The only question now is whether we’ll stupidly and cruelly command them to pay the same price that the Spartans paid, without getting anything for it.
III.
In 2004, I happened to be in Berlin when the director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film Der Untergang was still in the theaters. (The film was released here with the title Downfall; even with an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film of the year, it didn’t get the attention it deserved.) I saw it at the movie complex beneath the ultramodern Sony Center in the heart of the city. As I watched, the German friend I was with leaned over and pointed out to me that the events depicted in the film—the last days of the Third Reich’s ruling elite in the underground Führerbunker—occurred just a couple hundred yards from where we were sitting, and at about the same depth in the earth. I had already been hammered by the film, but it was then I felt the past wash over me, like some dark subterranean river, unstoppable in its course.
Disclaimer: As facile and fun as it is to equate today’s politicians with some of the worst people in history, I don’t want to go there. If anything, the ones in power now still seem like small potatoes compared to those monsters. Different people, different times, different situations, different agendas. But there were other people then—Der Untergang is told through the viewpoint of an apolitical personal secretary, who comes to admit that her naïve loyalty was in effect as evil as others’ knowing enthusiasm—and they displayed an eerie refusal to see that their war was lost, even while the bare concrete walls were shaking beneath the impact of Russian cannons.
There were enough survivors from the bunker that we have a good idea of what went on down there. At one point, the basically accurate film depicts Dr. Ernst-Günther Schenck, the director of the Reichs Chancellery casualty station, emerging from the bunker to forage for medical supplies. He’s warned by a German officer not to head for the hospital that is within plain sight, a few blocks away. “That’s the territorial limit of the Third Reich,” the officer says, pointing to the muzzle of the Panzer tank beside them. “Everything beyond is Russkie-land.”
That soldier was a realist. As was Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, SS Gruppenführer Hermann Fegelein, who wasn’t as much a soldier as an opportunist, happy to run with the Nazi pack while they were winning but only interested in saving his own hide when things went bad. The film’s Fegelein advises the young secretary to flee Berlin while there’s still time. But she believes the tide has turned: “Der Führer has assured us that we can still win! Why would he lie to us?”
That was as good a question then as it is now. In the film, Fegelein bitterly answers:
“What does he have left to lose?”
Indeed. There’s the L-word again, inescapable as one’s fate. While George Bush is a very different person, with different intentions and different desires, he’s managed to bit-by-bit work himself into the same desperate situation. Every U.S. president aims for the history books, with a presidential library stuffed with archived memos and press clippings, all about the shining achievements of his administration. At this point, the most fervent Bushite true believers will be hard-pressed to even fill a manila folder with anything worth pointing to. On the domestic front, he leaves a stack of tax cuts with a built-in expiration date, from which the Democrats will have no trouble standing back and watching them die; an immigration policy that his own party rank-and-file despises; and the No Child Left Behind Act, which virtually everybody hates. Everything else on his watch is ... the war.
The president might be crowing now about having gotten the money to continue the war, but there’s every possibility that he’s been snookered by Harry Reid & Co.—again. The war isn’t going to turn around in the next three months, centuries-old religious and political schisms aren’t going to be patched over in favor of New England-style town-meeting democracy, and there will be a lot more blood on the ground, American and Iraqi alike. Essentially, George Bush asked for the shovel with which to dig himself an even deeper hole, and Reid and Nancy Pelosi sold it to him. The one escape route through which the president might have scurried to avoid blame for the mess—They wouldn’t give me the blank check I needed to win—has been sealed off.
The vote on the Iraqi war appropriations bill is George Bush’s Stalingrad, the place at which he has so thoroughly committed all his remaining resources, against such overwhelming odds, that only an increasingly unlikely miracle can save him. To retreat now would be to admit the reality of the very thing which his surrogates have hacked out of the collective political vocabulary and thrown away. The L-word is that kind of ghost, the more fiercely you deny its existence, the tighter it wraps its cold arms around you.
IV.
But then there’s one more possibility. He who has nothing to lose might in fact believe that he has everything to lose. Those same accounts have it that before his death, der Führer was moving imaginary armies around on his map table and calculating what strategies to undertake once the Russians had been thrown back from the outskirts of Berlin. Right up until he put the bullet through his head, he might actually have been as confident of victory as his most deluded followers were. That’s the power of positive thinking, all right.
If someone mere yards from the frontline, surrounded by generals who were telling him just how badly it was going, could imagine that particular war was still winnable, perhaps it’s excusable that another commander-in-chief, half a world away from the action, would only listen to the carefully groomed good news funneled his way. The way we’re burning through our military resources, including recycling increasingly weary troops through end-on-end tours of duty, plus dragging in the National Guard, by the time 2008 rolls around at last, the president might indeed by shuffling nonexistent brigades and squadrons around on the board, there being not much else left.
But, as said above, we’re dealing with a different person. Different times, different situations. If being literally under the gun couldn’t push someone into seeing reality in 1945, perhaps it still might help some 60-odd years later.
The Orwellian purging of language is a process that can only be pursued in the abstract, by those separated from reality. Editing the word “ocean” out of the dictionary won’t save a drowning man, and not knowing what to call a rottweiler won’t make the one at your throat magically disappear. The party line might be that the L-word doesn’t exist, but its usefulness might be apparent when one is a little closer to the action.
So, a modest proposal. With all of our government’s modern communication technology, the Oval Office could be relocated to downtown Baghdad, and its occupant wouldn’t be any more out of touch than when he’s down on the ranch in Crawford, Texas—arguably less so. Reality would seem a bit realer when it’s your motorcade that’s driving, flags fluttering on the limo fenders, toward the roadside bomb a few yards farther on. When the shoulder-held surface-to-air missiles are aimed at the presidential helicopter overhead, the elevated view of its passenger might take in a few more details of what’s happening on the ground. Having nothing left to lose takes on a new meaning when what’s at stake is one’s life and not just one’s place in the history books.
That other, smaller war is over as well, and it also didn’t go as George Bush’s followers would have wanted, or as George Orwell would have gloomily predicted. In the book 1984, Big Brother is victorious in his campaign to eradicate words and their associated possibilities of thought. But in this world, the real one, language is still determined by those who speak it. You can go anywhere in the U.S., except perhaps the White House, and hear the L-word being used about this war.
Three months from now—or sooner—it will be interesting to see if Harry Reid and the other Democrats (and the Republicans who have come to their senses) speak the same English language that Americans speak.
Complete with the L-word.
K.W. Jeter is a writer in Las Vegas.