Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

There is a terrible irony in being the winner in war. The awful calculus of war makes it necessary for even the most civilized combatant to employ the short term efficiencies provided by the worst aspects of human nature. After all - isn't the very essence of war a recognition that the brutal efficiency of killing your enemy is a more effective short term means of eliminating opposition than seeking willing cooperation through intellectual appeals to logic and reason? Those who try to hold themselves to a higher level of civility than their enemy rarely survive the battle, let alone win the war.

The popular perception of conflict is that the winner gains and the loser loses. But the reality is that there are never any winners - only survivors. Victory in war often causes greater long term harm to the victor than the defeated suffer over the short term of their defeat. The victor must become his enemy in order to defeat him, with wartime necessities too often driving combatants to destroy the very things they originally set out to defend.

Lines on maps, and artfully arranged piles of brick and stone are often restored to conceal the scars of war. But there are more profound long term costs of conflict that must be measured in those treasured aspects of life that are made irrelevant by the nature of the conflict, or that aren't allowed to fully recover after the fighting ends. Each victory becomes another self-inflicted loss as the concessions and compromises of wartime become incrementally embedded in the expectations of the citizenry. Even the most triumphant victor will eventually be destroyed by the incremental costs of incompletely recovering from repeated decents into the darker aspects of human nature.

The world is changed by war - and rarely for the better. The history of war is full of both victors and vanquished returning home from battle to find the way of life they were defending so radically changed as to be practically unrecognizable. The personal papers of Confederate soldiers indicate that many, if not most, considered themselves to be fighting, least in part, to defend their pre-war decentralized agrarian way of life from the centralized industrial culture of the North. However, the War Between The States was waged as an industrial war, and the South had no option but to try to convert itself into a centrally controlled industrial society just to be able to maintain a credible army in the field.

The industrialization of the South produced some noteworthy accomplishments. They built the most advanced facility for mass producing gun powder in the world at that time - a sequential multi-stage production line complex extending over a mile in length. They also built and deployed the first militarily effective submarine and steam driven armored surface warship - weapons that would play dominant roles in future wars. While the South's drive to transform itself from an agrarian society into an industrial power was insufficient to catch up with the already industrialized North, and ultimately failed to provide the means to win the war, it did allow the South to significantly raise the cost of victory for the North. The war dragged on for more years, and consumed many more lives than would have been possible if the South had remained the agrarian society it had been at the start of the war.

Perhaps the greatest long term cost of the War Between The States was the extent to which the unexpected effectiveness of the Southern war effort provided Lincoln with the opportunity to redefine the Constitution and Bill Of Rights. Battlefield losses to the South allowed Lincoln to claim that wartime emergencies justified his suspension of the Constitution, and his exercise of near dictatorial powers over the nation. Lincoln's suspension of the Constitution during the Civil War didn't get much coverage in the newspapers of the day because Lincoln seized the printing presses of the few papers who mistakenly thought the First Amendment was still in effect.

The terrible death toll of the war made the citizens desperate for anything that promised an end to the slaughter - even the surrender of the very principles they'd claimed to be protecting when they entered the war. The failure to fully restore the limits on government defined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights after the Civil War were a primary cause of the trauma of the reconstruction era, and laid the foundation for the incremental transfer of power from citizens to the state that today threatens our few remaining freedoms.

Each time America has gone to war to defend freedom, it has adopted some measure of the worst aspects of its enemies, and American citizens have lost some measure of the freedoms they possessed before the war. The South had already lost the war to protect its way of life the moment the first shot was fired. It couldn't win if it remained "the South", and wouldn't be "the South" any more if it changed itself enough to win the kind of war it was fighting with the North.

America will be changed by the coming war. We can win the war if we have the determination and fortitude to do what is required to win. But the war we win won't be the war we thought we set out to fight, and the fruits of victory will have little resemblance to the goals we set out to accomplish. If we follow the historical pattern in the way we conduct the coming war and in the measures we take to defend our nation, by the time we achieve victory, the America we hoped to protect will no longer exist, and our eventual victory will be a celebration of how completely we have become the enemy of who we were before.

We must take care to keep those who would exploit the current crisis from changing America in ways that will further erode the fundamental rights and freedoms of individual citizens. The authoritarians have already started demanding the surrender of our few remaining rights in the name of protecting America from terrorism. We must be vigilant that those who claim to be defending America do not destroy the very things that make America worth defending.