by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
Jamie Kirchick managed to stir the pot again, publishing an email from “a well-renowned journalist” on the subject of grit.
I’m trying hard to find the right style in which to articulate the stark-raving lunacy of imagining that the present condition is at all analogous to the situation during World War II, and then wishing that we would just have the determination of the Greatest Generation in facing down the present danger.
Primarily, this lunacy stems from the fact that WWII-era Great Britain and Germany were a pair of warring industrialized countries with large economies, armies, and navies. Germany’s goal was military domination of Continental Europe and extermination of the Jews. Also important was the small fact that Germany came remarkably close to achieving that goal. Great Britain’s grit probably stems from the fact that the alternative to determination would have been the end of Great Britain, or at least signaled its subjugation to Germany’s goals. Meanwhile, in the real world, “Al Qaeda” has, at best, loose control over maybe half a million jihadists scattered across the globe, plus a couple of bank accounts in Dubai. I hate having to take my shoes off at the airport as much as the next person, but the fact of the matter is everyday life in America is operating more or less as it was before 9/11. A single act of terrorism just isn’t on the same scale as sustained submarine warfare. Al-Qaeda has so far failed at most of its specific goals. The United States seems to be chugging along just fine; Israel still exists; India still lays claim to Kashmir; and the US still has troops in Middle East, and will continue to have them there even in the event of a withdrawal from Iraq.
The primary reason we don’t have the grit of the WWII era is that, thankfully, we no longer live in the WWII era. Now, if you want to claim that we don’t have the grit of, say, the UK during the conflict in Northern Ireland, you might have a case. But the root causes there have nothing to do with the state of the American psyche in the 21st century, and much more to do with our bedwetting discourse when it comes to domestic security and foreign policy, where the Aqua Teen Hunger Force viral marketers are viewed as needlessly frightening the public, and right-of-center foreign policy pundits hype the capabilities and intentions of nuisance regimes (Venezuela, Iran, Syria). I hate to point fingers, but … no, wait, I don’t hate to point fingers on this one. Everyone on cable news and inside the beltway needs to stop seeing Hitler around every corner. Just stop.
But Jamie Kirchick “support[s] NATO intervention in Darfur, because I sincerely believe it’s the only way to end the crisis”, and spends lots of time fretting about the “potential genocidal consequences of American withdrawal from Iraq”, so he very gritty and serious.