Joseph Loconte's Blog, page 17

National Review: War, Refugees, and the Christian Imagination

This article was originally posted at National Review.

How the refugees of the Great War informed the works of two great Christian writers.

Thomas Hardy, in “Poems of War and Patriotism,” described an appalling refugee crisis in the heart of Europe a century ago. They were “pale and full of fear,” and came by the thousands to England’s shores: “From Bruges they came, and Antwerp, and Ostend, / No carillons in their train. Foes of mad mood / Had shattered these to shards amid the gear / Of ravaged roof, and smouldering gable-end.” They were families, mostly from Belgium, caught up in the German advance during the First World War.

As with the Syrian refugee crisis today, their plight touched the conscience of the West. Two of the 20th century’s greatest Christian authors, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, encountered firsthand the human suffering of the Great War and enlisted their literary imagination to confront it. Their epic works — tales of valor and sacrifice in a great conflict between Good and Evil — do not evade society’s moral obligations to the victims of war.

In October 1914, the German army entered the Belgian port of Ostend, bringing most of Belgium under German occupation. Soon tens of thousands of refugees were fleeing for Great Britain, which had entered the war to defend Belgian neutrality. Many arrived in the village of Great Bookham, where Lewis was being tutored in the classics before being sent to France to fight for king and country. He wrote to his father: “Everyone at Bookham is engaged in a conspiracy for ‘getting up’ a cottage for Belgian refugees.”

In The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis’s series of children’s books, the hardship and sense of loss endured by those caught up in war are themes woven throughout the works. In Prince Caspian, when the four Pevensie children return to Narnia after a long absence, they learn that the Telmarines rule with an iron fist and have sent the Narnians into hiding and exile. “Never in all these years,” explains Dr. Cornelius, “have we forgotten our own people and all the other happy creatures of Narnia, and the long-lost days of freedom.”

Serving as a second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1916, Tolkien encountered many refugees along the Western Front. The images of these destitute families never left him.

Thus in The Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins take flight from their beloved Shire, dependent on the kindness of others as they pursue their great quest to destroy the Ring of Power. “Certainly I have looked for no such friendship as you have shown,” Frodo tells Faramir. “To have found it turns evil to great good.”

We see the desperate inhabitants of Minas Tirith, escaping by wagon train before the battle of Pelennor Fields. We learn about “the Men who had come up the Greenway,” fleeing the forces of Sauron, the Dark Lord. They are refugees “on the move, looking for lands where they could find some peace.” It will not be easy for them to find safe haven: “The Bree-folk were sympathetic, but plainly not very ready to take a large number of strangers into their little land.”

Many Americans today also seem unwilling to accept even a small number of strangers fleeing war-torn Syria and Iraq. The Syrian refugee crisis — over 4 million people have left the country — has set off a debate within America’s churches about how to balance national-security interests with Christian compassion.

Even before the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, some groups began calling for a ban on Muslims trying to enter the United States. “We urge the U.S. to stop Muslim migration,” announced Evangelicals for Biblical Immigration, “until Islamic culture comes peacefully as blessing.” Opinion polls suggest that this view is gaining ground nationally.

Yet for Tolkien and Lewis, their mythic tales — set in the crucible of war — were framed by the Christian themes of rescue and redemption. Lifelong friends who first met at Oxford in the 1920s, they both rejected the moral cynicism and agnosticism of their postwar generation. Their shared literary aim was to recover an older tradition of the epic hero, but to reinterpret the tradition for the modern mind.

Thus the most compelling characters of Middle-earth and Narnia — whether they are hobbits or elves or talking horses — owe a moral debt to the central figure of the Christmas story. In that story, a refugee family from the Middle East must flee to Egypt to escape a vicious and paranoid ruler. The experience would inform the ethics of the Nazarene: “I was a stranger,” Jesus taught his disciples, “and you invited me in.”

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

WNET/Channel 13: Author and Historian Joseph Loconte Discusses the Influence of the First World War on Authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis

This article was originally posted at MetroFocus.

Authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis share the distinction of being two of the most important writers of the twentieth century, but they were also close friends, bonded by their shared experiences of the First World War and its aftermath. In his book, A Hobbit, A Wardrobe and a Great War, historian Joseph Loconte details the immense influence of the First World War on Tolkien and Lewis and the impact that it had on their respective literary works. Rafael Pi Roman speaks to Loconte about how the two authors’ experiences as soldiers on the Western Front inspired the epic imagery and themes of classic tales like The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

Providence: Ted Cruz, Realpolitik, and the Future of the Middle East

This article was originally posted at Providence.

Perhaps like no other Republican presidential candidate, Senator Ted Cruz exemplifies the nation’s conflicted conscience over the direction of U.S. foreign policy in the age of terror. Should the United States promote democracy in the Middle East, or should we learn to live with Arab dictatorships, even as we seek to defeat and destroy the Islamic State?

In this week’s Republican presidential candidates’ debate, as well as in a speech last week at the Heritage Foundation, Mr. Cruz tries to navigate between isolationism and interventionism. “We will not win by replacing dictators, as unpleasant as they may be,” he says, “with terrorists who want to kill us and destroy America.” Better to live with the devil we know, in other words, than with the demons who might replace him.

This argument was explicitly rejected by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack. In a seminal 2003 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, Mr. Bush condemned as a Faustian bargain decades of U.S. support for thuggish governments in the Muslim world: “Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.”

Mr. Bush had at least some evidence on his side: fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive states in the world. Another came from Egypt, then ruled by military strongman Hosni Mubarak. Thus, the Bush Doctrine made the promotion of democracy in the Middle East its political lodestar. “As long as freedom does not flourish,” he said, “it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.”

Mr. Cruz, by contrast, is perfectly willing to accept the status quo. He rejects, he says, “the conventional wisdom that holds that America must always promote democracy at all costs.” It should be pointed out that no Republican president or presidential candidate has ever insisted that democracy should be promoted “at all costs.”

The Texas senator goes on to invoke Ronald Reagan, “the single greatest liberator of human oppression” in history. “He did not do it by forcing democracy on unwilling nations.” This is the language of the left: the rhetoric of false choices that has been a staple of Mr. Obama’s sophomoric speechifying.

None of the Republican contenders for president has suggested “imposing” democracy on anyone. Nor did the United States impose democracy following the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq—it removed brutal and sadistic dictatorships that had imposed themselves on unwilling populations. Muslim leaders in both countries wrote their own constitutions and elected their own leaders, regardless of U.S. preferences.

Mr. Cruz continues: “We do not betray the idea of America by accepting reality.” The reality we are asked to accept, he says, is the genocidal regime of Bashar al-Assad—except Mr. Cruz usually neglects to mention Mr. Assad’s association with genocide. There are, we are told, no better alternatives. “Quite simply,” he concludes, “we do not have a side in the Syrian civil war.”

The Syrian government violently quashes a peaceful democratic protest movement, butchers over 200,000 of its own citizens, unleashes chemical weapons against its civilian population, and creates a refugee crisis that is destabilizing moderate Muslim governments and threatening our European allies—and the United States has no interest in the outcome of this war? The conflict creates safe havens for the Islamic State, invites Russian influence into the region, and is transforming Syria into a political appendage of Iran, a leading exporter of terrorism—and the next American president must remain indifferent to the author of this chaos?

Perhaps Mr. Cruz is right: After four years of U.S. dithering, after the landscape of Syria has become an Islamic jihadist playground, Mr. Assad’s departure might turn the country into a trophy for the Islamic State. Maybe this latest expression of political “realism”—effectively a continuation of President Obama’s Syria policy—is the only choice left to the United States.

But is it? The case for realpolitik has been made before, by both political parties, even in the face of a geo-political and humanitarian crisis of similar magnitude. Recall the response of Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican, when asked whether the United States should help stop ethnic cleansing in the Balkans during the 1990s: “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” It turned out, in the first war among European states since 1945, after thousands killed and millions of refugees made destitute, that America did have a dog in that fight—a fact that President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, discovered almost too late.

“Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty,” President Bush asked in his 2003 speech. “Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom, and never even to have a choice in the matter?”

For Mr. Cruz and his supporters, the disturbing answer at the moment appears to be yes.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

Providence: A Terrorism Speech that Will Live in Infamy

This article was originally posted at Providence.

Barack Obama’s prime-time address to the nation on Sunday—delivered four days after the most deadly terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11—was intended to reassure an anxious nation that America was nevertheless on course to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Instead, the president’s predictably languid, misleading, and often banal remarks have reinforced widespread disapproval of his entire approach to combatting Islamic terrorism.

Let’s consider just a few of Mr. Obama’s claims from his speech following the assault in San Bernardino, California that killed fourteen people and injured twenty-one.

“So far, we have no evidence that the killers were directed by a terrorist organization overseas, or that they were part of a broader conspiracy here at home.”

The statement suggests that Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, were self-taught, self-funded “lone wolves.” Mr. Obama seems determined to convince us that ISIS has been “contained” by his policies, that this was not a Paris-style attack.

But the evidence in hand, and an ounce of common sense, tell us the statement is meaningless. We know that Malik attended a Pakistani school renowned for its militancy. We know she pledged allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi on Facebook just before the assault. We know that Farook spent time in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hotbeds of Islamic radicalism, and contacted people from at least two terrorist organizations overseas, including the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front in Syria. We know the couple engaged in target practice, wore tactical vests to the assault, acquired thousands of rounds of ammunition for their rifles and handguns, and converted their home into a virtual “bomb factory”—all the earmarks of an ISIS-funded operation. We know that a large sum of money was reportedly deposited in the couple’s bank account shortly before the attack. And we know that the terrorists tried to destroy their cell phones and laptops, something only members of a larger network of conspirators would bother to do.

The statement is also misleading at a deeper level, as it exposes the president’s inability to grasp the religious character of the threat. ISIS has anointed al Baghdadi as “Caliph Ibrahim,” the only legitimate religious and political authority for the entire Muslim community. Under this vision, all Muslims must swear complete loyalty to him. Refusal equals rebellion, (khuruj), an act deserving death by crucifixion. Under this vision, Muslims everywhere are foot soldiers in an apocalyptic conflict that respects no borders, no norms of civilized nations, no rules of war.

This is the malignancy that Mr. Obama declines to name, or to explain to the American people. Instead, we are told:

“For seven years, I’ve confronted this evolving threat each morning in my intelligence briefing. And since the day I took this office, I’ve authorized U.S. forces to take out terrorists abroad precisely because I know how real the danger is.”

The one thing—the most consequential thing—that Barack Obama has failed to do over the last seven years of his presidency is to actually confront, with intellectual seriousness and moral resolve, the great scourge of radical Islamic jihad. This is the conclusion, put in more diplomatic terms, of his own former defense secretaries, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta.

Thus, in a recent study, “A Global Strategy for Combatting al Qaeda and the Islamic State,” lead author Mary Habeck describes an enemy that is gaining strength, while the United States and its allies mount a defensive—and ineffective—counter-reaction. “American leaders still have not recognized the nature of this war and have a dangerous misconception of the threat,” she writes. “At the same time, our global position is materially worse than it was just three years ago. We have fewer allies, fewer capable partners, fewer forward bases, fewer available resources, and fewer forces to deal with the threat.”

Rather than face these troubling realities in his address, President Obama chose to lecture the American people about their instinct to over-react and to discriminate against their Muslim neighbors:

“Our success won’t depend on tough talk, or abandoning our values, or giving in to fear. That’s what groups like ISIL are hoping for.”

Of course Americans must not abandon their political ideals of equality under the law, religious pluralism, and so on. Donald Trump’s latest tirade about keeping Muslims out of the United States is a symptom of Mr. Trump’s egomania, eager to exploit deep distrust in the president’s capacity to protect the homeland. Mr. Obama’s statement, an exercise in self-evident pabulum, is yet another attempt to change the subject: ISIS doesn’t give a damn about tough talk, or American values, or whether or not we are, by the president’s definition, “giving in to fear.”

What the Islamic fascists are hoping for is precisely what Mr. Obama’s policies have delivered to them: the disintegration of Syria, profound insecurity in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a morbid fear of committing America’s diplomatic and military resources to actually defeating them on the battlefield.

The forces of ISIS have outmaneuvered and fought off a U.S.-led “coalition” of 53 nations, armed with superior weapons, for over 18 months. They have emerged militarily stronger, seized vast resources and strategic territory, committed genocide with impunity, downed a commercial airliner, struck into the heart of Europe, and now terrorized an American city. They continue to attract thousands of fresh recruits to their transcendent cause, because victory against the infidels has become their greatest recruiting tool.

This, as any honest and rational mind knows, is what the barbarians were hoping for.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

Providence: Syrian Refugees, the Republican Party, and the American President

This article was originally posted at Providence.

If we needed conclusive proof of the degraded condition of America’s political leadership, we have it in the debate over the Syrian refugee crisis.

For the Republican Party and its conservative allies, this is their hour of shame. Last week 27 Republican governors declared that they would not accept any more Syrian refugees into their states. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives, by a vote of 289-137, passed a bill calling for the most stringent vetting process ever established for people fleeing a war-torn nation. Party leaders are repudiating President Obama’s call to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year. Their rationale is that terrorists will slip in among the new arrivals and carry out a Paris-style attack in the United States.

The Republican Party’s response is a toxic mix of fear, exclusion, ignorance, and irrationality. Although conservatives have good reasons to doubt President Obama’s grasp of America’s national security threats, none of them justify a posture of cynicism and denial toward this human tragedy.

FBI Director James Comey lit the bonfire with his congressional testimony last month, when he warned that background checks on Syrian refugees can be problematic because of the lack of good intelligence in the theater of war. “If someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home,” he said, “but there will be nothing showing up because we have no record of them.”

Despite repeated claims to the contrary, none of the Syrian refugees have been linked to the November 15 Paris attacks. Nevertheless,Republican presidential candidates have seized upon Mr. Comey’s testimony to discourage or bar Syrian refugees from entering the country.

Donald Trump warns of a “Trojan Horse” strategy that would allow terrorists to hide among their number. “This could be one of the great tactical ploys of all time,” he says. Ben Carson compares the threat of militants posing as refugees to a “rabid dog” prowling the neighborhood. “You’re probably going to put your children out of the way,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that you hate all dogs by any stretch of the imagination, but you’re putting your intellect into motion.”

The intellect is the one human faculty in this debate that is not in motion. Rather, the capacity for reason and moral reflection—the qualities of leadership desperately required at this hour—seems caught in a vice grip of irrationality.

Mr. Comey’s testimony about possible “gaps” in intelligence is accurate—but, taken out of context, badly misleading. Those who are using it to ban all Syrian refugees ignore the singular fact that the United States already has in place the toughest vetting process for refugees in the democratic West—much more discriminating than Europe with its open borders.

Refugees are first screened by the UN High Commission on Refugees, and only a fraction of those are selected for possible entry into the United States. They are then vetted by the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the State Department, and Defense Department, and the Department of Homeland Security (involving an extensive, in-person interview). The entire process takes 18 to 24 months.

Barely 1,800 refugees have been allowed into the United States since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, a conflict that has displaced over 11 million people. Most are elderly men, women, and children. Many of them—including Muslims, Yazidis, Christians, and Jews—have been targeted for extinction either by the Syrian regime or the Islamic State. Two percent of the Syrian refugees now in the United States are single men of combat age.

No immigration system is risk-free. To demand such a system would mean shutting down all immigration into the United States—and betraying our deepest political and religious ideals in the process.

Republican leaders and their conservative allies seem prepared to abandon one of the most consequential ideas in history: the belief in American exceptionalism. Since the founding of the republic, Americans have insisted that their national interests must be tempered by their moral and religious interests—by their Judeo-Christian tradition that refuses to separate justice from mercy. They point to this historic commitment to explain the United States as a powerful global advocate for human dignity, democracy, and human rights.

President Obama—and the liberalism in which he lives and moves and has his being—rejects American exceptionalism. This accounts for his refusal to act on behalf of the Syrian people when acting decisively could have averted much of the killing and carnage. This explains why the president has watched, with stoic indifference, the transformation of Syria into a living hell for its people. He has allowed Bashar al-Assad to continue his genocidal campaign. He has declined to establish safe havens for Syrian refugees. For the first three years of the civil war, Mr. Obama, for all his recent moralizing, allowed exactly 30 Syrians per year to enter the United States.

It is hard to think of a president less qualified to lecture the nation about its moral obligations than this one. It is even harder to recall a commander in chief more naïve—even delusional—about the threat of Islamic radicalism.

Yet none of this excuses the hysterical and morally debased response of the Republican Party and its conservative allies. The victims of the Syrian civil war—and there are so many children among them—face a future of despair and destitution. The conflict has created a vortex of human suffering not seen since the end of the Second World War. Indeed, the last time the United States ignored a refugee crisis of this scale was during the administration of another liberal Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt, a master at separating his personal political interests from larger moral concerns. The victims, of course, were the Jews of Europe, trying to escape the fires of the Holocaust.

Yes, it is an hour of shame, an hour when the conscience of a nation has succumbed to a spirit of cowardice and fear. “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me,” wrote Emma Lazarus. “I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” As the tempest rages on, America’s lamp is dimming.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.