Could the Jews have shot their way out of the Holocaust? Or, Ben Carson and self-caricature in politics.

When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, Tom Lehrer announced that he would give up singing satirical songs. In a world in which that could happen, he felt there was no longer any place for satire.

Well, it’s curious to discover that things could decline still further from that low point. The US is once again providing us with a wonderful new political spectacle.

The front runner for the presidential nomination of the Republican Party – that’s the party of Abraham Lincoln, mind – is a man who prides himself on having dragged himself up by the bootstraps from colossal wealth to even more colossal wealth. Donald Trump is one of those characters who like to throw the abusive comments out there, and then apologise for any offence they may have caused, but in such a way as to suggest that their targets (in Trump’s case, principally women) are themselves at fault for lack of a sense of humour.

Behind him, in second place for the nomination, is Ben Carson. It’s a commonplace to describe something as not being brain surgery, as a way of saying that there’s nothing more complex or requiring more intelligence. Carson gives the lie to that facile notion. He’s a neurosurgeon but seems to show that either you can operate on brains without having huge capacity in your own, or having used up so much of your brain for the surgery, you have too little left for politics.

Ben Carson: proof that even if you operate on brains,
you don't necessarily make great use of your own

I suppose the clue was provided by Rupert Murdoch, who tweeted about Carson “what about a real black president who can properly address the racial divide?” Ah, yes. Carson is a real black, unlike the present occupant of the White House.

Murdoch has since said he was sorry for the tweet, proving that Trump isn’t the only exponent of the late, empty apology. 

In any case, if Murdoch likes Carson, that’s probably enough to make his candidacy deeply suspect. Carson has helped us out, anyway, and put the question beyond all doubt. First of all, we had his comment that no Muslim should run for President because Islam is inconsistent with the US Constitution. The US Constitution was written by men such as Madison and Jefferson for whom few principles mattered as much as completely equal rights between religions. Perhaps Carson hadn’t found the time to work much on the Constitution, between reading the medical journals.

No comment went so far, however, in proving the nature of the man than his crass comment, that had there not been gun control in Germany, the Jews might have been able to prevent the Holocaust happening. This is linked to the strange reasoning that the huge numbers of guns available in the US keeps people safe, against all the evidence (for example in 45 school shootings this year alone) that they put huge numbers at serious risk.

Even without that illogic, the Carson comment is based on extraordinary ignorance. There was resistance by Jews during the Holocaust, even armed resistance, most notably in the Warsaw Ghetto. And how did that work out? Inevitably, civilians – even with guns – were no match for a trained army with heavy weapons. Had the Russians intervened to support them, they might have won, but the Red Army stood still and waited while the Wehrmacht polished off the Jewish resistance. The mere possession of guns is far from enough.

Still. One wouldn’t expect Carson to know that. He belongs to the Tom Lehrer school of politicians or institutions that satirise themselves. Except that in his case, he’s more of a caricature than a satire.

A week before Armistice Day: another day to remember

In a week, we’ll be awash with First World War commemorabilia. 

Armistice Day. Poppies on every lapel. Politicians laying wreaths at war memorials. Two minutes of silence throughout Britain but a day off in France, less parsimonious with its commemorations.

To avoid being swamped, I’ve decided to get my commemoration in first, to indulge in a little of what Tom Lehrer called ‘pre-nostalgia’.

Not that the choice of date was coincidental. The fourth of November is one of the bleaker dates of a war that had plenty of bleakness. At ten to six in the morning on that day in 1918, British soldiers assembled on the banks of the Sambre et Oise canal in Northern France. They had pontoon bridges and rafts to help them cross the canal and form a bridgehead on the other side.

Scene of the fighting: near of lock on the Sambre et Oise canal

In the event, the Germans put up such withering fire, most of the pontoons and bridges were destroyed. If the day was eventually marked down as a British victory, it’s because one group forced their way across a lock. But the slaughter amongst the men who were trying to wade, paddle or swim across was terrible, and entirely futile.

It was particularly futile because, just as today is a week before Armistice day, so 4 November 1918 was a week before the actual armistice, the end of the fighting. Nothing that happened on that day was ultimately going to make the slightest difference to the outcome of the war.

Ceremonies in remembrance of war dead always make the point that those who fell did not die in vain. It’s a falsehood so widely believed that it’s become more of a delusion than a deceit. It’s part of a greater lie, that it’s somehow commendable to die for your country. Or to put it in other, better words, ‘the old lie, dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.’

That denunciation of the lie comes at the end of a powerfully moving poem, by a man last seen on a raft in the canal, struggling to get across under terrible and ultimately lethal fire. He was 25. He had until the late summer been in England recovering from earlier wounds; it had been made clear to him that he was not expected to go back to the front, but he went anyway, convinced it was his duty, if only to to keep exposing the sadness of the war: ‘my subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.’

The poet of the pity of war was Wilfred Owen.

To mark next year’s centenary of the outbreak the First World War, Carol Ann Duffy, the present British Poet Laureate, is overseeing the publication of a collection of new poems echoing those of the time. She’ll be picking up the themes of Owen’s The Sendoff, and says of its author:

For me, the loss of Owen as a poet during the first world war is a continuing poetic bereavement each time I read him. He is a presiding spirit of our poetry.

Every one of those needless deaths at the Sambre et Oise, as all the other millions of deaths in that needless war, is an individual tragedy. Perhaps we can, however, sum them up most poignantly by that one death, of a 25-year old who had so much more he might have said, in those icy waters in Northern France.

One bereavement can stand for all the rest. Particularly as the loss still reverberates down the century to today.

All of which adds up to an excellent reason to mark the fourth of November with at least as much solemnity as the eleventh.