From the most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, which looks back to January 6, 2021 and other times in American history:
Trump has taken on himself the right to go to war with another country in order to take its oil, and is openly working to destroy the rules-based international order that has stabilized the world since the 1940s. Today, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper: “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he said. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”Miller’s comment about strength, force, and power make me think of what Simone Weil wrote:
That vision is a profound rejection of the principles of the rules-based international order, which was designed to use power for deterrence rather than domination. It is also a profound rejection of the principles of American democracy, a system of checks and balances to channel power into a government that could deliver stability and prosperity to all the people, not just a select few.
In 1863, when that system was unraveling under pressure from those who wanted to base society on a system of enslavement that enriched an elite, Republican president Abraham Lincoln asked Americans to remember those who had died to protect a nation “conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln asked Americans to “take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion,” and to resolve that “these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all.
Simone Weil, The “Iliad,” or the Poem of Force , trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1956).
comments: 5
Simone Weil's little book is the smallest textbook I ever had, (for my class in Outstanding Lives) and one of the most exciting. I recommend it.
I never used the book, but I always cited her observations about the Iliad. That seems to be the world as Stephen Miller would like us to return to: go in, take a place by force, and do whatever you want to it and its people.
She was writing during the occupation of her country, France, to say that Force was why the Nazis wouldn't win.
U.S. citizens may not realize that their war movies, (at least during my boyhood watching on TV) have glory, arrogance, and a sense that the US won WWII single-handed. In Canada we called it Yankee B.S. (Note: the sole exception, said an armour corps officer to me, is "12 O'clock High") That book came out in (1948?) written by two veterans.
In contrast, the Iliad (which ends with the war still in progress —no horse!— with the Trojans knowing they are going to lose) has neither Greek B.S. nor Trojan B.S. Ms Weil points out that, from the text, you can't tell which side wrote it. Our society has yet to achieve the clear sight of the Greeks.
Homer presents a very different way of seeing an enemy. I have always thought that ancient audiences must have wept when Hector speaks with Andromache in Iliad 6.
So grimly ironic that Stephen Miller, whose ancestors who remained in Europe were wiped out by force, should espouse an international order founded on force.
For that scene, too bad we don't weep.
I once told a young lady from Africa, "I'm proud to be a North American, but you've got to admit, we don't do emotions very well."
She moved her palm up and down between us, saying, "Yes, we say you guys are behind a pane of glass."
Post a Comment