Review - The Forever War

 

Today, gentle reader, I'm reviewing Nick Bryant's The Forever War.

This is the second of Bryant's books I've read, and like the first one (When America Stopped being Great), it's an enlightening read.

It's also a little depressing, given the possibility that Trump may be "elected".

I put "elected" in quotes, because it is completely obvious, that even if you haven't followed US history, or read Bryant's book, the USA is not a democracy.

Stalwarts who admire America have always been honest about this. It's only non-Americans who seemed surprised when they come to the understanding that the country is a constitutional republic, not a democracy.

Bryant is in a good position to write about the USA. He's a Brit, who lived in the USA for years until his children went to school, and were obliged to participate in active shooter drills.

At that point he made the decision to move his family to Australia.

His thesis has two significant themes. The first describes the thread of violence that runs through American history. He describes violence as having been regarded as an acceptable means of managing power and politics across American history. 

The fact that four sitting presidents have been killed: Abraham Lincoln (1865, by John Wilkes Booth), James a Garfield (1881, by Charles J. Guiteau), William McKinley (1901, by Leon Czolgosz), and John F. Kennedy (1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald) makes that thread obvious.

Violence in the form of a civil war, the obscene regularity of mass shootings, and incidents such as the Oklahoma bombing and the Waco siege are cited by Bryant. This first element of his thesis is convincing.

Then he moves to an argument, which put simply, maintains that the Civil War has never ended. He traces the history of the pro-slavery Democrats, Lyndon Johnson's reforms, and what is known as REDMAP (Republican gerrymandering) that seeks to suppress African American voters. 

He maintains that race has been cynically used by both Republicans and Democrats as a tool to seek and hold power. He writes that despite the cliches surrounding the Kennedy brothers, that Lyndon Johnson (like Guy Fawkes perhaps) was honest about his intentions when it came to race, wheras the Kennedys weren't. Or put another way, the Kennedy's, especially Jack, used the issue to display their political morality, but Johnson did the hard yards in putting the reforms into practice.   

Given that both Kennedys were assassinated before their work was finished, it's difficult to make judgments about their sincerity.

As noted above, I find his narrative depressing, as he contends that the US constitution is largely incompetent, and written in a way that reflects the mores of the age. Those mores reflected a real fear of democracy, driven perhaps by the French Revolution.

He uses the events of January 6th 2021 to frame this narrative, and argues that Trump's coup went within a hair's breadth of succeeding.

In other words the American Republic is less a noble experiment than it is a reactionary exercise.

Time will tell, but unfortunately for Australians, the actions and fortunes of the USA influence life in this country. I learned that in 1970 in Vietnam.

It's beautifully written, carefully researched, and suffused with wit and irony.

It's a must-read.