O Who Hath Caused This?

William Blake, Pestilence: Death of the First Born, 1805

O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue
To drown the throat of war! When the senses
Are shaken, and the soul is driven to madness,
Who can stand? When the souls of the oppresed
Fight in the troubled air that rages, who can stand?
When the whirlwind of fury comes from the
Throne of God, when the frowns of his countenance
Drive the nations together, who can stand?
When Sin claps his broad wings over the battle,
And sails rejoicing in the flood of Death;
When souls are torn to everlasting fire,
And fiends of Hell rejoice upon the slain,
O who can stand? O who hath caused this?
O who can answer at the throne of God?
The Kings and Nobles of the Land have done it!
Hear it not, Heaven, thy Ministers have done it!

William Blake, Prologue, intended for a Dramatic Piece of King Edward the Fourth

This is one of my favorite poems, although I have many, many favorite poems, many by Shakespeare. I find it arresting. The imagery is striking. I can see a huge dragon flapping its wings over a battlefield. Blake's question, "O who hath caused this?" is the eternal question in war. Whose fault is it? Nations will usually come up with blame for the other side. "They did it first!" That doesn't matter, in this scenario. Nations engage in war for less than honorable reasons. Wars come about through the failure of nations to be reasonable. Wars happen when nations think short-term rather than long term. World War II, for example. My father is a veteran of the European theatre. He was nearly killed in a rocket attack in London. The war was a necessary one, but only because the West supported Hitler as a bulwark against Bolshevism. Many in the US held eugenics to be a legitimate science--the belief that some races are superior to others. Where did Hitler get that idea? He got it from us.

The bottom line is always who suffers the most. The common soldiers suffer the most. The civilian populations suffer the most. The heads of state and the generals, who assign their sons to a general's staff far away from danger, do not suffer.

As long as nations choose to short circuit diplomacy and go to war, common people will suffer. They will die on battlefields or starve at home.

Our current regime is rattling a saber at a frightening pace. Today President Drumpf called for a military parade in Washington. Such a parade would cost millions of dollars and would fly in the face of concerns about excessive government spending. It would be a demonstration of his own bloated sense of power. Military dictatorships such as the Soviet Union, East Germany and Romania used to put on such parades. So does North Korea. Is this what we want to become? Every day Drumpf is resembling more and more a dictator such as Stalin, who demanded worship from the mindless masses and tolerated no dissent. God help us.

I don't think comparisons of Drumpf to Hitler are quite accurate. I see Stalin as a better comparison. For your perusal I offer a passage from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, in which he  describes the compulsory applause for Comrade Stalin at the 1937 Party Congress that went on for a long time:

A district party conference was under way in Moscow Province. It was presided over by a new secretary of the District Party Committee, replacing one recently arrested. At the conclusion of the conference, a tribute to Comrade Stalin was called for. Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference with every mention of his name). The hall echoed with “stormy applause, raising to an ovation.” For three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, the “stormy applause, rising to an ovation,” continued. But palms were getting sore and raised arms were already aching. And the older people were panting from exhaustion. It was becoming insufferably silly even to those who adored Stalin. However, who would dare to be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had just called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who’d been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who would quit first! And in the obscure, small hall, unknown to the leader, the applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn’t stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks! At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly—but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them'

The director of the local paper factor, an independent and strong-minded man, stood with the presidium. Aware of all the falsity and all the impossibility of the situation, he still kept on applauding! Nine minutes! Ten! In anguish he watched the secretary of the District Party Committee, but the latter dared not stop. Insanity! To the last man! With make-believe enthusiasm on their faces, looking at each other with faint hope, the district leaders were just going to go on and on applauding till they fell where they stood, till they were carried out of the hall on stretchers! And even then those who were left would not falter… Then, after eleven minutes, the director of the paper factory assumed a businesslike expression and sat down in his seat. And, oh, a miracle took place! Where had the universal, uninhibited, indescribable enthusiasm gone? To a man, everyone else stopped dead and sat down. They had been saved! 

The squirrel had been smart enough to jump off his revolving wheel. That, however, was how they discovered who the independent people were. And that was how they went about eliminating them. That same night the factory director was arrested. They easily pasted ten years on him on the pretext of something quite different. But after he had signed Form 206, the final document of the interrogation, his interrogator reminded him: “Don’t ever be the first to stop applauding!”