“Poor Elijah’s Almanack” is written by Peter Berger of Mount Holly, who taught English and history for 30 years.
It used to be an American maxim that party politics ended “at the water’s edge.” Now in an age where self-interest, conspiracy theories and actual conspiracies increasingly poison American government, partisan rancor travels overseas as readily as it crosses the rivers that separate red states from blue states.
That’s why I was surprised to find that most surveys of public opinion suggest that red and blue Americans largely agree about the war in Ukraine and our engagement in it. When it comes to economic sanctions, enforcing a no-fly zone, sending American soldiers into combat, and NATO’s performance, similar percentages of citizens on both sides of the aisle approve and disapprove.
Not surprisingly, Republicans are somewhat more hawkish, and Democrats are somewhat more open to admitting Ukrainians as refugees. Consistent with the ambiguity that’s typical of opinion surveys, a majority of Americans finds President Biden too cautious. At the same time, a majority is somehow simultaneously afraid of provoking a wider conflict.
Despite the bipartisan consensus about the issues, most Democrats support President Biden’s handling of the war, but only one in 10 Republicans approves of his performance. This disparity may reflect the influence of Republican politicians who decry Biden as “weak” and somehow blame him, not Putin, for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
So much for George Washington’s farewell warning against the “baneful effects of the spirit of party.” It’s worth noting that our first president specifically cautioned that partisan politics induces “ill-founded jealousies” between countrymen, “kindles the animosity of one part against another,” “enfeebles” the government, and “foments … riot and insurrection.” The inevitable consequence is the acquisition of “absolute power” by a man intent on “his own elevation” and a “permanent despotism” erected on the “ruins of public liberty.”
This should sound eerily familiar to Americans who remember the past five years.
Returning to the war and our support for Ukraine, I’m alarmed at how averse to risk even our most determined, concerned leaders seem, especially when Putin mentions “special alerts” and “nuclear” in the same sentence.
Putin’s allusion to “consequences greater than any you have faced in history” echoes Hitler’s threat to “smash” Czechoslovakia and launch a general war in Europe if his demands weren’t met. That risk and fear of something worse than losing the Sudetenland, specifically a war with Germany, paralyzed Britain and France and prompted their timidity in Munich. They didn’t know that after surrendering the Sudetenland, they’d get the war they feared, too.
The principal factor that’s changed since 1938 is how bad the worst can be. Millions of World War II’s victims likely wouldn’t have died if 1938’s Allies hadn’t buckled in Munich. The same will prove to be the case if Putin gets to use the threat of nuclear weapons to blackmail today’s Allies into letting him take Ukraine.
Unless we’re willing to give Putin license to subjugate his neighbors and reconquer the Soviet empire, we need to resist his nuclear extortion and stop him now. Otherwise history will record that millions were subjugated and condemned to die one country at a time because the 21st-century Allies were afraid to risk a nuclear confrontation in the battle for Ukraine.
The lesson won’t be lost on every other tyrant with a nuke.
I realize what I’m saying. I wasn’t brought up to be cavalier about nuclear war. I was born five years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Our town tested its neighborhood air raid sirens every Saturday at noon. I remember that a “warbling” tone, whatever that was, meant an attack was “imminent.” I also remember hiding pointlessly under my desk at school. I remember the Conelrad radio drills and their less than reassuring tagline informing us that “had this been an actual alert,” we would have been instructed where to tune our radios for bulletins from the government.
“Alert” was Cold War shorthand for Soviet hydrogen bombs falling from the sky.
I remember the black-and-white Civil Defense films and their sanitized depictions of nuclear war as staggering in its destruction and yet somehow survivable, provided we prepared properly, didn’t look at the explosion, and crouched alongside a sturdy building if we were outside when the bomb dropped.
According to one informational short film, proper American preparedness included keeping our houses tidy and our gardens weeded.
I lived in New Jersey, 18 miles from Times Square. Between the firestorm, the super-hurricane-force nuclear wind, and the radiation, my survival in the event of an actual alert seemed unlikely, especially if the Soviets decided that New York City warranted more than one warhead or northern New Jersey deserved a bomb or two of its own.
I remember the Cuban missile crisis, and helping my father hang a mirror on a door while we listened to the radio. I remember President Kennedy announcing a naval quarantine of Cuba and his declaration that the United States would regard “any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union.”
A full retaliatory response.
A year or so later, I saw a gray man on television after school. My mother told me he was Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who’d been in charge of creating the atomic bomb.
I remember his eyes looked hollow, though I may be crediting myself with my mother’s observation as we watched.
In 1948. Dr. Oppenheimer recounted his experience watching the first atomic bomb test out on the New Mexico desert. He thought then of a passage from the Hindu scripture that talks in context about the sad burden of duty: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
The bodies of the innocent line the roads of Ukraine.
The bomb is a terrible weapon, terrible even to contemplate.
The only thing worse than seeing it used would be if our fear of its use led us to shrink in the face of tyranny and fail in our duty to those innocent victims.