When does a powerful nation lose its spirit? And after a country’s sense of self goes adrift, can it be recovered? In the twentieth century, the gold standard of drift followed by recovery was Great Britain. More than 700,000 British soldiers were killed during WWI, roughly ten percent of all who served. Following the Treaty of Versailles, the British thought they had put war behind them. Certainly, when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement in 1938, it seemed to signify that Great Britain has lost its grit.
Far from it, as Winston Churchill firmly demonstrated. The government was in disarray when he became the prime minister in 1940. Yet such was the underlying spirit of the people that there was scant fuss when over thirty million gas masks were distributed to protect against an expected barrage of poison gas bombs, as had happened in the trenches a scant two decades earlier. Churchill’s rhetoric reflected his determined spirit: “We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire.” The English people responded with like grit. During the German air blitz of 1941, 29,000 citizens of London were killed. The historian Erik Larson referred to “the ambient courage of London” that Londoners showed during that carnage.
And what of the ambient courage of Washington? In 2001, speaking about the invasion of Afghanistan, President George W. Bush promised: “The battle is now joined on many fronts. We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter; and we will not fail. Peace and freedom will prevail.” In 2011, President Obama said, “Americans understand the costs of war. Yet as a country, we will never tolerate our security being threatened, nor stand idly by when our people have been killed. We will be relentless in defense of our citizens and our friends and allies.” In April of 2021, President Biden announced he was by September pulling out all U.S. troops. Despite President Bush’s rhetoric, we did falter and we did fail.
In his address to Congress, President Biden said, “the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today is from white supremacist terrorism.” Hmm. Every day our Special Forces kill terrorists in far-flung countries. Yet while “the most lethal terrorist threat” is here at home, somehow the FBI is not arresting or shooting it out daily with those terrorists and the mainstream press is not reporting daily about their lethal terrorist acts.
President Biden went on to say. “[W]e have to come together…to root out systemic racism that plagues America…” Systemic means ingrained into our institutions— the police, the Department of Justice, the armed services, the schools, the corporations, the fabric of society. If the American system qua system is infected by the plague of racism, then there is no way out. All efforts over tens of decades to enshrine in the fabric of our society the moral and Christian injunction that all men are created equal, were a chimera and a web of deceits and lies.
We all should strive to avoid rhetorical hyperbole. President Biden offered no proof that America is plagued by systemic racism, and the CDC Director cited no data to support her feeling of “impending doom.” In citing the resolve of Londoners in 1941, I am not suggesting we are at war. Instead, I am reprising William James in his call for “the moral equivalent of war,” a shared sense of national unity and purpose during a time of peace and prosperity. Our country’s sense of self has gone adrift.
