June 14, 2007

Dear Colleague:  

    I've been re-reading George Orwell's essay on England, written when bombs are dropping all around him, and Hitler can invade any time. It is a patriotic song, but unlike most such songs, it contains much criticism and bitterness.

    The English, says Orwell, are profoundly anti-military, yet they have an empire that covers a quarter of the face of the earth. It is a peculiar sort of empire—ruled by force, obviously, yet the armed men that maintain it number fewer than that necessary to maintain a Balkan state. For an empire of such size and of so many diverse, mutually antagonistic peoples, the British empire is also remarkably peaceful within its borders. There apparently is a Pax Britannica, and if mutual killing is the greatest evil, then the British empire has managed to cauterize it.

    What is the evidence for English anti-militarism? There are several, and this is how Orwell sums them up. "Well within living memory, it was common for 'the redcoats' to be booed at in the streets and for the landlords of respectable public houses to refuse to allow soldiers on the premise. In peace time, even when there are two million unemployed, it is difficult to fill the ranks of the tiny standing army." A military people would be boastful of their victories. The English boast—but almost exclusively of their brave defeats! In the First World War, the names engraved in popular memory are Mons, Ypres, Gallipoli, and Passchendale—all sites of disasters, whereas no Englishman seems to know the battlefields that turned the tide against the German armies. Prussian officers love their uniform and wear it even when off duty. Not so, officers of the British army. In peace time, they have always worn civilian clothes when off duty. Military parades—particularly the goose-step—are manifestations of power. The Italians adopted the goose-step as soon as they came under German domination. The British military march, though rigid and complicated, is little more than a formalized walk. Any stepping that suggests swagger would have provoked snigger rather than admiration.

    But, then, what about the empire? Don't the English know that they have one and that it is maintained by force? Well, not really, and the reason is that the force is the Royal Navy—its sailors in glamorous white and in tight, sexy trousers that flare at the bottom (remember how the bell bottom became popular with the Flower Children of the 'sixties?)—and not strutting soldiers in drab brown marching down the people's own streets, past their own houses, schools, churches, and taverns. Soldiers are a constant reminder to the local citizenry of the rule of force, even when the soldiers are their soldiers. Sailors, by contrast, are rarely seen by the public: they are either confined to a few ports, or they are on board ships and overseas. Sailors, moreover, appear to be individualists. On board a battleship, every sailor seems to do his own thing. On land, sailors walk in pairs, like nuns, and not march in massed flanks, as soldiers do.

     America is a democracy and an empire. As a democracy, it doesn't believe in strutting soldiers. On a national holiday, rather than military parades and a showing-off of military hardware, which is what dictators love to do, America does the opposite: family picnics, small-town parades with people wearing funny hats, popcorn and hot dogs. The empire—the rule of force—is there, but almost invisible to the citizenry. It is in the great navy—the aircraft carriers and battleships that rule the oceans and the world. No parades, yes, but have you seen the Sixth Fleet sailing majestically up the Persian Gulf, sending shivers down the Iranian Ayatollah's spine?

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu