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Published on Tuesday, August 1, 2000 in the Boston Globe
The Cruelest Month Of All
by James Carroll
I have written columns each year to commemorate the bombings of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, but lately I have been reading John Keegan's history of World War I,
and the violence of August was what struck me as I prepared to write this - the
''Guns of August,'' as Barbara Tuchman put it. I began to take reference and
history books almost at random off my shelves. All at once the days of the
month began to unfold as a literal chronology of war, from early in the century
to late, altering the context even of those most horrible atomic bombs. Here,
listed by date and year, is what I found:
Aug. 1, 1914: Germany declares war on Russia.
Aug. 2, 1990: Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait.
Aug. 3, 1914: Germany invades Belgium, declares war on France, the start of
World War I.
Aug. 5, 1949: China has fallen to the Communist forces of Mao Tse-Tung.
Aug. 6, 1945: Hiroshima.
Aug. 7, 1964: The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, the start of the Vietnam War.
Aug. 9, 1945: Nagasaki.
Aug. 13, 1961: The Berlin Wall begins to go up, to be completed in four days.
Aug. 14, 1980: Poland cracks down on workers. Solidarity goes on strike in
Gdansk.
Aug. 19, 1981: US warplanes shoot down two Libyan jets 60 miles off the Libyan
coast.
Aug. 19, 1991: Reactionaries in Russia launch a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev.
Aug. 20, 1968: Soviet forces invade Czechoslovakia, ending the Prague Spring.
Aug.20, 1998: Clinton orders an attack against a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.
Aug. 31, 1983: The Soviet Union shoots down a civilian airliner, KAL 007.
During the month of August in 1962, several thousand Soviets secretly come to
Cuba to construct missile launchers, which are exposed in October.
In late August of 1949, the Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb,
beginning the nuclear arms race.
By late August in 1939, German divisions are in place for the Sept. 1 invasion
of Poland, the start of World War II.
Such a chronology makes one wish to be able to remove this month from the
calendar of history, but it also makes one wonder if there is something in the
late summer that unleashes the dark energy of the human heart?
Obviously, most of these events were driven by forces that had no regard for
dates, yet when seen together it seems odd that so many momentous occurrences
took place in these very weeks. And then one remembers that the month is named
for Caesar Augustus, who transformed Rome from a republic into a dictatorship.
Augustus was an emperor who claimed to be the son of God, and used his army to
prove it.
Is it possible to transform the meaning of this month of guns? With that
question in mind, let me make a modest proposal to President Clinton and Vice
President Gore. For several years now, the Democrats, for clearly political
reasons, have gone along with the Republican-driven momentum toward the
creation of the Missile Defense Shield, the wildly expensive, unnecessary,
unworkable, and dangerous program that is opposed by this nation's friends and
rivals both.
It can be argued that Clinton's temporizing on Missile Defense and his
piecemeal approval of steps toward it have deprived the Republicans of a potent
campaign issue. But with the failure of the most recent missile test early this
month, coupled with the crescendo of criticism that the program provoked at the
recent summit in Japan, and with Clinton's own long-set schedule for an up-or-
down decision, the time for temporizing is over.
What if Bill Clinton chose this month to make a definitive choice against
Missile Defense, with a clear explanation to the American people of its risks
and costs. He could claim credit for his temporizing as mere prudence, while
emphasizing that the preliminary testing of prototypes it made possible has
demonstrated that the system will not work.
At last, instead of trying to neutralize missile defense as a political issue,
Clinton could undercut hawks in Congress and in the Pentagon by choosing this
most political of moments to put the question before the public. It would be
his cleverest move yet. Such a reversal would immediately benefit Al Gore, who
could make his own considered opposition to Missile Defense the centerpiece of
his presidential campaign. Now there would be an absolute difference between
the candidates, and the gravity of the question would galvanize the campaign.
What liberal could vote for Ralph Nader in this context? The Republicans would
eagerly join such a debate, much as Barry Goldwater did in 1964. Because of a
momentous choice set before it in August, the American electorate would cast
its most important vote, perhaps ever, on the issue of war and peace. That
would change the meaning of this month for sure. I, for one, am confident that
the result of such a national plebiscite on the arms race would be the end of
it.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
� Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company
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A<>E<>R
Integrity has no need of rules. -Albert Camus (1913-1960)
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The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The libertarian therefore considers one of his prime educational
tasks is to spread the demystification and desanctification of the
State among its hapless subjects. His task is to demonstrate
repeatedly and in depth that not only the emperor but even the
"democratic" State has no clothes; that all governments subsist
by exploitive rule over the public; and that such rule is the reverse
of objective necessity. He strives to show that the existence of
taxation and the State necessarily sets up a class division between
the exploiting rulers and the exploited ruled. He seeks to show that
the task of the court intellectuals who have always supported the State
has ever been to weave mystification in order to induce the public to
accept State rule and that these intellectuals obtain, in return, a
share in the power and pelf extracted by the rulers from their deluded
subjects.
[[For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto, Murray N. Rothbard,
Fox & Wilkes, 1973, 1978, p. 25]]
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