Donald Trump violates and tramples every law he can to create more power for himself but aggression in Venezuela is unjustified

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by David French:

“War,” the Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “is a mere continuation of policy by other means.” 

If there is one line that virtually every Army officer learns from Clausewitz’s posthumously published 1832, book, “On War,” it’s that description of the purpose of armed conflict.

Those words were among the first that popped into my head when I woke up Saturday morning to the news that the American military had attacked Venezuela, seized its dictator, Nicolás Maduro, and brought him to the United States to face criminal charges.

The reason those words occurred to me was simple — the attack on Venezuela harks back to a different time, before the 19th century world order unraveled, before two catastrophic world wars, and before the creation of international legal and diplomatic structures designed to stop nations from doing exactly what the United States just did.

One of the most important questions any nation must decide is when — and how — to wage war. It’s a mistake, incidentally, to view General Clausewitz as an amoral warmonger. He wasn’t inventing the notion he describes; he was describing the world as it has been. His statement is a pithy explanation of how sovereign states viewed warfare for much of human history.

When a strong state operates under the principle that war is just another extension of policy, it is tempted to operate a bit like a mob boss. Every interaction with a weaker nation is tinged in some way with the threat of force — nice little country you have there. Shame if something happened to it.

This is not fanciful. In a telephone conversation with The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer, Donald Trump threatened Venezuela’s new leader, Delcy Rodríguez, who served as Maduro’s vice president. “If she doesn’t do what’s right,” Trump said, “she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.”

But the Clausewitzian view isn’t the only option for nations and their leaders. There is a better model for international affairs, one that acknowledges the existence of evil and the reality of national interests, but also draws lines designed to preserve peace and human life.

Carl von Clausewitz, meet Saint Thomas Aquinas (b. 1215- d.1274)

In Summa Theologica, written in the 13th century, Aquinas outlined three cardinal requirements of what came to be known as just war theory.
Diplomacy and economic pressure are almost always still a first resort for powerful nations, but if they fail to achieve the intended results — well, you can watch footage from the American strike in Venezuela to know what can happen next.

Second, the war must be based on a just cause. National self-defense or collective self-defense are obviously just, for example.

Third, there must be a just purpose, namely the advancement of good and the avoidance of evil.

One way to think about the shifting patterns of warfare is that humanity seesaws between Clausewitz and Aquinas. Strong nations impose their will on the weak and then — eventually — try to impose their will on each other. When catastrophe results, as it invariably does, they turn back to Aquinas.

You can actually see the results of this shifting approach across the sweep of history. An analysis of global deaths in conflict shows that
war is always with us, but its intensity waxes and wanes. Periods of extreme suffering and death are followed by periods of relative quiet, followed again by an age of horror.

Consider history since World War I. After the ongoing slaughter of trench warfare, the world attempted to ban aggressive warfare and to establish an international institution — the League of Nations — to keep the peace.

The League failed, in part because the United States refused to join, and, after an even more horrible world war, the world tried again, this time under American leadership.

Echoes of Aquinas are all over the U.N. Charter. Article 2 of the United Nations Charter bans aggressive warfare (taking away a key tool in the Clausewitz toolbox); Article 51 permits individual and collective self-defense to keep great powers in check; and Chapter V established a body (the Security Council) that’s designed to keep the peace.

No one would argue that the system is perfect. We’ve seen wars of aggression since World War II, but the system has achieved its primary goal. The world has been spared total war. The Aquinas model, however, has to fight two foes — the will to power and the loss of memory. 

Just war theory demands restraint from the powerful. It asks great powers to forgo imposing their will — even to the point of subordinating their short-term national interests to the long-term aspiration of international peace and justice. 

That’s where our loss of memory comes into play. Restraint is more persuasive when people actually remember a world war, and the people who built the United Nations and NATO had been through two. In that sense, the moral argument against aggressive war has practical application.

In fact, the world saw what happened when the will to power dominated world affairs. World leaders know (or should know) that the most catastrophic conflicts can start from the most modest beginnings.

When Gavrilo Princip took aim at the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, for example, and Austria-Hungary mobilized against tiny Serbia, how many world leaders grasped that more than 16 million people would die in the war to come❓

When memory fades, the Clausewitz model grows more tempting — in part because it can achieve quick results, just as it did in Venezuela early Saturday morning.

Not even the angriest opponents of Trump’s intervention in Venezuela should whitewash the rule of Maduro. He was a corrupt and violent dictator who impoverished and oppressed his people.

The economic numbers tell one version of that story. In 2012, the year before Maduro took power, the gross domestic product of Venezuela was more than $372 billion. In 2024, it was just under $120 billion — a terrible collapse.

He retained power only by defying democracy. In 2024, election observers believe he lost his bid for a third term by a more than 30-point margin. His opponent, Edmundo González, won more than 65 percent of the vote, and Maduro won just over 30 percent. The official tallies, however, gave Maduro the victory.

But, talking about G.D.P. numbers and vote totals seems inadequate when addressing the pure human misery caused by the Maduro regime. Since 2014, almost 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country to escape poverty, corruption and oppression. This represents more than a quarter of Venezuela’s population before Maduro was president.

Nevertheless, even so, the ends do not justify the means.

The Trump administration — acting entirely on its own and without seeking congressional approval — decided it was in the best interests of the United States to remove Maduro from power.

But Donald Trump struck Venezuela, he violated every principle of just war.

First, Trump acted unilaterally, turning his back on the sovereign constitutional requirements of American law. He did not consult with Congress. He did not secure a declaration of war. He simply attacked a sovereign country on his authority alone.

Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has argued that the administration’s action wasn’t an act of war, but rather a “law enforcement operation” and that the Defense Department merely protected the arresting officers.

This defense is laughable. Under that reasoning, any president could transform virtually any war into a law enforcement operation by indicting opposing leaders and claiming that the large military forces needed to secure the leader’s arrest were simply protecting law enforcement. That’s not an argument; it’s an excuse.

Second, Donald Trump struck without a casus belli, without just cause recognized by international law and the U.N. Charter. 

Jack Goldsmith, a law professor at Harvard and a former assistant attorney general for the office of legal counsel under President George W. Bush argued in a post on his Substack, the attack “pretty clearly violates the charter,” even if there is no clear way to enforce the charter’s commands.

Third, while removing a dictator from power can be a just end, Trump’s decision to turn his back on the democratically elected opposition is profoundly troubling. That the remaining elements of a corrupt regime still govern the country — subject to American demands to negotiate oil deals with American companies — risks perpetuating corruption and oppression at the expense of freedom and democracy.

Nothing here is new. In a sharp piece for The Free Press, the historian Niall Ferguson argued that Trump’s attack on Venezuela was a piece of a much larger whole, the restoration of the politics and diplomacy of 1900, — the years before the catastrophe of the First World War.

The gunboat diplomacy of the Gilded Age certainly meant that the United States dominated Central and South America. It imposed a quasi-colonial reality on the region. Each nation developed under at least some degree of American oversight. Every nation was only asTrump’s attack on Venezuela didn’t take place in a vacuum, either. In December, the administration released its National Security Strategy paper that put the Western Hemisphere first.

The document addressed the Americas before it addressed Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and it declared that the United States will “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.”

The president already has a name for his revival of 19th Century American foreign policy: the Donroe Doctrine.

At the same time, the paper created a dangerous distance between the United States and its European allies. It declares that Europe must “stand on its own feet and operate as a group of aligned sovereign nations, including by taking primary responsibility for its own defense.”

In isolation, that statement isn’t terribly problematic. The nations of Europe are rich enough and strong enough to shoulder most of the burden of collective defense. American allies, though, contribute more than many Americans may think. According to a recent RAND study, America contributed roughly 39 percent of the total defense burden by 2023 — a number that has dropped substantially since the end of the Cold War.

Trump has embraced the "Donroe Doctrine" (was this a slur or intentional❓) enthusiastically. He’s engaged in economic warfare against Canada and Mexico. He’s said that Canada should be America’s 51st state. He has designs on Greenland, part of the sovereign territory of Denmark, a NATO ally.

That brings us back to the fatal flaw of running the world through spheres of influence and the amoral approach to war as an extension of policy. Smaller nations don’t want to be dominated by the strong, and strong nations don’t want to see their rivals get stronger. So they make alliances. In 1914, Serbia had Russia, and Belgium had Britain. In 1939, Poland had France and Britain.

That’s exactly how regional conflict turned into global war.

If Americans wonder why any South American regime would seek closer ties with other foreign powers, perhaps we should ask what their history has been with the United States and what the people of South America think about an aggressive revival of the Monroe Doctrine. (Donald Trump either slurred, or intentionally, called it the "Don-roe Doctrine❗)

There are better and worse ways to argue about Trump’s approach.

The worse argument is to say that Trump set a precedent with his intervention in Venezuela — a precedent that nations such as Russia, China and Iran will be eager to follow in their own respective spheres of influence, and we will have no standing to object when our adversaries take the same approach to countries in their spheres of influence that we took in ours.

But Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China and revolutionary Iran have never had the slightest concern for just war theory or any moral argument. They’re held in check (to the extent they are) by deterrence, or, when deterrence fails, raw military force.

The better argument recognizes that there will never be a unanimous embrace of just war theory. It recognizes that the U.N. Charter is doomed to often be more aspirational than operational.

This argument recognizes that the world order doesn’t depend on every great power for its existence, but it does depend on the greatest power — the United States. Put another way, our national commitment to Aquinas keeps Clausewitz at bay.

We can barely keep the world order together when only three of the five permanent members of the Security Council — the United States, Britain and France — comply with the U.N. Charter and international law. But, if the United States joins Russia and China in their approach to armed conflict and international relations, then the Western postwar consensus is truly dead.😡😢

America First isn’t necessarily isolationist — there’s nothing isolationist about arresting the leader of a sovereign nation and pledging to “run” it, but it is myopic.

It pursues the sugar high of national power at the expense of justice and peace. You can see that Trump is on that sugar high right now. On Sunday night, NBC’s Sahil Kapur reported that Trump was still saying, “We’re gonna run” Venezuela. “If they don’t behave,” Trump added, “we’ll do a second strike.”

But ,wasn’t just thinking about Venezuela. “Colombia is very sick, too,” he said. Cuba is “ready to all.” 

Moreover, Donald Trump also threatened to strike Iran if Iran kills protesters and brought up Greenland again: “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.”

If there is anything that could decisively wreck NATO, it would be an attempt to annex Greenland. Annexation could conceivably empower Denmark to invoke Article 5, the collective self-defense provision of the North Atlantic treaty, against the United States.

But, there’s even a further problem: The true international norm is that when the strong dominate the weak, the weak try to become strong.

That can mean alliances with enemies. That can mean global rearmament. That can mean nuclear proliferation. It can also mean that a foolish world once again endures the high cost of forgetting what it’s like when great powers go to war.


David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).

Donald Trump and maga Republicans must read about the consequences of tyrannical Nazi history during the Third Reich

Can Americans sustain the political courage to oppose Trumpziism❓ Echo essay published in The Guardian, by Jonathan Freedland, and reprinted in the New York Times.  (Note- Impossible to understand why authoritarians are somehow capturing so much political attendion.)

As authoritarian rulers gain ground across the democratic world, making inroads not only in Hungary and Turkey, but even in the United States, a question from the 20th century has resurfaced in the 21st, one that presses on individuals as well as institutions. Put simply, who bends the knee to tyranny and who stands up to it?

A clue can be found in an extraordinary episode from inside the Third Reich that has lain, almost forgotten, for nearly 80 years. 

At the heart of it is a loose grouping of 10 or so friends and acquaintances drawn from German high society, both the aristocracy and professional elite. Their circle included not one but two countesses, an ambassador’s widow, a diplomat, high-ranking government officials (current and former), a doctor, a pioneering headmistress and a former model, among others. What they found in one another was a shared willingness to defy Hitler, in ways large and small.

Except their assumption of common purpose was fatally flawed. In September 1943, they met for a tea party — unaware that one of them was poised to betray all the rest to the Gestapo. That act would lead to arrest and jail and, for several of those present that day, death, whether by the guillotine or the hanging rope. Its ramifications would eventually reach the apex of the Nazi state.

The core mystery that runs through this story is not just the identity of the betrayer, but also why people of privilege and rank, who could so easily have kept their heads down, risked everything. Had they fallen in line, their fortunes, careers and country estates likely would have remained intact. They could have survived the war unscathed. But they chose another path.

Consider Otto Kiep, 57 years old at the time of the tea party, a diplomat who had secured the glamorous post of German consul general in New York City in the last years of the Weimar Republic.

(FYI: The Weimar Republic was Germany's government from 1919 to 1933, established after World War I and ending with the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.)

In 1933, an invitation had come to attend a dinner in honor of an eminent fellow countryman, Albert Einstein, who also happened to be the world’s most famous Jew. To accept would be to incur the wrath of his new Nazi masters, installed in power just a few weeks earlier. To refuse would be to side with their campaign of antisemitic persecution. Kiep accepted the invitation and delivered a toast in Einstein’s honor. That brought a summons back to Berlin where he would be hauled before the Führer himself.

Or take Maria von Maltzan, the young countess who turned her Berlin apartment into an unofficial refuge for “submarines” — Jews forced to live in hiding, whose safety depended on staying silent and unseen. (Among them was Ms. von Maltzan’s own forbidden Jewish lover.) Or her fellow countess, Lagi Solf, who broke the rules banning contact with Jews, in order to fetch groceries for the submarines. Carrying full shopping bags, one in each hand, had long been her habit. That way, if she ran into someone on the street she would be unable to give the requisite Heil Hitler salute.

In scouring the archives, including letters, diaries and court testimonies left behind by the group, and by speaking with their surviving relatives, I’ve begun to form an answer to why some were capable of saying no to a mighty and terrifying regime while the vast majority of their neighbors were bowing their heads and saying yes.

Several were committed Christians, adamant that they would ultimately have to answer, not to Adolf Hitler, but to Jesus Christ. Perhaps the most devout was the hostess of the fateful tea party: the innovative educator, Elisabeth von Thadden, whose school, the Evangelical Rural Education Home for Girls, founded six years before the Third Reich, discreetly took in Jewish pupils while their families scrambled to secure the papers that would enable them to flee the country. Her belief that she was accountable to God alone helped Ms. von Thadden face down the Gestapo inspector who came to examine her school for “deficiencies of conviction,” after the authorities learned that she had recited an Old Testament psalm, which, to them, bore the unforgivable taint of Hebrew scripture. (A 13-year- old pupil was the informant.)

Others among the rebels were children of the nobility, convinced their highest loyalty was not to national socialism but to their own ancestors. Hitler might have dreamed of a 1000-year Reich, but these families had already ruled Germany for centuries. They believed that those of their class represented the deep and true Germany, defined in part by its patrician ideal of compassion for the weak. Nazism would be a passing fad; it was they, and the aristocratic inheritance they embodied, that would last.

So it was that Maria von Maltzan could speak to the Gestapo men who raided her apartment with imperious impatience. 

When they demanded she open up the wooden compartment under a sofa-bed — inside which her lover was hiding, holding his breath — she explained that it could not be opened, and that if the secret police were so certain someone was hiding inside, they should aim their guns at it and shoot. She all but dared them to do it. But, she insisted, if they did, they would have to compensate her for the damage, and promise to do so in advance and in writing. Her gambit, deployed with all the hauteur of her caste, worked. Her lover survived.

Several key players in the drama were women whose upbringing shared another striking aspect: a close relationship with a strong father. That was true of Ms. von Thadden and both countesses, Maria and Lagi. In all three cases, the women were not just loved by their fathers; they were trusted by them. In a way that was unusual in the era before modern feminism, they were deemed by their fathers to be the equal of any man, capable of taking on any task. Long after their fathers were dead, the women carried that confidence with them. 

By the time the Nazis ruled Germany, it had blossomed into courage.

The strength of those women was buttressed by that deeper conviction that is perhaps the key determinant of who defies an oppressive regime and who buckles before it: belief in an authority higher than the government of the day. 

Most rebels at the tea party also came to understand that such a belief demanded action as well as thought.

For some, that translated into small gestures of defiance, like Lagi Solf and her shopping bags. For others, such as Otto Kiep, it meant acts of audacious resistance, coming within touching distance of a plot to assassinate Hitler. Through deeds large and small, they demonstrated — to themselves and one another — that obedience was not the only option.

To be clear, most aristocratic Germans did not rebel against Hitler. On the contrary, the German nobility largely fell in line behind the Nazis, drawn in part by the Führer’s pledge to restore titles abolished in the Weimar era. And of course, we cannot neatly read across from that place and that time to our own age.

But if there is a lesson to be gleaned from the deadly fate of those men and women, it might just be that the best safeguard against tyranny is a legion of people who believe in an authority higher than any political program, prince — or president.

Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for the Guardian.

Ignore pandemic history and we are doomed to repeat it

Echo essay published in The Conversation: 

By J. Alexander Navarro, Assistant Director of the Center for the History of Medicine, at the University of Michigan

People gave up on flu pandemic measures a century ago when they tired of them – and paid a price.

1918 the greatest pandemic in history

Picture the United States struggling to deal with a deadly pandemic.

State and local officials enact a slate of social-distancing measures, gathering bans, closure orders and mask mandates in an effort to stem the tide of cases and deaths.

People were ready to be done with masks as soon as it looked like the flu was receding. PhotoQuest/Archive Photos via Getty Images

The public responds with widespread compliance mixed with more than a hint of grumbling, pushback and even outright defiance. As the days turn into weeks turn into months, the strictures become harder to tolerate.

Theater and dance hall owners complain about their financial losses.

Many citizens refuse to don face masks while in public, some complaining that they’re uncomfortable and others arguing that the government has no right to infringe on their civil liberties.

Clergy bemoan church closures while offices, factories and in some cases even saloons are allowed to remain open.

Officials argue whether children are safer in classrooms or at home.

As familiar as it all may sound in 2021, these are real descriptions of the U.S. during the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic. In my research as a historian of medicine, I’ve seen again and again the many ways our current pandemic has mirrored the one experienced by our forebears a century ago.

As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its second year, many people want to know when life will go back to how it was before the coronavirus. History, of course, isn’t an exact template for what the future holds. But the way Americans emerged from the earlier pandemic could suggest what post-pandemic life will be like this time around.

Sick and tired, ready for pandemic’s end:

Like COVID-19, the 1918 influenza pandemic hit hard and fast, going from a handful of reported cases in a few cities to a nationwide outbreak within a few weeks. 

No mask- no service in 1918 on streetcar

Many communities issued several rounds of various closure orders – corresponding to the ebbs and flows of their epidemics – in an attempt to keep the disease in check.

These social-distancing orders worked to reduce cases and deaths. Just as today, however, they often proved difficult to maintain. 

By the late autumn, just weeks after the social-distancing orders went into effect, the pandemic seemed to be coming to an end as the number of new infections declined.

People clamored to return to their normal lives. Businesses pressed officials to be allowed to reopen. Believing the pandemic was over, state and local authorities began rescinding public health edicts. The nation turned its efforts to addressing the devastation influenza had wrought.

For the friends, families and co-workers of the hundreds of thousands of Americans who had died, post-pandemic life was filled with sadness and grief. Many of those still recovering from their bouts with the malady required support and care as they recuperated.

At a time when there was no federal or state safety net, charitable organizations sprang into action to provide resources for families who had lost their breadwinners, or to take in the countless children left orphaned by the disease.

For the vast majority of Americans, though, life after the pandemic seemed to be a headlong rush to normalcy. 

Starved for weeks of their nights on the town, sporting events, religious services, classroom interactions and family gatherings, many were eager to return to their old lives.

Taking their cues from officials who had – somewhat prematurely – declared an end to the pandemic, Americans overwhelmingly hurried to return to their pre-pandemic routines. They packed into movie theaters and dance halls, crowded in stores and shops, and gathered with friends and family.

Officials had warned the nation that cases and deaths likely would continue for months to come. The burden of public health, however, now rested not on policy but rather on individual responsibility.

Predictably, the pandemic wore on, stretching into a third deadly wave that lasted through the spring of 1919, with a fourth wave hitting in the winter of 1920. 

Some officials blamed the resurgence on careless Americans. Others downplayed the new cases or turned their attention to more routine public health matters, including other diseases, restaurant inspections and sanitation.

Despite the persistence of the pandemic, influenza quickly became old news. Once a regular feature of front pages, reportage rapidly dwindled to small, sporadic clippings buried in the backs of the nation’s newspapers. The nation carried on, inured to the toll the pandemic had taken and the deaths yet to come. 

Unfortunately, people were largely unwilling to return to socially and economically disruptive public health measures.

It’s hard to hang in there:

Our predecessors might be forgiven for not staying the course longer. First, the nation was eager to celebrate the recent end of World War I, an event that perhaps loomed larger in the lives of Americans than even the pandemic.

Second, death from disease was a much larger part of life in the early 20th century, and scourges such as diphtheria, measles, tuberculosis, typhoid, whooping cough, scarlet fever and pneumonia each routinely killed tens of thousands of Americans every year. Moreover, neither the cause nor the epidemiology of influenza was well understood, and many experts remained unconvinced that social distancing measures had any measurable impact.

Finally, there were no effective flu vaccines to rescue the world from the ravages of the disease. In fact, the influenza virus would not be discovered for another 15 years, and a safe and effective vaccine was not available for the general population until 1945. Given the limited information they had and the tools at their disposal, Americans perhaps endured the public health restrictions for as long as they reasonably could.

A century later, and a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, it is understandable that people now are all too eager to return to their old lives. This end of this pandemic inevitably will come, as it has with every previous one humankind has experienced.

If we have anything to learn from the history of the 1918, influenza pandemic, as well as our experience thus far with COVID-19, however, it is that a premature return to pre-pandemic life risks more cases and more deaths.

And today’s Americans have significant advantages over those of a century ago. We have a much better understanding of virology and epidemiology. We know that social distancing and masking work to help save lives. Most critically, we have multiple safe and effective vaccines that are being deployed, with the pace of vaccinations increasingly weekly.

Sticking with all these coronavirus-fighting factors or easing off on them could mean the difference between a new disease surge and a quicker end to the pandemic. 

COVID-19 is much more transmissible than influenza, and several troubling SARS-CoV-2 variants are already spreading around the globe. The deadly third wave of influenza in 1919, shows what can happen when people prematurely relax their guard.

Armenian genocide history badly synergies with what's happening today

"...brunt of the genocide fell upon the .... civilian population, made up overwhelmingly of women and children and elderly"

Mother Arising Out of the Ashes, memorial statue (2002)
What Recognizing the Armenian Genocide Means for U.S. Global Power. Excellent history essay with salient reflections on current events.

Tsitsernakaberd is Armenia's official memorial dedicated to the victims of the Armenian Genocide, built in 1967, on the hill of Tsitsernakaberd, in Yerevan. Every year on 24 April, the Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, thousands of Armenians gather at the memorial to commemorate the victims of the genocide. The people who gather in Tsiternakaberd lay fresh flowers out of respect for all the people who died in the Armenian genocide. Over the years, from around the world, a wide range of politicians, artists, musician, athletes, and religious figures have visited the memorial.
By Charlie Laderman Kings College London lecturer in International History

Grateful to Speaker Nancy Pelosi! It is apt that the U.S. House of Representatives recently formally recognized the Armenian genocide and called for “education” about the United States’ own humanitarian response.  This expert echo opinion was published in the History News Network electronic magazine and in The Washington Post.  

Just over 120 years ago, the House passed a different resolution regarding the Armenians that confirmed a fundamental departure in U.S. foreign policy. That event signaled that the United States was becoming a great power with global responsibilities and would no longer remain indifferent to events beyond its continent. The House’s latest action could serve as another watershed moment in American diplomacy if it challenges a new isolationist spirit and stimulates a fresh debate over the nation’s international role.

In early 1896, Congress responded to the first large-scale massacre of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire — which claimed roughly 100,000 lives — by passing a resolution calling for President Grover Cleveland to intervene diplomatically to help “stay the hand of fanaticism and lawless violence.” It was an unprecedented step, the first time that a branch of the federal government advocated a political response to a humanitarian problem outside the Western Hemisphere.

Cleveland demurred, outside of sending a couple of warships to the Eastern Mediterranean to protect U.S. missionaries, the nation’s principal regional interest. Still, the resolution revealed a bold new spirit in American diplomacy. Theodore Roosevelt would soon emerge as the leading advocate of an American duty to aid the Armenians — and of greater intervention in the world beyond U.S. borders. Atrocities against Armenians profoundly shaped his commitment to counter “crimes against civilization.”

In his 1904, address to Congress, Roosevelt even suggested that intervention might be warranted. Roosevelt was personally “entirely satisfied to head a crusade for the Armenians.” But he recognized that Congress would not back an intervention in a remote region, at a time when the majority of Americans wished to keep their country isolated from great power politics.

A decade later, in 1915, during World War I, reports reached the United States that the Ottomans were again perpetrating atrocities against Armenians. Roosevelt, at that point a former president, was the most outspoken proponent of intervention on their behalf. But although the American public responded with an impassioned expression of philanthropy to aid survivors, the official U.S. response was restraint. President Woodrow Wilson was concerned that public condemnation of one of Germany’s principal allies would compromise U.S. neutrality in a conflict that most Americans wished to stay out of. 

Even after entering the First World War against Germany in 1917, Wilson avoided declaring war on their Ottoman ally.

Roosevelt was adamant that if the United States failed to vindicate the Armenians by punishing the Ottomans, then it would reveal all of Wilson’s “talk of guaranteeing the future peace of the world” as “mischievous nonsense” and “insincere claptrap.”

But Wilson’s prime concern at the time was the defeat of Germany. He was also concerned that military intervention would threaten the security of U.S. missionaries and their institutions, and risk worsening the Armenian situation by impeding the missionary-led relief efforts.

Yet Wilson’s apparent inaction in the face of the massacres belied the outsize role that the Armenians would come to play in his own vision of reforming global politics. While he was against military invention during the conflict, at the end of the war Wilson wanted Americans to take the lead in establishing a new international system, in which the Ottoman Empire would be dismembered and the security of its subject peoples guaranteed.

Armenia played a key role in this vision. Wilson hoped the United States would help the Armenians establish a state under the new League of Nations’ “mandate system,” through which the victors assumed responsibility for the imperial possessions of the defeated powers and prepared them for self-determination. The Armenian mandate was a clear manifestation of Wilson’s new world order, providing an American alternative to Europe’s imperial practices and, more importantly, ensuring the United States assumed a position of global leadership.

But the public didn’t agree. Whereas Wilson perceived the mandate as a symbol of American selflessness and moral authority, his opponents interpreted it as evidence of the unrewarding and open-ended commitments the new international organization would impose. For Wilson’s opponents, there was a fundamental difference between private expressions of charity and a political commitment to Armenian security. Republican Sen. Warren Harding, who succeeded Wilson as president in 1920, summed up their position: “I am not insensible to the sufferings of Armenia … but I am thinking of America first. Safety, as well as charity, begins at home.”

Ultimately, Wilson was unable to convince Americans to join the League and his request to assume a mandate was also rejected. Correspondingly, deprived of protection, Armenian independence was short-lived, crushed between Russian expansion and Turkish nationalism.

Although the United States was unable to prevent the wartime atrocities or secure Armenia’s independence in the aftermath, the plight of the Armenians was a major political issue at the time — reflecting how, as American power expanded at the turn of the 20th century, so did some Americans’ sense of global responsibility.

Events that would have been lamentable but unresolvable in an earlier era, occurring far away, began to provoke intense debate over whether the United States should respond and, if so, how. The humanitarianism was certainly selective. At a time when lynchings were rife within the United States and the country had just fought a brutal war to suppress an insurrection in the Philippines, it opened the government to charges of hypocrisy. 

Yet in attempting to convince the public of its responsibility to the Armenians, first Roosevelt and then Wilson extended the parameters of debate on the purpose of American power and the nature of the national interest. Their attempts to safeguard the Armenians encapsulated the nation’s internal conflict over its world role.

Today, the question of the United States’ moral responsibility to victims of humanitarian atrocities could again spark a debate over the nation’s global mission. It was strained relations with Turkey — a longtime NATO ally that has successfully lobbied for decades to prevent recognition of the genocide — that created an opportunity for advocates of recognition to convince congressmen that the pursuit of historical truth trumped considerations of realpolitik.

As well as recognizing the genocide, the House also stressed its relevance to “modern-day crimes against humanity.” Indeed, the passage of the House resolution was justified by its sponsors with reference to Turkey’s current human rights violations. Alongside the resolution, the House passed a bill to impose sanctions on Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government. This served as a riposte to President Trump, whose announcement that U.S. troops were withdrawing from northeastern Syria provided the precursor to Turkey’s assault on the Kurds. Moreover, it was a rejoinder to the more narrowly nationalistic “America First” approach to foreign policy, (badly!) advocated by Trump and, before him, by Harding.

The House’s actions increased pressure on the administration. It has already faced a backlash from American Christian leaders, including formerly loyal supporters such as Franklin Graham and Pat Robertson, for sanctioning a withdrawal that has also left 50,000 Syriac-Assyrian and Armenian Christians on the Syrian-Turkish border in grave peril. Many Christians live in al-Hasska and al-Qamishli, two cities founded by survivors of the 1915 genocide.
In the early 20th century, two internationalist presidents, in their different ways, urged a reluctant Congress to adopt a more interventionist role in the region. Today it is a branch of Congress that is attempting to pressure a recalcitrant president to change course. But unless Congress succeeds in reversing the U.S. withdrawal, it is likely that forces sponsored by Turkey and Russia will fill the vacuum, just as they did in 1920. And if they do, the remnants of these ancient Christian communities risk being cleansed from their ancestral homes for good.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/11/14/what-recognizing-armenian-genocide-means-us-global-power/

Charlie Laderman is a lecturer in war studies at King's College, London, and the author of "Sharing the Burden: The Armenian Question, Humanitarian Intervention and Anglo-American Visions of Global Order."

The Times Record- Brunswick Maine: Trump failed at Aisne Marne

https://www.timesrecord.com/articles/opinion/letter-dismayed-at-trumps-no-show-at-aisne-marne/
Gold Star mother Emma Morin. Her son was a World War I casualty.  MaineWriter - my letter to the editor:
In 1959, when Mrs. Emma Martin Morin of Pike Street in Biddeford turned 95 years old, her birthday was a front page feature story printed above the fold in the local newspaper. Her birthday celebration was featured because Mrs. Morin was a Gold Star mother. Her son Napoleon was only 19 years old when he was killed at the Battle of Chateau -Thierry, during World War I, in France. Napoleon is interred at Aisne-Marne American Cemetery in France. Memere Morin’s sacrifice stays with the family, even 60 years after her death at 95 years old, when she died at home on March 20, 1960, in Biddeford. She was the oldest World War I Gold Star mother from Biddeford’s Tighe-Beaudoin-Farley American Legion Post 26, Auxiliary. My husband and I visited the beautiful but somber cemetery in France, several years ago.

We traveled to the location from Paris, by train. We could have hired a taxi to drive us. We saw Napoleon’s grave marker inside the cemetery chapel. His name was carved above the alter.

Obviously, we are dismayed about how President Donald Trump was unable to travel to Aisne-Marne to commemorate the dedication of the Centennial of the end of World War I, with other European leaders, because of rain. There are at least 2,000 other graves of young Americans who are also interred at Aisne-Marne. Thankfully, Defense Secretary James Mattis was thoughtful enough to attend the ceremonies.

Juliana L’Heureux,  Topsham

Update research about war and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

From Shell Shock to Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome - a century of invisible war trauma

An echo essay published in The Conversation*

In the wake of World War I, some veterans returned wounded, but not with obvious physical injuries. Instead, their symptoms were similar to those that had previously been associated with hysterical women – most commonly amnesia, or some kind of paralysis or inability to communicate with no clear physical cause.

English physician Charles Myers, who wrote the first paper on “shell-shock” in 1915, theorized that these symptoms actually did stem from a physical injury. He posited that repetitive exposure to concussive blasts caused brain trauma that resulted in this strange grouping of symptoms. But once put to the test, his hypothesis didn’t hold up. There were plenty of veterans who had not been exposed to the concussive blasts of trench warfare, for example, who were still experiencing the symptoms of shell-shock. (And certainly not all veterans who had seen this kind of battle returned with symptoms.)

We now know that what these combat veterans were facing was likely what today we call post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. We are now better able to recognize it, and treatments have certainly advanced, but we still don’t have a full understanding of just what PTSD is.

The medical community and society at large are accustomed to looking for the most simple cause and cure for any given ailment. This results in a system where symptoms are discovered and cataloged and then matched with therapies that will alleviate them. Though this method works in many cases, for the past 100 years, PTSD has been resisting.

Three scholars in the humanities have individually studied PTSD – the framework through which people conceptualize it, the ways researchers investigate it, the therapies the medical community devises for it. Through our research, each of us has seen how the medical model alone fails to adequately account for the ever-changing nature of PTSD.

What’s been missing is a cohesive explanation of trauma that allows us to explain the various ways its symptoms have manifested over time and can differ in different people.
Nonphysical repercussions of the Great War

Once it became clear that not everyone who suffered from shell-shock in the wake of WWI had experienced brain injuries, the British Medical Journal provided alternate nonphysical explanations for its prevalence.

A poor morale and a defective training are among the most important, if not the most important, etiological factors: also that shell-shock was a “catching” complaint. – (The British Medical Journal, 1922)

Shell-shock went from being considered a legitimate physical injury to being a sign of weakness, of both the battalion and the soldiers within it. One historian estimates at least 20 percent of men developed shell-shock, though the figures are murky due to physician reluctance at the time to brand veterans with a psychological diagnosis that could affect disability compensation.

Soldiers were archetypically heroic and strong. When they came home unable to speak, walk or remember, with no physical reason for those shortcomings, the only possible explanation was personal weakness. Treatment methods were based on the idea that the soldier who had entered into war as a hero was now behaving as a coward and needed to be snapped out of it.

Lewis Yealland, a British clinician, described in his 1918 “Hysterical Disorders of Warfare” the kind of brutal treatment that follows from thinking about shell-shock as a personal failure. 

After nine months of unsuccessfully treating patient A1, including electric shocks to the neck, cigarettes put out on his tongue and hot plates placed at the back of his throat, Yealland boasted of telling the patient, “You will not leave this room until you are talking as well as you ever did; no, not before… you must behave as the hero I expect you to be.”

Yealland then applied an electric shock to the throat so strong that it sent the patient reeling backwards, unhooking the battery from the machine. Undeterred, Yealland strapped the patient down to avoid the battery problem and continued to apply shock for an hour, at which point patient A1 finally whispered “Ah.” After another hour, the patient began to cry and whispered, “I want a drink of water.”

Yealland reported this encounter triumphantly – the breakthrough meant his theory was correct and his method worked. Shell-shock was a disease of manhood rather than an illness that came from witnessing, being subjected to and partaking in incredible violence.

Evolution away from shell-shock

The next wave of the study of trauma came when the Second World War saw another influx of soldiers dealing with similar symptoms.

It was Abram Kardiner, a clinician working in the psychiatric clinic of the United States Veterans’ Bureau, who rethought combat trauma in a much more empathetic light. In his influential book, “The Traumatic Neuroses of War,” Kardiner speculated that these symptoms stemmed from psychological injury, rather than a soldier’s flawed character.

Work from other clinicians after WWII and the Korean War suggested that post-war symptoms could be lasting. Longitudinal studies showed that symptoms could persist anywhere from six to 20 years, if they disappeared at all. These studies returned some legitimacy to the concept of combat trauma that had been stripped away after the First World War.

Vietnam was another watershed moment for combat-related PTSD because veterans began to advocate for themselves in an unprecedented way. 

Beginning with a small march in New York in the summer of 1967, veterans themselves began to become activists for their own mental health care. They worked to redefine “post-Vietnam syndrome” not as a sign of weakness, but rather a normal response to the experience of atrocity. Public understanding of war itself had begun to shift, too, as the widely televised accounts of the My Lai massacre brought the horror of war into American living rooms for the first time. The veterans’ campaign helped get PTSD included in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM-III), the major American diagnostic resource for psychiatrists and other mental health clinicians.

The authors of the DSM-III deliberately avoided talking about the causes of mental disorders. Their aim was to develop a manual that could simultaneously be used by psychiatrists adhering to radically different theories, including Freudian approaches and what is now known as “biological psychiatry.” These groups of psychiatrists would not agree on how to explain disorders, but they could – and did – come to agree on which patients had similar symptoms. So the DSM-III defined disorders, including PTSD, solely on the basis of clusters of symptoms, an approach that has been retained ever since.

This tendency to agnosticism about the physiology of PTSD is also reflected in contemporary evidence-based approaches to medicine. Modern medicine focuses on using clinical trials to demonstrate that a therapy works, but is skeptical about attempts to link treatment effectiveness to the biology underlying a disease.

Today’s medicalized PTSD

People can develop PTSD for a number of different reasons, not just in combat. Sexual assault, a traumatic loss, a terrible accident – each might lead to PTSD. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates about 13.8 percent of the veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan currently have PTSD. For comparison, a male veteran of those wars is four times more likely to develop PTSD than a man in the civilian population is. PTSD is probably at least partially at the root of an even more alarming statistic: Upwards of 22 veterans commit suicideevery day.

Therapies for PTSD today tend to be a mixed bag. Practically speaking, when veterans seek PTSD treatment in the VA system, policy requires they be offered either exposure or cognitive therapy. 

Exposure therapies are based on the idea that the fear response that gives rise to many of the traumatic symptoms can be dampened through repeated exposures to the traumatic event. 

Cognitive therapies work on developing personal coping methods and slowly changing unhelpful or destructive thought patterns that are contributing to symptoms (for example, the shame one might feel at not successfully completing a mission or saving a comrade). The most common treatment a veteran will likely receive will include psychopharmaceuticals – especially the class of drugs called SSRIs.

Mindfulness therapies, based on becoming aware of mental states, thoughts and feelings and accepting them rather than trying to fight them or push them away, are another option. 

There are also more alternative methods being studied such as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing or EMDR therapy, therapies using controlled doses of MDMA (Ecstasy), virtual reality-graded exposure therapy, hypnosis and creative therapies. The military funds a wealth of research on new technologies to address PTSD; these include neurotechnological innovations like transcranial stimulation and neural chips as well as novel drugs.

Several studies have shown that patients improve most when they’ve chosen their own therapy. But even if they narrow their choices to the ones backed by the weight of the National Center for PTSD by using the center’s online Treatment Decision Aid, patients would still find themselves weighing five options, each of which is evidence-based but entails a different psychomedical model of trauma and healing.

This buffet of treatment options lets us set aside our lack of understanding of why people experience trauma and respond to interventions so differently. It also relieves the pressure for psychomedicine to develop a complete model of PTSD. We reframe the problem as a consumer issue instead of a scientific one.

Thus, while WWI was about soldiers and punishing them for their weakness, in the contemporary era, the ideal veteran PTSD patient is a health care consumer who has an obligation to play an active role in figuring out and optimizing his own therapy.

As we now have the strange benefit of the hindsight that comes with 100 years of studying combat-related trauma, we must be careful in celebrating our progress. 

What is still missing is an explanation of why people have different responses to trauma, and why different responses occur in different historical periods. For instance, the paraylsis and amnesia that epitomized WWI shell-shock cases are now so rare that they don’t even appear as symptoms in the DSM entry for PTSD. We still don’t know enough about how soldiers’ own experiences and understandings of PTSD are shaped by the broader social and cultural views of trauma, war and gender. Though we have made incredible strides in the century since World War I, PTSD remains a chameleon, and demands our continued study.

*Authored by:
MaryCatherine McDonald, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Old Dominion University, VA

Marisa Brandt, Assistant Professor of Practice, Michigan State University

Robyn Bluhm, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Michigan State University

Woodrow Wilson didn't deliver but 21st Century can re-enact- Silent Parade

Centennial Anniversary:

In the year 1917, there were several strange events: (a) Russian Revolution; (b) American entered World War I- The Great War; and (c) for Marian mystics, it was also the year of the Fatima apparitions.

But, Google reminded us, in a Google Doodle, about another event, the Silent Parade of July 28, 1917. 

It happened a century ago, on this July 28th, 1917, but the event is hardly ever mentioned.

This impressive visual could be re-enacted all across America today. It's certainly visually powerful and, in the 21st century, it could easily be a multi-racial and peaceful parade.  

LOUDER THAN WORDS

What was the Silent Parade of 1917? 

100th anniversary of civil rights march marked by Google Doodle – all you need to know

African Americans marched silently through New York in one of the first mass protests against anti-black violence in the US-
By David Hughes

What was the background to the Silent Parade of 1917?

The Silent Parade reflected the heightened anger of black Americans following a recent outbreak of vicious race-related violence.

Between May and July 1917 brutal riots in East St. Louis, a city in Illinois, between 40 and 250 black people were killed by white mobs.

Authorities were blamed for failing to protect innocent lives, with a chilling contemporary report describing how police were “either indifferent or encouraged the barbarities”.

The bloody scenes in East St. Louis sparked fury among black people across a nation already simmering with racial tension as African Americans migrated from the south to predominantly white industrial centres. (A northern immigration.)

Such violence was by no means uncommon – a lynching of a black farmer the previous year had attracted a gruesome crowd of 10,000 white Texans, according to the academic Chad Williams.
What happened during the Silent Parade?

On July 28, between 8,000 and 10,000 African American men, women and children marched silently down Fifth Avenue, New York City, in condemnation of the riots.

Women and children, all dressed in white, led the group, with the men following behind in dark suits, creating a poignant visual spectacle.

Placards held by the protesters expressed messages of peace and unity, as well as highlighting the contributions of African Americans to the nation and calling for justice over racial violence.

As well as a response to the shocking recent events in Illinois, the marchers demanded that President Woodrow Wilson delivered on campaign promises to protect black Americans.

His promised anti-lynching legislation never materialized – indeed, little was done to improve discrimination against African Americans during Wilson’s presidency.

However, as one of the first mass protests against anti-black violence in the US, the Silent Parade marks a significant landmark in the civil rights movement.

In my opinion, this is one of Google Doodle's best moments and it should be an annual traditional post.