David K. Shipler Quotes
In practically every war, it seems, those wielding the authority of the state were gripped with a galvanizing fear, not just of the enemy abroad but of an imagined virus of resistance and subversion at home.
David K. Shipler, Journalist & Historian, The Rights Of The People: How Our Search for Safety Invades Our Liberties, 2011
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the attack on Pearl Harbor
Referring to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy:
Response to an offer by Commodore Preble to exchange prisoners.
Although it seems incredible to us today, thousands of people were arrested and prosecuted under the Espionage Act. The government particularly targeted leftists such as Eugene V. Debs, Bill Haywood, J. Philip Randolph, Victor Berger, John Reed, Max Eastman, and Emma Goldman. Debs was sentenced to 20 years in prison for criticizing the Act itself.
The Senator was an Army sergeant fighting in Europe during WWII. He and a unit of Japanese American had volunteered to fight for America at the same time as many other Japanese Americans – American Citizens -- on the West Coast were interned in camps and denied the very rights we were fighting to preserve. The internment was one of the most regrettable mistakes in American history.
There was a Sedition law which made it a Federal felony to encourage anyone not to join or support the military during the First World War. The Socialist Politician and Candidate for President, Eugene Debbs and others, were jailed for less seditious statements. Helen Keller was a remarkable woman who was blind and deaf, and yet she became a great orator and social reformer. The administration died not relish the reaction if they put this popular, blind, deaf woman in jail so she was never charged. The law of course was unconstitutional, but it took years to reach that determination. Until then, the Sedition Act was one of the worst examples of infringement in American history since the original Alien and Sedition Acts of John Adams.
He had been mortally wounded in battle and asked the Duc de Bourbon to prop him up against a tree facing the enemy. Then enemy army was French also but abandoned the cause of the French King to fight with the more powerful Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. He was only going to die, but the enemy would remain traitors for ever. This was typical of the code of the Knights of which he is sometimes referred to as the Last of the Knights.
This part of the war was particularly bloody as Marion and his opponent Colonel Tarleton both committed atrocities and war crimes against the civilians who supported the other side or tried to remain neutral. Marion was promoted to General.
The so called War on Terror had many lessons. President Obama and many of the military leaders in the Pentagon realized that just as we evolved the concept of a Cold War, a new concept was needed to deal on the long run with the Al Qaeda terrorists. Typically in war, the nation is fully mobilized with the surrender of the enemy the major objective. When peace is negotiated, there is some demobilization and other things begin to take precedence. However, given the non state highly decentralized nature of Al Qaeda, there is no way to ever negotiate peace because no Al Qaeda official can speak for any more than his immediate cell and cadre. They will likely never stop attacking in any foreseeable future since their motivation is ideological and religious. It doesn’t take full military mobilization to protect against individual acts of terrorism, and indeed arguably the large mobilization only gives the terrorists more nearby targets. So American leaders were evolving a state of high protection, surgical strikes and attacks on Al Qaeda leadership and cells, and at the same time a demobilization of many of the overseas ground troops. It is not a state of war yet there will be attacks from time to time against us and attacks by us on Al Qaeda, yet there cannot be an all out war which is de factor non winnable in toto, but is very controllable. For Stein and other hawks, this new state is unfathomable. If there is any attack on Americans or American interests to them we are either at war with full mobilization or have surrendered. The total number of American civillians killed in the 10 year war on terror has been less than 2 months of normal automobile crash deaths or 3 months worth of gun accidents, or one tenth of the deaths caused by flu in a single year.
The Red Scare was the exaggerated, and somewhat irrational fear of communists and communism. A lesser used term is “Brown Scare” named for the Fascist Brownshirts thugs in several nations. It was an exaggerated and somewhat irrational fear of extreme right wingers and Fascists. It too has been a factor in American politics, but not to the same extent as the red scares.
The Chinese were massacred when the Japanese invaded with atrocities against civilians that were inconceivable until Hitler began his in Europe. However, there were many Chinese we worked against the Japanese including the Communists who made a truce with Chiang (see {636322}) so that they could oust the Japanese invaders.
David K. Shipler is an American author. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction in 1987 for Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land. He also wrote the book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America. Formerly, he was a foreign correspondent of The New York Times. He has taught at many colleges and universities. Since 2010, he has published the electronic journal, The Shipler Report.
