Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

by Charles Krauthammer

  Roosevelt’s denial of his disability was more than just a denial of crushing adversity, more than a jaunty, smiling, damn-the-torpedoes refusal to dwell upon—indeed, fully acknowledge—his physical reality. It was a denial of self, a strange notion for us living in this confessional age when self—self-exploration, self-expression, self-love—is paramount. Roosevelt’s life had a grand outer directedness. He was not searching for the inner Franklin. He was reaching for a new America. It was the outer Franklin he cultivated, and it is that Franklin, the one who saved his country, that we honor and remember.

  At a time like ours, when every cultural cue is an incitement to self-revelation, we can use a solitary monument to reticence. Leave FDR as he is.

  Time, May 12, 1997

  MARTIN LUTHER KING IN WORD AND STONE

  It is one of the enduring mysteries of American history—so near-providential as to give the most hardened atheist pause—that it should have produced, at every hinge point, great men who matched the moment. A roiling, revolutionary 18th-century British colony gives birth to the greatest cohort of political thinkers ever: Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton, Washington, Franklin, Jay. The crisis of the 19th century brings forth Lincoln; the 20th, FDR.

  Equally miraculous is Martin Luther King Jr. Black America’s righteous revolt against a century of post-emancipation oppression could have gone in many bitter and destructive directions. It did not. This was largely the work of one man’s leadership, moral imagination and strategic genius. He turned his own deeply Christian belief that “unearned suffering is redemptive” into a creed of nonviolence that he carved into America’s political consciousness. The result was not just racial liberation but national redemption.

  Such an achievement, such a life, deserves a monument alongside the other miracles of our history—Lincoln, Jefferson and FDR—which is precisely where stands the new Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. It opened Monday on the Tidal Basin, adjacent to Roosevelt’s seven acres, directly across from Jefferson’s temple, and bisecting the invisible cartographic line connecting the memorials for Jefferson and Lincoln, authors of America’s first two births of freedom, whose promises awaited fulfillment by King.

  The new King memorial has its flaws, most notably its much-debated central element, the massive 30-foot stone carving of a standing, arms crossed, somewhat stern King. The criticism has centered on origins: The statue was made in China by a Chinese artist. The problem, however, is not ethnicity but sensibility. Lei Yixin, who receives a lifetime government stipend, has created 150 public monuments in the People’s Republic, including several of Chairman Mao. It shows. His flat, rigid, socialist realist King does not do justice to the supremely nuanced, creative, humane soul of its subject.

  The artistic deficiencies, however, are trumped by placement. You enter the memorial through a narrow passageway, emerging onto a breathtaking opening to the Tidal Basin, a tranquil, tree-lined oasis with Jefferson at the far shore. Here stands King gazing across to the Promised Land—promised by that very same Jefferson—but whose shores King himself was never to reach. You are standing at America’s Mount Nebo. You cannot but be deeply moved.

  Behind the prophet, guarding him, is an arc of short quotations chiseled in granite. This is in keeping with that glorious feature of Washington’s monumental core—the homage to words (rather than images of conquest and glory, as in so many other capitals), as befits a nation founded on an idea.

  The choice of King quotations is not without problems, however. There are 14 quotes, but in no discernible order, chronological or thematic. None are taken from the “I Have a Dream” speech for understandable reasons of pedagogical redundancy. Nevertheless, some of the quotes are simply undistinguished, capturing none of the cadence and poetry of King’s considerable canon.

  More troubling, however, is the philosophical narrowness. The citations dwell almost exclusively on the universalist element of King’s thought—exhortations, for example, that “our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective,” and “every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.”

  Transcending all forms of sectarianism to achieve a common humanity was, of course, a major element of King’s thought. But it was not the only one. Missing is any sense of King’s Americanness. Indeed, the word America appears only once, and only in the context of stating his opposition to the Vietnam War. Yet as King himself insisted, his dream was “deeply rooted in the American dream.” He consciously rooted civil rights in the American story, not just for tactical reasons of enlisting whites in the struggle but because he deeply believed that his movement, while fiercely adversarial, was quintessentially American, indeed a profound vindication of the American creed.

  And yet, however much one wishes for a more balanced representation of King’s own creed, there is no denying the power of this memorial. You must experience it. In the heart of the nation’s capital, King now literally takes his place in the American pantheon, the only non-president to be so honored. As of Aug. 22, 2011, there is no room for anyone more on the shores of the Tidal Basin. This is as it should be.

  The Washington Post, August 25, 2011

  COLLECTIVE GUILT, COLLECTIVE RESPONSIBILITY

  No matter where you stand in the debate over the German cemetery at Bitburg—should President Reagan visit or should he not—everyone from Chancellor Helmut Kohl to Elie Wiesel seems to agree that there is, or ought to be, no such thing as collective responsibility. As Wiesel said in his White House address, “I do not believe in collective guilt nor in collective responsibility. Only the killers are guilty.”

  Can that be true? To start with, it is not the view of the common law. If you rob a bank and shoot the teller, you are not the only person guilty of murder. So is your unarmed accomplice. And the driver of the getaway car. In short, anyone who knowingly joined the criminal enterprise. The law spreads wide the net of guilt in order to express a moral truth: When you join a killing enterprise your private moral scruples do not limit your guilt. You may not be a killer, but if you sign up with killers, you are party to the deed.

  In fact, Wiesel’s own argument against the Bitburg visit rests (correctly) on the idea of collective guilt. Wiesel implored the president not to go because of “the presence of SS graves.” He did not inquire into the individual deeds of these SS men. He did not need to. To be a member of the SS is enough. Did any of these men pull the trigger at Malmedy, where the Waffen SS murdered 71 American POWs? Or at Oradour, where they murdered 642 Frenchmen? Or was it their comrades? It hardly matters. These crimes would simply compound the guilt; to be a member of the SS is guilt enough. When you join the most monstrous of killing organizations, when you carry its seal, you become responsible for its crimes.

  The collective guilt of the German Army is of a different order. The SS was designed to kill, the Wehrmacht to defend the killers and conquer at their command. This does not make the ordinary German soldier a mass murderer. But that said, he does not become the moral equivalent of, say, an American soldier. Between mass murder and ordinary soldierhood lies a vast moral no-man’s-land, and in that no-man’s-land lies Bitburg. Soldiers who die defending a regime of incomprehensible criminality are not criminals, but they bear—let us be charitable—a taint. (Which is why even without the SS, Bitburg’s dead are far down any list of those deserving to be graced by the presence of an American president.) A soldier cannot totally divorce himself from his cause.

  When Lord Mountbatten died, he left instructions that the Japanese not be invited to his funeral. He could not forgive the way they had treated his men as prisoners in Southeast Asia during the war. Now, certainly only those Japanese who tortured his men were torturers. But just as certainly, the nation that produced these torturers and produced the war in which the tortures took place bears some taint. Not enough, by any means, to warrant a trial. But enou
gh, certainly, to warrant exclusion from a funeral.

  We apply the same logic of collective guilt (and measured response) to white South Africans. Why, after all, are they banned from civilized international life (such as sports), if not for the feeling that by acquiescing to apartheid, they bear some guilt—for which ostracism is not too disproportionate a penalty.

  But what about those with no conceivable connection to a historical crime? Two-thirds of Germans today, Helmut Kohl likes to remind us, are too young to remember the war. Surely they do not bear collective responsibility for Germany’s past.

  Surely they do. They bear, of course, no guilt. But they bear responsibility. The distinction is important.

  Ask yourself: None of us was around when treaties were made and broken with the Indians a hundred years ago; we bear no guilt; are we absolved of responsibility to make redress today for the sins of our fathers?

  I wasn’t born when Japanese-Americans were interned during World War II. If Congress decides to apologize or to compensate the victims with my tax dollars (Sen. Spark Matsunaga introduced the resolution yesterday), will I have suffered an injustice?

  I think not. The point is this. There is such a thing as a corporate identity. My American identity entitles me to certain corporate privileges: life, liberty, happiness pursued, columns uncensored. These benefits I receive wholly undeserved. They are mine by accident of birth. So are America’s debts. I cannot claim one and disdain the other.

  During the centuries of slavery in America, my ancestors were being chased by unfriendly authorities across Eastern Europe. I feel, and bear, no guilt for the plight of blacks. But America’s life is longer than mine. America has sins, and obligations that flow from those sins. To be American today is to share in those obligations.

  Or are my children going to default on Treasury bonds issued today on the grounds that they were not yet born when these collective obligations were incurred?

  It is good politics around V-E Day to deny the notion of collective responsibility. Only, it is nonsense. Collective responsibility is an elementary principle of national life. It is not just that without that principle there would be no national apologies such as that proposed by Matsunaga or war reparations such as those given by democratic Germany to Nazi Germany’s victims. There would be no bond market.

  The Washington Post, May 3, 1985

  CHAPTER 12

  THE JEWISH QUESTION, AGAIN

  THOSE TROUBLESOME JEWS

  The world is outraged at Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Turkey denounces its illegality, inhumanity, barbarity, etc. The usual UN suspects, Third World and European, join in. The Obama administration dithers.

  But as Leslie Gelb, former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, writes, the blockade is not just perfectly rational, it is perfectly legal. Gaza under Hamas is a self-declared enemy of Israel—a declaration backed up by more than 4,000 rockets fired at Israeli civilian territory. Yet having pledged itself to unceasing belligerency, Hamas claims victimhood when Israel imposes a blockade to prevent Hamas from arming itself with still more rockets.

  In World War II, with full international legality, the United States blockaded Germany and Japan. And during the October 1962 missile crisis, we blockaded (“quarantined”) Cuba. Arms-bearing Russian ships headed to Cuba turned back because the Soviets knew that the U.S. Navy would either board them or sink them. Yet Israel is accused of international criminality for doing precisely what John Kennedy did: impose a naval blockade to prevent a hostile state from acquiring lethal weaponry.

  Oh, but weren’t the Gaza-bound ships on a mission of humanitarian relief? No. Otherwise they would have accepted Israel’s offer to bring their supplies to an Israeli port, be inspected for military matériel and have the rest trucked by Israel into Gaza—as every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel to Gaza.

  Why was the offer refused? Because, as organizer Greta Berlin admitted, the flotilla was not about humanitarian relief but about breaking the blockade, i.e., ending Israel’s inspection regime, which would mean unlimited shipping into Gaza and thus the unlimited arming of Hamas.

  Israel has already twice intercepted ships laden with Iranian arms destined for Hezbollah and Gaza. What country would allow that?

  But even more important, why did Israel even have to resort to blockade? Because blockade is Israel’s fallback as the world systematically de-legitimizes its traditional ways of defending itself—forward and active defense.

  (1) Forward defense: As a small, densely populated country surrounded by hostile states, Israel had, for its first half-century, adopted forward defense—fighting wars on enemy territory (such as the Sinai and Golan Heights) rather than its own.

  Where possible (Sinai, for example), Israel has traded territory for peace. But where peace offers were refused, Israel retained the territory as a protective buffer zone. Thus Israel retained a small strip of southern Lebanon to protect the villages of northern Israel. And it took many losses in Gaza, rather than expose Israeli border towns to Palestinian terror attacks. It is for the same reason America wages a grinding war in Afghanistan: You fight them there, so you don’t have to fight them here.

  But under overwhelming outside pressure, Israel gave it up. The Israelis were told the occupations were not just illegal but at the root of the anti-Israel insurgencies—and therefore withdrawal, by removing the cause, would bring peace.

  Land for peace. Remember? Well, during the past decade, Israel gave the land—evacuating South Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. What did it get? An intensification of belligerency, heavy militarization of the enemy side, multiple kidnappings, cross-border attacks and, from Gaza, years of unrelenting rocket attack.

  (2) Active defense: Israel then had to switch to active defense—military action to disrupt, dismantle and defeat (to borrow President Obama’s description of our campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda) the newly armed terrorist mini-states established in southern Lebanon and Gaza after Israel withdrew.

  The result? The Lebanon war of 2006 and Gaza operation of 2008–09. They were met with yet another avalanche of opprobrium and calumny by the same international community that had demanded the land-for-peace Israeli withdrawals in the first place. Worse, the UN Goldstone report, which essentially criminalized Israel’s defensive operation in Gaza while whitewashing the casus belli—the preceding and unprovoked Hamas rocket war—effectively de-legitimized any active Israeli defense against its self-declared terror enemies.

  (3) Passive defense: Without forward or active defense, Israel is left with but the most passive and benign of all defenses—a blockade to simply prevent enemy rearmament. Yet, as we speak, this too is headed for international de-legitimation. Even the United States is now moving toward having it abolished.

  But, if none of these is permissible, what’s left?

  Ah, but that’s the point. It’s the point understood by the blockade-busting flotilla of useful idiots and terror sympathizers, by the Turkish front organization that funded it, by the automatic anti-Israel Third World chorus at the United Nations, and by the supine Europeans who’ve had quite enough of the Jewish problem.

  What’s left? Nothing. The whole point of this relentless international campaign is to deprive Israel of any legitimate form of self-defense. Why, just last week, the Obama administration joined the jackals, and reversed four decades of U.S. practice, by signing on to a consensus document that singles out Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons—thus de-legitimizing Israel’s very last line of defense: deterrence.

  The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists—Iranian in particular—openly prepare a more final solution.

  The Washington Post, June 4, 2010

  LAND WITHOUT PEACE

  While
diplomatically inconvenient for the Western powers, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’ attempt to get the United Nations to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state has elicited widespread sympathy. After all, what choice did he have? According to the accepted narrative, Middle East peace is made impossible by a hard-line Likud-led Israel that refuses to accept a Palestinian state and continues to build settlements.

  It is remarkable how this gross inversion of the truth has become conventional wisdom. In fact, Benjamin Netanyahu brought his Likud-led coalition to open recognition of a Palestinian state, thereby creating Israel’s first national consensus for a two-state solution. He is also the only prime minister to agree to a settlement freeze—10 months—something no Labor or Kadima government has ever done.

  To which Abbas responded by boycotting the talks for nine months, showing up in the 10th, then walking out when the freeze expired. Last week he reiterated that he will continue to boycott peace talks unless Israel gives up—in advance—claim to any territory beyond the 1967 lines. Meaning, for example, that the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem is Palestinian territory. This is not just absurd. It violates every prior peace agreement. They all stipulate that such demands are to be the subject of negotiations, not their precondition.

  Abbas unwaveringly insists on the so-called “right of return,” which would demographically destroy Israel by swamping it with millions of Arabs, thereby turning the world’s only Jewish state into the world’s 23rd Arab state. And he has repeatedly declared, as recently as last week in New York: “We shall not recognize a Jewish state.”

  Nor is this new. It is perfectly consistent with the long history of Palestinian rejectionism. Consider: