Letter from Abe Lincoln to President Obama, April 12, 2011

Posted on April 19, 2011 by Fred Zilian

 ( This essay was published in the Newport Daily News, April 16, 2011, as “What Would Lincoln Think of U.S. Today?”)

With the 150th anniversary of the bombardment of Ft. Sumter, on April 12, 1861, launching the Civil War, what might Abe Lincoln say today to our current president?

 Dear Mr. President,

        Though your allegiance is to the other political party, I cast aside partisanship on such a momentous anniversary. First, let me render my highest praise and heartiest congratulations to you on your election to the highest political office in the land. For a man of your parentage to achieve such a station glorifies both you as well as the constitution and character of our country. With my Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, I am happy to have played a small part in launching the ship of freedom for the Negro race.

        Second, I am elated that our beloved country, this great experiment in self-government, continues to thrive 235 years after its birth. My faith in the common people is vindicated. I have always believed that if they retain their virtue and vigilance, no administration, however weak or corrupt, can do too much damage to our government in the space of four years.

        I must say that I am not surprised that the United States can claim today to be the leader of the free world. I could anticipate this; in my era I could see the vast potential of our country to expand economically, industrially, and geographically to the shores of the Pacific.

        On the other hand, I am surprised by the extent to which the many minorities of our Union have achieved such a notable level of social justice, by the complexities of the international system today, and by the astounding advances in technology which seem to be transforming the lives of Americans so profoundly.

        May I offer some humble advice? I must first register my serious concern at the size and role of government, both federal and state, and how it has assumed so many roles in our society, roles in my era filled by other institutions such as family and church, or simply left to individual initiative and responsibility. This to me is the most striking and potentially harmful feature of government in this present era. I have always firmly believed it is the role of government to set the conditions for men to lift themselves. As I said in my July 4, 1861, message to Congress:  The war on the Union side was “a struggle for maintaining in the world, that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men …to afford all an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.”  I fear that these well-intentioned, social welfare programs of today breed too much dependence and dampen individual responsibility and initiative, rather than magnifying them.

        Looking beyond our shores, I am heavy with doubt about the multiple military conflicts in which our republic is engaged. In the shadow it casts upon the international stage, let the United States be more the exemplar rather than the crusader. Avoid a malady of ancient Rome, which succumbed to the tendency of seeing threats everywhere. As its borders expanded, it saw malicious threats multiply. 

        Finally, look first to secure and strengthen the Union. While our country continues to be blessed with many natural, financial, and human resources, these resources must be husbanded. They are not limitless. In waging now more than two wars with the current budgetary problems not only at the federal but state and local levels, we may be driving the country to the breaking point. Let every segment of American society shoulder a share of the burden in solving our fiscal problems. As we claim today to teach others abroad how to be citizens of a state, let us renew our own efforts at home to bind together a house too divided.

        Remember the Aesop’s fable about the father who could not keep his sons from quarreling. He gave a bundle of sticks to each son and told each to break it. None could. Then he untied the bundle and gave a stick to each son. Each son broke the single stick easily. While we are unified, no enemy can do us mortal harm.

        I am reminded of my words early in my political career: “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Yours, very sincerely,

A. Lincoln

Fred Zilian is an admirer and impersonator of Abe Lincoln. He is also an educator at Portsmouth Abbey School, Portsmouth, RI.

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Western Gifts to Arabs

Posted on March 15, 2011 by Fred Zilian

(Published in the Newport Daily News on March 14, 2011, as “Democracy is West’s Gift Back to the Arabs”)

As the Arabs for centuries kept alive and eventually passed back to the West the learning of the ancient Greeks, the West has now offered the Arabs the ancient Greek ideals of freedom and democracy, galvanizing and actuating them to overthrow their tyrants.
     In the Western tradition, it was the ancient Greeks—especially the Athenians—who raised the ideal of freedom with all its risks to a highest principle. Tired of tyranny, the Athenian people in 508 BCE arose to throw off the yoke of oppression. Under the leadership of Cleisthenes and eventually Pericles, the Athenians established the world’s first democracy.
     After the Western Roman Empire declined and fell in the 5th century CE, remarkably and tragically most of the learning of the ancient Greeks was lost to the West. After Muhammad’s death in 632, Arabs–impassioned by Allah’s revelations to Muhammad—launched an expansion which eventually brought them into contact with the wisdom of the ancient Greeks. It was the Arabs—coming across the great works of Ptolemy, Plato, Galen, Hippocrates, Euclid, Archimedes, and especially Aristotle—who kept the lamp of Greek learning alive in those centuries of Western history we have come to consider as dark with brutality, superstition, and intellectual stagnation.
     How fitting then that the West has repaid the favor by providing the Arab world with its example of freedom and democracy. Educated and enabled by the gadgets of the technological revolution of the last two decades, the younger Arab generations have been sparked by the self-immolation of one of their own—26-year-old Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi, denied the freedom to sell fruits and vegetables. Even as US forces invaded Iraq in 2003 carrying the ideal of freedom in their rucksacks, most of us knew if the “Arab Street” was going to rise up and reject the tyranny of Ben Ali in Tunisia, Mubarak in Egypt, and now Qaddafi in Libya, it would have to be self-initiated and not imposed from without by Western forces wielding guns and missiles.
     In recent years the question, much-debated in high academic and policy circles, has been whether Islam and democracy are compatible. Some have argued no; others like Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Institute have argued it is not Islam that is incompatible with democracy. Rather it is Islamism or political-militant Islam a la al-Qaeda or the Taliban. “…the Islamist movement which today dominates Muslim intellectual life pulls in precisely the opposite direction from democracy.”
    

What will emerge in the Arab world in the next decade will be an Arab synthesis of Western democracy and Arab-Islam. With Arab-Islam’s different views of the place of women, the relationship of mosque and state, and the authority of the tribal leader, this democratizing process will be much more of a challenge than the people of Eastern Europe faced after they toppled their Communist regimes in the revolutions of late 1980s and early 90s. The East Germans, for example, were simply incorporated in October 1990 into the existing democracy of the Western Germans.
     Arab tradition and culture is much more rooted in the subordination of women, the integration of religion into the life of the state, and deference and docility to the tribal leader. Therefore, the process now begun in the Arab world will be much bloodier, volatile, fitful, and extended. Plato, one of the ancient Greeks that the Arabs helped to keep alive, suggested democracy’s messiness: “Democracy is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequal alike.” Happily for Western political leaders, they should confront less than they have in the past the dilemma of dealing with ossified autocrats who deny the very rights and freedoms which allowed these leaders to assume power in their own countries.
     The ancient Athenians were willing to take the risks which freedom posed. In so taking, they eventually created the political system of direct democracy in which the Athenian citizens actually took turns in running the government of Athens. Three or four times each month all adult, male Athenians assembled to debate and vote on issues as simple as the price of olives and as momentous as a declaration of war. The Arabs (and perhaps the Persians of Iran), who have risen up against their tyrants as the ancient Athenians did, have decided to risk it.
     The future complexion of these new regimes is not clear. What is clear is that the long era of acquiescence to the Arab tyrant is over.

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United Germany at 20

Posted on March 6, 2011 by Fred Zilian

By Fred Zilian

(Published in the Newport Daily News, October 10, 2010, as “Unified Germany at 20 Has Much to Celebrate”)

This October Germany is not only celebrating the 200th anniversary of its world famous Oktoberfest, but more significantly on October 3 it celebrated the 20th anniversary of its unification. This one, accomplished peacefully unlike its first unification in 1871, added 16 million people from the previous East Germany to West Germany, creating the most populous country in Europe, now with over 82 million. Not only Germany, but also Europe and America can be proud and thankful.

          On the political level, the Federal Republic of Germany has now proven itself over sixty years to be a stable, resilient democracy, consigning to history its authoritarian and totalitarian past up to 1945. In its twenty years since the Unification it has peacefully and democratically installed several governments of various political hues. In 2005 Angela Merkel became its first female chief executive (chancellor) and the first from the “new federal states,” as the former East Germany is called. Though accused by its NATO allies of foot-dragging at times, it has moved from a country militarily hand-cuffed—restricted by its Constitution, its national culture, and its past—to a more confident, “normal” country that is prepared to assert itself and even send its soldiers abroad. In 1999 it committed its military forces to combat for the first time since WW II as part of a NATO force to protect Kosovo from Yugoslavia. Beyond the Balkans it has also sent military forces to the Middle East, Africa, and now Afghanistan. It currently has 4670 soldiers in that region as part of NATO’s force. When I was stationed there as a young officer in the early 1970s, I can recall my surprise at the universal lack of patriotism and flag waving. Showing that it has exorcised at least some of the hyper-national devils from its Nazi period, German flags flew plentifully and vibrantly for the World Cup it hosted in 2006.

          Economically, Germany has the fifth largest economy in the world and the largest in Europe. For decades Germany has been the economic engine of Europe, so featured on the front page of a recent edition of the influential British magazine The Economist. Driven by Germany’s 2.2% growth—its best quarterly performance since Unification—the 16-nation eurozone of the European Union with a growth of 1% outpaced both US (.4%) and Japan (.1%) in April-June of this year.

          The social and economic integration of eastern Germany into the Federal Republic has had its successes as well as its shortcomings. In July, 1991, shortly after Unification, the unemployment rate in the east (12%) was double that of the west. Regrettably, the figures remain about the same today, with some areas of the east having a rate approaching 20%. Since Unification, the east has lost one-tenth of its population and still needs much aid from the western states, totaling $12 billion in 2008 for example. On the other hand, former east Germans now earn on average 83% of the equivalent salary in the west, compared to only 53% in 1991. GDP per capita has risen in the east from 40% of the west’s in 1991 to nearly 70% in 2008. Life expectancy in the east has risen by six years, and its infrastructure has enjoyed a substantial makeover, making westerners jealous.

          On the social level, the difficulty in integrating easterners and westerners—the Ossis and Wessis—persists. This so-called “wall of the mind,” present 20 years ago, has proven quite tenacious. The resentments and prejudices continue. One politician described it as like an “arrogant rich uncle [the West] versus the resentful poor nephew [the East].” A poll in 2008 found that 64% of the easterners feel they are treated like second class citizens, with about one in six agreeing with the statement: “It would have been better if the Wall had never fallen.” Still, in a poll this past year, 91% of easterners and 85% of westerners said that unification was the right choice, and another survey showed that 91% of easterners support democracy though half are not happy about the way it sometimes works.

As I stood in Bonn’s central market place on Unification Day twenty years ago, oompah music playing, balloons rising, flocks of pigeons darting, the crowd swaying, I was hopeful that the Germans would succeed in their unification. Today the Germans can be proud of their achievements, and Americans can be proud of the role they played in ending the Cold War and supporting the Unification. Shortly after Unification, I spoke to a former East German sergeant who indicated how it might have been had the Soviets won the Cold War. He told me that “Germany would have been one big concentration camp.”

An educator at Portsmouth Abbey School, Portsmouth, RI, Fred Zilian, Ph.D., spent six years in Germany as an Army officer.

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America and China’s Rise

Posted on February 17, 2011 by Fred Zilian

Hello, Cyberworld,

I am happy to be up and running with my first blog post. As Rick said in Casablanca: I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I would like to provide my latest essay on the United States and the rise of China.

 America: The Middle Kingdom

(Published in the Newport Daily News, February 16, 2011, as “China’s Rise Is Wake-Up Call for United States”)

For an American patriot, recent news on the rise of China can be quite grim. On many fronts China seems to be forging ahead while the U.S. limps.

        On the economic front China maintained over the period 1989-2010 an average quarterly growth in GDP of 9.3 %, growth which it seems likely to sustain for at least the near term. After negative growth rates during the Great Recession of 2008, the US has managed a GDP growth rate of less than 3%. Eighteen months into “the recovery” unemployment is at 9% and the federal deficit for last year was $1.3 trillion. China’s export-driven economy has boosted its foreign reserves to $2.6 trillion. It is using this and its other sources of wealth to build a network of new airports, a new system of high-speed trains, and a state of the art electric car industry. The U.S. continues to spend billions each month in Iraq and Afghanistan. While China’s President Hu had conciliatory remarks throughout his recent visit, the US has been unable to convince China to let its currency rise in value against the dollar, something which would help redress the large US trade imbalance.

        On the international political-military level, China is showing a more assertive foreign policy. It failed to support South Korea when North Korea sank one of its ships, killing 46, even after an international panel concluded a North Korean submarine had attacked it. The Pentagon has indicated that China has “the most active land-based ballistic and cruise missile program in the world.” It is developing the world’s first anti-ship ballistic missile system, and has enlarged its submarine fleet. Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, has said, “The smiling diplomacy is over.” 

        The gloominess is not just restricted to these traditional spheres of hard power; it shows also in the social and cultural spheres. Hou Yifan, a young Chinese girl of 16, has become the new women’s world chess champion, the youngest person ever to win a championship. Hitting us literally in our own homes, Chinese-American Amy Chua, in her new book, The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom, asserts that the Chinese way of raising children is the best—emphasizing excellence, hard work, high standards, less independent decision-making and less concern for the child’s self-esteem compared to the American approach.

        In 1405 Chinese Emperor Yongle launched a series of maritime expeditions. Under Admiral Zhenghe a fleet of Chinese ships was dispatched into the Indian Ocean to explore, to acquire knowledge, and to show China’s wealth and power, similar to Theodore Roosevelt’s launching of America’s Great White Fleet in 1907. The first voyage included 62 ships and some 28,000 sailors, and eventually 300 ships participated in seven of these voyages. Some of these Junk ships were larger than any ships the world had seen. One account claims at least one expedition even reached North America in 1421.

        Historians offer different explanations as to why the voyages ended after three decades. One holds that a majority of the Chinese elites and Yongle’s son and successor, Hongxi, did not believe the voyages justified the effort and cost. China was the Middle Kingdom—between heaven and earth—and therefore the outside world did not have anything to offer of genuine significance. The Confucian court scholars said that China should end the voyages, destroy records of them, and return to traditional agriculture.

        If there is any silver lining in these trends that mark the rise of China it is that they may collectively shake us in our collective complacency about our centrality in the world system, a mentality which has been called the “omphalos syndrome,” from the Greek word for navel. The omphalos stone was a monument in a number of ancient cities and supposedly marked the center of the world.     China’s rise should give us pause to reconsider our national priorities and where we are spending our enormous yet limited resources. Especially, it should help us to be more open to how others think and order their societies. In the process of considering ourselves less a Middle Kingdom, we may learn another way of thinking about ourselves and our relation to the world.

Fred Zilian teaches Western Civilization and World History at Portsmouth Abbey School, Portsmouth, RI.

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