We don’t really know (and probably never will) whether President Donald Trump really called America’s World War One dead “losers” and “suckers,” as Jeffrey Goldberg claims in a September 3 piece in The Atlantic.

On one hand, the claim rings true. Trump has a history of publicly spitting in the faces of war veterans both individually (calling Vietnam POW John McCain a “loser,” vilifying administration appointees who even briefly remove their lips from his posterior, etc.) and collectively (for example, pardoning war criminal Eddie Gallagher in the face of his comrades’ reports of his atrocities).

On the other hand, that it rings true makes it somewhat irrelevant. His “pro-military” supporters knew he was a snake when they picked him up, and they’ve continued to embrace him no matter often or brazenly he sinks his fangs into their favored people and causes.

Amid the howling commentary and “analysis,” what I’ve not seen is any substantial discussion of two questions: Were US troops in World War One “losers?” Were the Marines who died at Belleau Wood “suckers?”

“Losers,” I think, is pretty much an obvious falsehood. The US and its allies won that war, the Central Powers lost it, and the entry of US forces almost certainly changed that outcome from stalemate to rout.

Ever since boot camp in 1985, I’ve loved — and steeped myself in — Marine Corps history, and Belleau Wood looms large in that history. First Sergeant Dan Daly, already the winner of two Medals of Honor, is said to have yelled “come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” as he led his Marines into the fray. To this day, members of the Fifth and Sixth Marine Regiments wear the French fourragère in recognition of their units’ valor at Belleau Wood. The Marines carried the day at Belleau Wood. “Losers?” Nope.

But “suckers?” Well, maybe.

More than four million Americans volunteered for, or allowed themselves to be conscripted into, military service in World War One. 117,000 of them died. Hundreds of thousands more bore wounds that pained them for life.

And for what?

Certainly not, as US President Woodrow Wilson claimed, to make the world “safe for democracy.” Among America’s allies, Russia was an outright autocracy, while Britain and France, formally democratic at home, ran global and distinctly non-democratic empires. And Wilson himself instituted an anti-democratic police state at home, censoring and jailing opponents of the war.

Nor, as it turned out, was World War One “the war to end all wars.” US entry into the war turned a likely status quo ante into an ersatz “peace” that led directly to World War Two, as the allies divvied up new suzerainties from the Central Powers’ colonial remnants and imposed crushing reparations on Germany.

That — and everything that followed from it, including a warfare-welfare state that, like a vampire latched firmly onto his victim’s jugular, sucks peace and prosperity from Americans’ lives to this very day — is what the Marines at Belleau Wood died for.

“Suckers” sounds fair.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

When you undergo a medical procedure or volunteer for a research study, you’re presented with forms to sign, outlining what’s going to happen (and what bad things could happen), and expressly consenting to have those things happen.

If you’re accused of rape, “he or she didn’t physically resist” isn’t an acceptable defense. In fact, express consent is the emerging standard, sometimes to seemingly ridiculous degrees (i.e. re-requesting consent at each stage of an encounter).

Consent, I think we can agree, is a big deal in America today.

It was a big deal in 1776, too, when Thomas Jefferson asserted in the Declaration of Independence that  governments “deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Consent is a central issue in the 27 colonial grievances listed in the Declaration, one of which (“imposing Taxes on us without our Consent”) became a primary battle cry of the American Revolution: “No taxation without representation!”

To this day, American politicians proudly claim “consent of the governed” via democratic elections. But that claim conflicts with the known facts.

According to the US Census Bureau, the population of the United States, as of November 8, 2016, stood at 323,781,667. That evening, the winning candidate for President received 62,984,828 votes nationwide. To put it a different way, about 19.5% of people living in the United States consented to Donald Trump’s presidency.

In 2014, Mitch McConnell was elected to his sixth term in the US Senate with 806,787 votes from among a state population of about 4.4 million.  In other words, about 18.3% of Kentuckians consented to be represented by Mitch McConnell in the US Senate.

In 2018, Nancy Pelosi was elected to her 17th term as a US Representative from California. That state’s 12th US House District boasts a population of about 765,000. A whopping 35.5% — 274, 035 — of those she claims as her constituents consented to her claim to represent them.

One interesting dodge to the obvious implication — that our politicians don’t truly enjoy the consent of those whom they govern — is that voting implies consent to be ruled by the winner. The minority gets its say, but implicitly agrees to be bound by the results.

But even accepting that argument, it’s a rare election in which a majority of those supposedly consenting to be ruled vote at all, for the winner or otherwise.

Some aren’t allowed to vote: Minors, non-citizen immigrants, prisoners, and, in some states, felons who have completed their sentences. Others choose, of their own accord, to abstain from voting.

They are the silent majority.

They’re not represented, but they’re taxed.

They’ve chosen no rulers, but they’re ruled. And if they resist the rule of the minority and its representatives, they’re caged or killed.

Can government truly enjoy the consent of the governed? Under certain conditions, yes. Small political units operating on unanimous express consent, perhaps interfacing with other such units in a system known as “panarchy,” could work.

But in today’s America, consent of the governed is a fairy tale. America’s politicians enjoy no such consent and should stop pretending they do.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“[W]e currently have an inferno of political violence to which the president of the United States adds fuel,” Jennifer Rubin thunders from her bully pulpit at the Washington Post. “[I]t is time for bipartisan voices, local and state leaders, police and other first responders, civic and religious leaders, and all responsible media outlets to try to quench the flames of violence.”

Rubin is no lone voice in the wilderness. As America’s latest long hot summer drags into autumn, politicians and pundits are getting louder and more shrill in their denunciations of political violence.

Considering the sources, those denunciations smack of hypocrisy.

In another Post column published the very same day as her rant against political violence, Rubin tells us US Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) should be “revered and thanked for her courage and service to the country.”  Duckworth lost her legs co-piloting a helicopter during the US occupation of Iraq. That is, engaging in unambiguously political violence on behalf of the US government.

Rubin denounces political violence out of one side of her mouth while lionizing it out of the other.

Politics as we know it today is entirely based on violence and the threat of violence.

That’s most obvious in the case of war, in which governments settle their political conflicts by sending forth their armed servants in large numbers to murder one another (and anyone else with the bad luck to get in the way), but don’t be fooled: Every government edict, at home and abroad, is backed by the credible threat of violence.

According to the Declaration of Independence, government exists to protect our rights. It may only legitimately use force to do so, and to bring to justice those who violate those rights.

If government accomplished that mission and went no further, it might be an acceptable, even worthwhile institution. But it doesn’t accomplish that mission very well, and it inevitably turns the inch it’s given into miles.

Why? Because the problem with power, as Lord Acton noted, is that it corrupts. Governments, and those who run and rely on them, always turn from the task of protecting our rights to increasing their power.

At the far, not always visible, end of every government demand — a speed limit, a tax code, a drug prohibition, what have you — stand men and women with guns, waiting to cage or kill you for non-compliance or defiance.

As for democracy, as currently practiced it’s merely a contest to see who gives armed enforcers their marching orders. America’s two “major” political parties don’t want to end political violence; they merely want control of those they deem its “legitimate” combatants.

The present conflagration — marches in the streets, clashes between protesters and police, cities on fire — shouldn’t surprise us.

Sometimes the state’s victims fight back. And then the state pours on even more force, because that’s its nature. It’s a cycle that can only be broken by abolishing the state itself. Which means that only anarchists enjoy moral standing to denounce political violence.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY