Blue Age II: China, Russia, Mahan & Law

Review by Bill Doughty––

In Part I of our review of Gregg Easterbrook’s “The Blue Age: How the US Navy Created Global Prosperity –– and Why We’re in Danger of Losing It” we explored his thesis that the United States Navy is a force for good, keeping peace and stability on the seas, promoting prosperity, and reducing worldwide poverty.

Easterbrook says, “The United States would do well to recognize how many of its advantages are gifts of the sea.” Keeping sea lanes open the global commons from other nations’ ill intent and also from piracy means “open highways without trolls or tolls.”

Then-CNO Adm. Gary Roughead visits PLAN hospital ship Daishandao in Qindao, China in 2009,

Former Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead is quoted twice in “The Blue Age.” Roughead says, “Land and air forces can win disputes, but it is the Navy that keeps disputes far from our shores.” Easterbrook quips, “Keeping disputes far from our shores looks better all the time.

”In Part I of our review of “The Blue Age,” we also presented Easterbrook’s conclusion that thinker-strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan was fundamentally wrong in some of his beliefs that, in fact, may have led to two world wars –– and may be influencing China today in the PRC’s expansionist policies, which parrot some of Mahan’s own views.

We also touched on Easterbrook’s conclusion that a continued era of peace and prosperity requires nations' commitment to following international laws, which will lead to more international cooperation. That’s especially important for the world’s two biggest powers.

“The question of whether the blue age will continue comes down to this: whether the United States and China, the two most important nations of history, can get along,” Easterbrook writes. Can maritime cooperation be achieved on the “outlaw ocean” through empathy and mutual respect?

“Walking in another’s shoes is the essence of human understanding,” Easterbrook contends. 

So, what is it like in China’s shoes?

Lights of Beijing and Tianjin, captured by the International Space Station orbiting 264 miles above, May 1, 2021. (NASA)

Evidence of China's rapid rise within one generation can be seen from space. But the affluence comes with effluence. "China must control its greenhouse emissions, the worst in the world." Easterbrook says, “Life is stressful in China, corruption permeates government, elections are rigged, and there is no freedom of speech or religion. These said, China’s living-standards, improvements and poverty reduction from 1995 to 2020 rank high in any accounting of the human family’s great accomplishments.”

In a deceptively easy style but with academic rigor, Easterbrook explains some of China’s feelings of victimization, its previous isolation, and its lack of enlightenment about human rights. He looks at the history of East/West interaction over centuries in or affecting China. And he shows some of the hypocrisy in dealing with the Middle Kingdom, including in recent history.

For example, President Trump’s second Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, lectured Chinese leaders about their lack of democracy, then –– in an attack on our own democracy –– “told the world from the podium of the Department of State that the [U.S.] election outcome would be ignored and Trump would remain president.” Then there's the January 6, 2021 insurrection, seen by the world.

“Walking in China’s shoes does not mean excusing failings, including oppression of the Uighurs and Tibetans, betrayal of Hong Kong, stifling of free speech, ‘labor camps’ that are actually prisons, no constitutional rights, corruption top to bottom. In China there is plenty of disgrace to go around. 

“Above all these, 1.4 billion human beings are living close together in a place that’s polluted and depleting its aquifers at an alarming rate. Modern China may not remain stable. Unstable societies may lash out. If China lashes out, the sea is the most likely setting.”

Easterbrook reminds his readers, “Capital C Communism has not failed some of the time; it has failed all of the time.” In large part, because the individual has a need to live free, not as vassals of an authoritarian state.

“The Western view of the world –– unbraced by the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, and increasingly by Japan and South Korea –– is the Enlightenment conclusion that the individual is more important than the state. The view is morally correct, is self-evident under natural law, is true in a metaphysical sense that exists independent of the empirical. The individual is more important than the state. That’s five hundred years of Western thought in one sentence.”

And individuals, once recognized as such, have rights, including the right to own property.

“The right to property is deceptively important, as it has been contested by many social systems, including fascist, autocratic, and communist. If at root your property is yours, just as your thoughts are yours, you have an incentive to build, create, and trade, profiting while helping others. If at root your property belongs to the commissar, prince, or Gauleiters, why work hard? That far-left and far-right nations are economically sluggish compared with the for-profit nations is explained in this way.”

Easterbrook warns against “fear of outsiders and assumption that change is automatically bad. Whatever might be true in a perfect world, in the actual world, opposition to change is a formula for being left behind.”

Ukraine President V. Zelensky meets Cmrs. John D. John, CO of USS Ross (DDG 71) during Exercise Sea Breeze 2021, Odessa, Ukraine. (MC2 Grosvenor)

Enlightened change is needed in strengthening international codes and conventions governing the world’s oceans. For example, there is a need for enforcing laws, including “against naval assaults, such as the one Russia staged in 2014 at Crimea.”

And what about Russia?

Then-Supreme Allied Commander Europe, Adm. James Stavridis holds a press conference with Russia Chief of Defense, Nov. 1, 2010. (Sebastian Kelm)

“Blue Age” evaluates the threat posed by Putin’s Russia as it also tries to build a modernized fleet as it rattles its scimitar at its neighbors, especially now against Ukraine.

“Since Russia about a decade ago gave up its hope of European Union membership, turning cold to the West, the Kremlin has resumed longing for the kind of maritime power that great nations possess. Russia’s moves against Crimea and Ukraine were seen in the West as owing to Putin’s ego. To the Kremlin, they were an attempt to fulfill centuries of Slavic desire for year-round access to warm waters.”

But intrusions into another nation is just one issue.

“A true global governance system for the blue water would eliminate flag-of-convenience loopholes, protect workers in fishing and shipping, impose strict antipollution rules, and create clear agreements about the mining of minerals on the seafloor. Prototype vessels that vacuum up nodules from the seabed discharge effluent that can pollute the towering deepwater columns essential to marine life, including the marine plants that release oxygen. If sea mining is to become common, a much better system, with close supervision, is required.”

Hope for better oversight rests in a document that is already in front of the international community, the “Law of the Sea.”

“No matter what, we need America to ratify the Convention on the Law of the Sea,” Easterbrook pleads. “The US position on this treaty is irrational. Irrational has been doing quite well in Washington, D.C., lately. But there must be international consensus on how to govern the seas. The sooner the world acts on this, the better.” International agreement and enforcement would protect fishing grounds and habitats, energy resources, and internet communication cables.

Easterbrook notes, “Since 1994 nearly every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the leadership committee for the US military, has expressed support for the Law of the Sea.”

As for nuclear arms control:

“When he was president, Jimmy Carter, a former navy officer who had been the XO of a submarine, joined the Soviet Union in signing the treaty called SALT II, which aimed to reduce strategic nuclear weapons. SALT II begat an arms control regime now called NEW START. At the end of the Carter presidency, the United States and Soviet Union possessed about 54,000 nuclear bombs, according to the Federation of American Scientists; today the total is down to about 9,900. In 2009, Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for advocating elimination of nuclear explosives.”

After Trump took the United States out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2018, the Russian Federation also withdrew. China was not a signatory.

Easterbrook says, “Full elimination of nuclear arms might backfire by allowing great-power fighting to resume –– but the smaller the inventory the better.”

Regarding submarines armed with such weapons, he writes, “Having them underwater and constantly changing position tells any leader that a nuclear first strike will fail. At least, any rational leader.”

“For now, nuclear deterrence clearly discourages war.”

Mahan (September 27, 1840 – December 1, 1914) died decades before nuclear weapons were developed. He was an extremely devout orthodox Christian who believed humans were preordained toward violence and war, as shown by Susanne Geissler, author of “God and Sea Power: The Influence of Religion on Alfred Thayer Mahan” (Naval Institute Press, 2015).

Geissler writes, “It is important to grasp that because of his theological views, Mahan did not view human nature as constantly improving … Therefore, he thought war never could or would be eliminated.” Geissler’s biography is indispensable in helping understand Mahan’s linear thinking and inability to consider a world at peace.

Alfred Thayer Mahan attended the First Hague Conference in 1899.

Mahan was against international “universal arbitration,” even after attending the First Hague Conference in the summer of 1899 as a member of President McKinley’s U.S. delegation. “The idea was that if international disputes could be arbitrated, war could be avoided,” Geissler writes. “In Mahan’s view, arbitration was even worse than war in that it coerces the conscience and binds it ahead of time to unforeseen situations.”

[Of note, the League of Nations created the not-so-permanent “Permanent Court of International Law,” known as the "World Court,” in 1920; the court held its first session exactly one hundred years ago today, January 30, 1922 at the Hague, Netherlands. The United States never joined the World Court, and the court disbanded one year after WWII ended.]

Mahan’s beliefs were anchored in his interpretation of the Bible, sticking with Genesis but also solidly in the New Testament. “Based on his belief in original sin and the innate depravity of humankind, he believed that war was intrinsic to the human condition.”

Captain Mahan, front row, fifth from left, was CO of USS Chicago, circa 1893-95. (NHHC)

Among other revelations from Geissler, Mahan was against women’s rights to vote or hold political office, based on his belief in scripture. He supported annexation of Hawaii near the turn of the century but “also expressed concern about the ‘great number of Chinese’ who lived in Hawaii and whether the islands would become ‘an outpost of European civilization or of the comparative barbarism of China,’” in his words.

Geissler’s “God and Sea Power” is a compelling read, especially helpful in further explaining Easterbrook’s critique of Mahan in “The Blue Age.”

Easterbrook has his own list of related and recommended books. And there are a number we’ve featured here on the Navy Reads blog, including Robert Kaplan’s “Monsoon,” James Stavridis’s “Seapower,” Eri Hotta’s “Japan 1941,” Evan Thomas’s “Sea of Thunder,” and Hampton Sides’s “In the Kingdom of Ice.”

Like Steven Pinker, author of "The Better Angels of Our Nature," Easterbrook is an optimist. After all, he is the author of "The Progress Paradox" and "It's Better Than It Looks." He notes how the United States has a vast array of strong allies, while Russia and China have only a handful of friends; in Russia's case: Iran, Syria, and Venezuela. Easterbrook lauds the fact that at least until 2016 China had been previously invited to the Rim of the Pacific exercise at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and PLA(N) ships were welcomed with a spirit of aloha.

U.S. and Chinese leaders watch as Keiki Hula dancers perform during an arrival ceremony for three People's Liberation Army-Navy ships, Luhu-class destroyer Qingdao (DDG 113), Jiangkai-class frigate Linyi (FFG 547) and a Fuqing-class fleet oiler as they arrive in Hawaii for a scheduled port visit, Sept. 6, 2013. Over the weekend, Chinese and U.S. leaders conducted dialogues to build confidence and mutual understanding between the two nations. The port visit was part of the U.S. Navy's ongoing effort to maximize opportunities for developing relationships with foreign navies to build trust, encourage multilateral cooperation, enhance transparency, and avoid miscalculation in the Pacific. (MC2 Nardel Gervacio)

Easterbrook is hopeful for a true win-win in the future, where cooperation can be achieved and conflict can be prevented, thanks to a strong U.S. Navy and "gifts of the sea."

Blue Age I: ’Global Prosperity’ Ignoring Mahan

Review by Bill Doughty––

“The United States Navy –– A Global Force for Good.”

There was a time –– and it doesn’t seem that long ago –– when that message, a former recruiting slogan, came on TV in commercial breaks during NFL games.

For some, it was controversial. Anyone who misunderstood the meaning of the word “force” could misconstrue the message. Should the United States, through its surface ships, submarines, aircraft carriers, and Navy SEALs, be “forcing” its way? So, another way to look at the former Navy slogan is, “A Global Enforcer for Good.

Gregg Easterbrook makes the case for the Navy’s role as “a force for good” –– enforcing free trade on the world’s oceans and seas –– in “The Blue Age: How the US Navy created Global Prosperity –– and Why We’re in Danger of Losing It” (Public Affairs, Hachette Book Group, 2021). The result of such enforcement is peace, prosperity, and an amazing decline in extreme poverty, especially in China.

“Nearly all the decline of extreme poverty occurred in the trade-focused nations of Asia. Max Roser, an economist at the University of Oxford, has noted that China’s trade-based improvement of living standards in the last two decades works out to about 130,000 people escaping poverty each day. Roser calls this ‘the leading achievement in human history,” greater than the Apollo missions, greater than the European Enlightenment, greater than independence for the United States or India.”

“We are living in the blue age. Many generations of our ancestors, up to our grandparents, could only have dreamt of a time when a guardian navy eliminated nearly all risk involving sea lanes, anyone anywhere can sell to or buy from anyone else, anyone anywhere can sail anywhere.”

Mahan

Someone who did imagine it in our grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ time was Alfred Thayer Mahan. He foresaw a strong U.S. Navy on two oceans, and he greatly influenced President Theodore Roosevelt to build battleships and achieve naval hegemony under Manifest Destiny "moral" justification.

But, according to Easterbrook, Mahan, though still revered in many circles and right about the importance of the oceans, was devastatingly and fundamentally wrong then and now about some key theories.

Among Mahan’s failed theories were that bigger platforms are always better, a big navy could deter war just by being built and kept in port, and “that if sent into action, a navy should concentrate all force into a single, decisive battle.” Mahan’s theories enticed not just T.R. but also Kaiser Wilhelm, Führer Hitler, and Emperor Hirohito. Today, Mahan is read and cited by military leaders in the Communist Chinese Party, according to Easterbrook.

Mahan’s theories led Wilhelm and his navy leader Adm. Alfred von Tirpitz to build a big fleet but leave it in port until a decisive battle and defeat at Scapa Flow. “Unable to make Mahan’s theoretical notions work in the real world, Tirpitz pressured the kaiser to allow unrestricted submarine warfare against American merchantmen. This decision, taken in winter 1917, brought the United States into the Great War. “By drawing in the United States, strongest nation in the world, Mahan’s theories converted German military advantage into utter ruin.”

Imperial Japan made the same mistake less than a generation later when the attack on Pearl Harbor, instead of striking decisive blow, brought America into World War II. Japan built super-sized battleships Yamato and Musashi, and aircraft carrier Shinano, that were quickly sunk by the U.S. Navy.

After the British government appeased Hitler in the late 1930s, the Nazi’s were unleashed. “Hitler conceived a pure Mahan strategy, with he ominous label Plan Z, of building supergiant battleships, aircraft carriers, and long-range cruisers, all of which never would leave port: the ultimate fleet-in-being, to use Mahan’s terminology.”

The world has moved away from military conquest and toward greater international cooperation and trade by sea. But what about China’s plans?

“Today, Alfred Thayer Mahan is admired in China. Officers of the Chinese maritime force –– officially the People’s Liberation Army Navy, the existence of an organization called the Army Navy being delightful –– are required to read ‘The Influence of Sea Power Upon History.’ A documentary about how the upstart Tudor fleet brought great-power status to England in 1588 by defeating the Spanish Armada in decisive battle is shown on state-controlled Chinese television, followed by a talk-show format discussion of the genius of Mahan.”

Easterbrook observes, “Should China make a Mahan-style move, the harm to international trade will send the entire world spiraling backward.” He examines the current situation in Taiwan and the ways in which forces on all sides are monitored so as to create less uncertainty.

Easterbrook says that though Mahan was right about a nation’s coastline being its most valuable natural resource, he was wrong in arguing for the right of America to use its naval force “outward” to seize power over developing nations –– or otherwise Germany would do so.

One of the problems of building bigger and more and more ships, as Mahan advised, is that it gives powerful leaders more hammers, and you know what they say about hammers.

“Peace on the waters is both invisible to most of humanity and tenuous. For decades the US Navy has been so strong that no other nation tried to contest its ensign. Recently, China has engaged in a clipped naval buildup. The saying ‘When you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail’ can apply to military affairs. Soon China will possess maritime hammers, and the world’s oceans may begin to seem like nails.

“The Russian Federation is improving its navy, while India, the United Kingdom, Japan, and other nations are adding warships. Destructive, almost continuous novelist military buildup was a distinguishing feature of the world from about 1500 to the 1950s. The English-German naval arms race that began in 1909 engaged the momentum of World War I. The reprise English-German naval arms race that began in 1936, coupled with Japan’s preparations to sink the American Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, were major factors in the impetus for World War II. Should a new naval arms race commence, the impacts will be global and entirely negative. Americans ignore the prospect at our peril.”

The world cannot ignore what Easterbrook considers the two greatest threats to continued prosperity: a renewed arms race (more hammers) and global climate change.

He explores how the Arctic is creating new challenges but also new opportunities for international cooperation, including new trade routes as long as sea lanes are unrestricted.

Special attention is given to contested areas and expanded sweeping claims by the PRC in the South China Sea.

Yesterday, the United States showed how it “will continue to defend the rights and freedoms of the sea guaranteed to all,” according to a statement on Navy.mil.

Logistics Specialist Joshua Green, from New Orleans, stands lookout watch on the bridgewing as Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold (DDG 65) conducts routine underway operations, Jan. 20, 2022. Benfold is forward-deployed to the U.S. 7th Fleet area of operations in support of a free and open Indo-Pacific. (MC2 Class Arthur Rosen)

From the Navy: “On Jan. 20, USS Benfold (DDG 65) asserted navigational rights and freedoms in the vicinity of the Paracel Islands, consistent with international law. At the conclusion of the operation, USS Benfold exited the excessive claim and continued operations in the South China Sea. This freedom of navigation operation (‘FONOP’) upheld the rights, freedoms, and lawful uses of the sea recognized in international law by challenging restrictions on innocent passage imposed by the People's Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, and Vietnam and also by challenging the PRC’s claim to straight baselines enclosing the Paracel Islands.”

Easterbrook

The Navy is still “a global force for good” if you believe Easterbrook’s contention that free and open trade between nations helps prevent wars.

“For present generations, a world without war is too distant to represent a practical goal,” Easterbrook writes.

“Disincentives to war are more pragmatic. The strongest disincentive to war on the blue water –– and, thereby, the best protection for trade that benefits nearly everyone on earth –– is the strength, scope, and forward placement of American naval power.”

In Part II of our review of “The Blue Age,” we will dive deeper into Easterbrook’s observations about China as well as the need for enforcing international laws, including especially, as the Navy notes, “international law of the sea as reflected in the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention provides for certain rights and freedoms and other lawful uses of the sea to all nations.”

Top photo: Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold (DDG 65) conducts routine underway operations in the South China Sea, Jan. 20, 2022. (MC2 Arthur Rosen)

I’ll Vote for That: ‘Race’ as ‘Caste’

Review by Bill Doughty––

Although science says there is no such thing as race, that doesn’t mean there is no “racism.”

Under a guise of racism, a dominant class can subjugate, discriminate, and try to control a subordinate class, including by suppressing or subverting their right to vote –– based on superficial differences.

Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson makes the case for recasting, so to speak, “racism” as “casteism” in her indispensable book for our time: “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” (Random House, 2020), an Oprah’s Book Club selection.

As for “no such thing as race…”

Scientists call ‘race’ an artificial construct. Wilkerson writes this, citing a great Navy veteran scientist:

“Two decades ago, analysis of the human genome established that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. ‘Race is a social concept, not a scientific one,’ said J. Craig Venter, the geneticist who ran Celera Genomics when the mapping was completed in 2000. ‘We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.’” (Venter is a former Navy corpsman and Vietnam War veteran; we have featured his work and his autobiography several times here on Navy Reads.)

Now DNA kits ordered by mail show “that race as we have come to know it is not real,” Wilkerson says. “It is a fiction told by modern humans for so long that it has come to be seen as a sacred truth.”

Wilkerson interviews a Nigerian-born playwright, who says, “You know that there are no black people in Africa. Africans are not black. They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.”

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who embraced the nonviolent teachings of Mohandas Gandhi, saw the issue of racism framed as casteism. Sixty-three years ago, in February 1959, he and his wife, Coretta Scott King, traveled to and within India, where MLK self-identified as “an untouchable.” The Kings visited the grave of Gandhi, laid a wreath, and prayed.

In India, people are born into castes that are supposedly divinely dictated. Discrimination against people considered part of the lower classes was acceptable, lawful, institutional. While civil rights laws in India in the 1940s (and in the United States in the 1960s) have made it illegal to discriminate, "both countries still live with the residue of codes that prevailed for far longer than they have not."

Casteism in the U.S. began more than a century before we became a nation.

Actions 

Beginning in 1619, Europeans brought Africans to the English colonies as property and to the very bottom of a social hierarchy. Confronting the morality of the institution led eventually and with great upheaval to the Emancipation Proclamation and American Civil War nearly 250 years later. But like it or not, racism, constructed within a framework of casteism, had been already institutionalized.

“In the decades to follow, colonial laws herded European workers and African workers into separate and unequal queues and set in motion the caste system that would become the cornerstone of the social, political, and economic system in America. This caste system would trigger the deadliest war on U.S. soil, lead to the ritual killings of thousands of subordinate-caste people in lynchings, and become the source of inequalities that becloud and destabilize the country to this day.”

“After the Civil War, Confederates blamed the people they had once owned for the loss of the war,” Wilkerson writes. There was a backlash to “take our country back.” The Lost Cause. The Big Lie.

South Carolina's Hammond

Wilkerson contends, “Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an x-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenge is flawed without it.”

She presents dozens of examples of the horrors inflicted by the dominant class in America over previous centuries, including torture, riots, and lynchings.

We learn of the horrid senator of South Carolina James Henry Hammon, who said, “God created slaves for us.” Hammon raped women, including his own daughter, and sexually assaulted four of his nieces. We also read the crushingly sad story of Willie James Howard, a 15-year-old black boy who made the fatal mistake of having a schoolboy crush on a white girl in 1943 in Grand Gulf, Mississippi. And, we hear of ludicrous practices under endogamy, miscegenation, and eugenics laws and theories.

A eugenics book published in 1916 by an American, Madison Grant, titled “The Passing of the Great Race,” became popular with white supremacists.

Adolf Hitler called it his bible.

The Nazis were inspired by how the American upper class treated blacks and especially indigenous peoples. But, fascist Germans of the 30s and 40s escalated and intensified the evil when they exterminated millions of people based on eugenics and claims of Aryan supremacy.

Hitler and Nazi casteism

A caste system set up by Hitler and the Nazis justified the torture and deaths of millions of Jews, homosexuals, Roma people, and people with disabilities. To the Nazis, it was “obvious Jews were a separate race.”

When Einstein, a Jew, escaped Germany as an immigrant to the United States, he was shocked to discover he had moved from a country of castes to another country where, this time, people of color were considered a subordinate class.

Once we accept the reality of caste systems, it helps us understand the point of view of others.

That includes many people in the privileged dominant class who feel fear and resentment when they start to lose their privileged position. “A caste system builds rivalry and distrust and lack of empathy,” Wilkerson contends.

Will the dominant class –– through fear, anger, and resentment –– do anything, accept anything, to try to retain the power hierarchy? Think: sedition, treason, secession.

This week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the indictment of members of the Oath Keepers, including the far-right group’s Texas-based founder, on charges of seditious conspiracy related to the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol insurrection.

Oathkeepers stack into the U.S. Capitol, along with other Trump supporters, during the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2022.

Reactions

People confronted with scenes of outright violence respond in different ways. Some –– like those who attended lynchings of black people in the American South, or German citizens who swooned when Hitler’s stormtroopers returned from invading Poland –– react with joy. Other people may be outraged at first but later find justification for ignoring or even condoning the violence.

For example, despite being an advocate of slavery Secretary of the Navy James K. Paulding reacted strongly after he witnessed what Wilkerson describes as “barefoot men and women locked together with the weight of an ox-chain in the beating sun, forced to walk the distance to damnation in a state father south and riding behind them, ‘a white man on horse back, carrying pistols in his belt, and who, as we passed him, had the impudence to look us in the face without blushing.’” Paulding said he was outraged to see “such flagrant and indecent outrages upon humanity … a villain, in thus marching half naked women and men, loaded with chains, without being charged with a crime but that of being black…” [Paulding, SECNAV from 1838 to 1841, was a contemporary of David Dixon Porter, Isaac Hull, and John Rodgers, serving with them on the Board of Navy Commissioners. Paulding was an ardent defender of slavery and called abolitionists “satanic.” He is also remembered for being opposed to steamships and engineers in the Navy.]

The armed services have come a long way in promoting equality and dignity, especially since the 1960s; nevertheless, military readers will cringe at some of the lack of empathy and outright prejudice and bigotry in the past.

MA1 Laymoun Ferguson lights a candle on National Holocaust Remembrance Day at Commander, Fleet Activities Sasebo. (MC3 Mackenzie P. Adams)

Wilkerson reminds us that during World War I, black soldiers were segregated not only from their fellow white warfighters but also from their European counterparts in uniform.

“American military command informed the French of how they were to treat the black soldiers, clarified for them that these men were ‘inferior beings,’ no matter how well they performed on the front lines, that it was of the utmost importance’ that they be treated as inferior.

“The fact that military command would take the time in the middle of one of the most vicious wars in human history to instruct foreigners on the necessity of demeaning their own countrymen suggests that they considered adherence to caste protocols to be as important as conducting the war itself.”

Black American heroes like Pvt. Burton Holmes and Cpl. Freddie Stowers, both killed in action, were blocked from receiving the Medal of Honor, despite nominations by their white officers who witnessed their bravery and “broke with caste” to nominate them. [Holmes was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross posthumously in 1919; Stowers’s sisters accepted the MoH on their brother’s behalf in 1991, presented by Navy/WWII veteran President George H.W. Bush.]

Veterans of both world wars came back from the warfront to confront Jim Crow racism and the construction of more monuments to losing leaders of the Civil War.

The 90-foot tall, 17,000-square-foot carving at Stone Mountain, Kennesaw, Georgia, honoring the Confederacy. Carving began in 1964, the year of the Civil Rights Act and a year before the signing of the Voting Rights Act. The carving was dedicated by Vice President Spiro Agnew in 1970. It was completed in 1972.

Retractions

Confederates lost the war but won the peace, according to Wilkerson, especially when thousands of monuments, symbols, and namesakes to traitors who fought to defend slavery were set up throughout the United States.

Local governments removed statues of Robert E. Lee, including in Charlottesville and Richmond, Virginia, last summer, and in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2017 after public hearings. In New Orleans:

“At one hearing, a Confederate sympathizer had to be escorted out by police after he cursed and gave the middle finger to the audience. A retired lieutenant colonel in the Marine Corps, Richard Westmoreland, came at it from the other side. He stood up and said that Erwin Rommel was a great general, but there are no statues of Rommel in Germany. ‘They are ashamed,’ he said. ‘The question is, why aren’t we?’”

Germany looks at its history “without blinking,” highlighting the shame of what the Nazis did –– and what good people failed to do; but, the Germans are neither ashamed nor too proud to confront their history. They reject the hate of the Nazis and honor the victims of the Third Reich.

Wilkerson notes that U.S. Confederacy monuments on pedestals such as those honoring Robert E. Lee –– as well as Georgia’s Stone Mountain, bigger than Mt. Rushmore, featuring Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson –– are up high so everyone has to literally look up at them. But in Germany, where there are numerous monuments to the victims but none to Nazis, people see stolpersteine, stumbling stones embedded in the cobblestones, each denoting a victim of the holocaust or other Nazi horrors. “Leaning over to read the names on the stumbling stones forces you to bow in respect,” Wilkerson observes.

Stolpersteine commemorate the victims of the Nazis, who receive no monuments in Germany for their lost cause. 

Traction

Sailors raise the flag on MLK Day in Yokosuka, Japan, Jan. 17, 2011.  (PO2 Devin Dow)

MLK’s famously said, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” He marched in Selma for voting rights. He realized that voting rights in a full and open democracy were key to ending casteism.

Some of Wilkerson’s own personal first-hand examples of dealing with casteism, particularly in a restaurant, dealing with a plumber, or while flying first class, seem petty and unnecessary in the context of the moral universe presented in the bulk of her book. However, I can understand if others feel differently.

On the other hand, Wilkerson’s conclusions at the end of this great book are as big as an arc can be, and her optimism is inspiring:

“We look to the night sky and see the planets and stars, the distant lights as specks of salt, single grains of sand, and are reminded of how small we are, how insignificant our worries of the moment, how brief our time on this planet, and we wish to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to magnify our significance, to matter somehow as more than the dust that we are.

“Even the longest lived of our species spends but a blink of time in the span of human history. How dare anyone cause harm to another soul, curtail their life or life’s potential, when our lives are so short to begin with?”

                A view of our galaxy. (NASA)

Wilkerson concludes that the answer is in our hands: “We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and openhearted enlightenment, our own wisdom. We are responsible for ourselves and our own deeds or misdeeds in our time and in our own space and will be judged accordingly by succeeding generations.” Isn’t the answer truly in our hands when we hold a good book –– or a ballot?

Wilkerson, author of “The Warmth of Other Suns,” is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. In 2016 President Barack Obama presented Wilkerson with the National Humanities Medal for "championing the stories of an unsung history."

‘Misfire: Inside the Downfall of the NRA’

Review by Bill Doughty––

Retired Marine Corps Lt. Colonel Oliver “Ollie” North is the unlikely hero who tried in vain to save the National Rifle Association from complete implosion during a humiliating scandal involving grift, corruption, and collusion with a Russian agent.

Tim Mak makes that case for Ollie North in “Misfire” (Dutton/Penguin Random House, 2021), the definitive history of the modern NRA. It’s a surprisingly timely book as the nation commemorates the anniversary of the insurrection and coup attempt of January 6, 2021 (called by some "J6" or "1/6").

If North is a hero of sorts in attempting to rescue the NRA, Wayne LaPierre and his wife Susan are depicted as the villains, along with dozens of other sketchy characters, both American and Russian, including Bill Brewer, Angus McQueen (who worked in the Navy Office of Information during the Vietnam War,) Millie Hallow, Woody Phillips, David Keene, and Maria Butina. 

According to Mak, LaPierre recruited North as a celebrity figurehead in the mold of Charlton Heston. “Wayne had hoped that North would follow the model of previous NRA presidents. But instead he brought on board a Marine who was going to be nosy, persistent, and hands-on.” (And not just "cold, dead hands," as Heston once said.)

Retired U.S. Marine Corps Lt. Col. Oliver North, center, is greeted by Navy Cmdr. Michael Wheeldreyer, CO of guided-missile destroyer USS Halsey (DDG 97), and XO Antoinette McCann aboard the ship in the Gulf of Aden Feb. 25, 2012. North visited Halsey to gather footage for his TV show, "War Stories with Oliver North." (MC1 Krishna M. Jackson)

Mak notes North’s roots as a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, class of 1968; his father fought in Gen. Patton’s Third Army during World War II. “All Ollie North had ever wanted to do was lead men into combat as a U.S. Marine Corps infantry officer.” But after returning from combat in Vietnam in 1969, “he was scarred by the traumatic memories that he brought back home.” He turned away not only from guns but even from hunting for a while till fellow former Marine Joe Foss, then-NRA president, reached out. North is well-known as the central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal in the mid-1980s and, later, as a television commentator.

Ollie North

Once he became president of the NRA, North chose to be an active and engaged leader. “North brought the attitude of a commanding officer.”

“North had lofty goals: to raise the membership of the gun rights group from between five and six million to fourteen million. But that was before he looked under the hood. Almost as soon as he started in his new role, he immediately realized that he had entered an organization in crisis. The NRA was just months away from a crisis in which its payroll was nearly not paid out; expenses were rising, especially legal costs; and the numbers of donors and contributions were down.”

North took an immediate pay cut, from more than two million dollars a year to $1.75M.

In 2020 the NRA saw itself downsized to 490 employees, down from 770. There were more cutbacks. The NRA also had to reduce its contribution to Donald Trump’s campaign to $17M, down from the previous contribution of $30M.

The LaPierres and their close associates were not interested in North’s attempted reforms, according to Mak. They fought any proposed investigations into the NRA’s financial troubles and moved to oust North as NRA president on April 25, 2019. North exited, reportedly saying, “I’m going home. Humility is a virtue. Being humiliated is a sin.”

New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, brought a lawsuit against the NRA challenging its tax-exempt status as a nonprofit organization. LaPierre attempted to file for bankruptcy on behalf of the NRA as “a hail-Mary tactic.” One could call it "hail-Maria" tactic, in honor of the Russian agent who made political connections for Russia at the American National Prayer Breakfast. She had affairs with influential men connected with the NRA and even interviewed candidate Donald Trump. 

Mak documents the rapid rise and crashing fall of Maria Butina in "Misfire."

Russian agent and friend of the NRA Maria Butina

Mak’s fascinating reporting about the corruption of the organization over two decades includes monumental mismanagement of donations, hypocritical hype in the wake of mass shootings, fomenting of fears in order to raise money, and greedy grifting with people like Butina.

According to court records tied to the NRA’s failed attempt to declare bankruptcy, in 2019 and 2020 the NRA cut millions of dollars from “safety, education & training” and cut spending on “hunter services” by more than 60 percent (to less than 0.08 percent of reported spending in 2020). Meanwhile, the NRA continued to sponsor gun shows, membership drives, and politicians.

Old NRA / Gun Training & Safety

It wasn’t always that way for the organization that aims to protect the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

Mak notes that the NRA is older than the American Red Cross. “It was formed in 1871 to improve the marksmanship of American soldiers.” At its foundation was gun safety, not proliferation of military-style assault weapons without accountability.

In 1934 the NRA endorsed restrictions of sales of machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, and silencers. Decades later, the NRA supported then-California Governor Ronald Reagan’s law ban on openly carrying loaded weapons in public.

And, “After the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., the NRA supported the Gun Control Act of 1968, which according to one summary ‘banned the interstate retail sale of guns, prohibited all sales to  juveniles, convicted felons, and individuals adjudicated as being mentally unsound.’”

After the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, the deadliest school shooting in the United States till then, in which 12 students and one teacher were murdered, LaPierre said publicly, "We believe in absolutely gun-free, zero-tolerance, totally safe schools.That means no guns in America’s schools. Period."

After the horrific murder of 20 first-grade children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012, the NRA briefly supported background checks and seemed to support parts of the Manchin-Toomey Act before reversing its stand, withdrawing support and threatening lawmakers.

In other words, the NRA formerly stood for common sense until a tectonic shift when it became “a much more aggressive regime focused on fighting gun control laws” and trying to get more guns into the hands of people, even in schools. But, the NRA faced a backlash from many of its members. And –– "Soccer moms were pissed."

Today, according to Mak, “The National Rifle Association has a Field & Stream membership with Fox & Friends leadership.” On August 6, 2020, Sean Hannity of Fox News, said in an interview on Fox, “The Left has talked about eliminating the Electoral College. They want to stack the courts. They've always hated the Second Amendment, he said, adding "They've always hated the NRA."

New NRA / Misfire & Backfire

LaPierre’s private jets, vacations to the Bahamas, and $275,000 worth of fine Italian suits are just the tip of the iceberg that crashed the titanic gun lobbying organization. Mak also shows how the NRA expanded its ties with the Republican Party and Russia’s Internet Research Agency in a misinformation/disinformation campaign to influence the presidential campaign.

Wayne LaPierre

“But the irony is that by endorsing Trump and ensuring his victory, the NRA sowed the seeds of its own destruction,” Mak says. Fear and gun sales go up when progressive liberal politicians are in power, but when Trump won the Electoral College tally in 2016, there was “no fear left to monger.”

More free-thinking Americans were repulsed by the toxic NRA brand after the group’s hypocrisy came to light, which is similar to the reaction of President George H.W. Bush, a Navy veteran of WWII, who publicly resigned his membership after the NRA called federal agents “jack-booted thugs.”

Who were the true patriots?

“The bottom line is that the National Rifle Association, for all its culture-war noise and reliance on patriotism as a selling point, was more than willing to meet with America’s designated adversaries for personal gain. And, in doing so, it served as a conduit for a Russian government agent who was secretly trying to build back channels between Russia and U.S. officials in order to undercut American interests.”

Many of the insurrectionist rioters at the Capitol on January 6, 2001, considered themselves to be NRA-supporting patriots. Only nine people were arrested with firearms that day, but more than 3,000 rounds of ammunition were confiscated. However, without Washington D.C.’s strict gun control laws, 1/6 could have been a bloodbath, with people firing guns instead of chemical spray at law enforcement officers or using metal poles as weapons.

J6 / Psalm 26

According to Jake Charles of the Duke University Center for Firearms Law blog, “The events of January 6, 2021 were tragic and shameful. Five people lost their lives as a result of the failed attempt to overthrow our elected government. But without the federal and D.C. gun laws in place, it could have been much worse.”

Charles adds, “D.C. law bars openly carrying firearms and restricts both concealed carry and the types of firearms that one can transport or possess. The current laws have been upheld against Second Amendment challenge, with judges crediting the government’s compelling interests in public safety as reason for banning select semi-automatic weapons and large-capacity magazines. Federal law also bars gun possession not only in the Capitol building itself but also on Capitol grounds, which cover almost 300 acres of the District. This law too has been upheld against constitutional challenge.”

According to Everytown Research & Policy, “The deadly insurrection attempt at the Capitol was fueled, in part, by gun rights extremists who brought their firepower to Washington to stop the certification of the electoral college votes.” 

Everytown issued a comprehensive report in late January last year titled “The Role of Guns & Armed Extremism in the Attack on the U.S. Capitol,” showing the NRA’s responsibility in fomenting “conspiratorial rhetoric that animates extreme right actors,” such as those who stormed the Capitol.

Tim Mak

Mak, an investigative correspondent, has continued to report on the NRA implosion and has done extensive reporting on extremism in the wake of 1/6. According to his bio, “Mak holds a B.A. from McGill University, where he graduated as valedictorian. He is also a former U.S. Army medic and EMT who worked on the front lines of the COVID pandemic. In his spare time he likes to run, play the guitar, and surf.” 

“Misfire: Inside the Downfall of the NRA,” Mak's first book, cuts off in a jarring and intriguing way, leaving the reader reflecting and wondering “what comes next?” 

Ollie North was in a reflective mood as he left his position as NRA president, according to Mak. “(H)e thought of a Bible verse, Psalm 26, which reads in part: ‘I do not sit with the deceitful, nor do I associate with hypocrites / I abhor the assembly of evildoers, and refuse to sit with the wicked.'”

“Misfire” is a tour de force book to help understand how the NRA became subverted and in turn clouded any common sense and common ground discussion of firearm regulations in society while still respecting the Second Amendment to the Constitution.