WARS AND RUMORS OF WARS

By Edwin Cooney

 

Eighty-two years ago, as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, several factors favored fortress America.

First, there was our geographic isolation from Japan and Germany. Second, there was what Winston Churchill called Britain's and America's fraternal association of blood, law and language. Third, totalitarianism was at war with itself which was emphasized by Nazi Germany's invasion of Communist Russia and therefore Russia needed to be saved from Nazism by the “free world.”

The last time that Congress declared war on any country was Monday, December 8th, 1941.

Today's world, of course, is vastly different than the world of 1941. It is much more deadly than the Second World War was for millions of people across the globe.

The close of World War I marked the end of empires and royal dynasties.

The close of World War II opened the atomic age and a worldwide agenda to avoid World War III.

Back in 1991, millions of us believed that the end of communism and the advance of democracy meant that World War III had been pretty permanently avoided.

Now, however, Armageddon may — just may — be around the corner. Hence, the inevitable question: where do we go from here?

Last night, as the host of a zoom program called "The Political Parlor," I featured a Christmas Eve broadcast from the South Lawn of the White House by FDR and Winston Churchill.

President Roosevelt wondered how we could celebrate Christmas, how we could light our tree and give our gifts. He found the answer to those questions in the significance of Christmas as the birthday of "our Savior Jesus Christ.” After all, the sharing of gifts to one another was to share gifts with Christ.

Prime Minister Churchill, in his best Dickensian way, linked family tradition and Father Christmas with children's innocence and happy inheritance, asserting that the hard and grim days ahead constituted a struggle to win for the children's future their natural birthright of happy lifelong  expectation.

Perhaps there's some hope that catastrophe will be avoided for most of us if not for all of us. After all, human nature has a habit of doing what it takes to preserve life here on earth.

Someone once observed that perhaps communism stayed its hand during the cold war because it came to realize that it was too materialistic to deserve the blessings of a spiritual reward and that capitalism was sufficiently anxious to avoid nuclear disaster because there was still much more profit to be realized.

For now, I'm allowing myself to take comfort in the best images of our imperfect but glorious past.

Ah! Grandfatherly Winston: with your plum pudding, your cigar, and your imperial eloquence, bathe today's crises with the assurance you offered the less than worthy world of eighty-two years ago!

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY