Tuesday, June 21, 2022

Opinion Today: Are we sure America is not at war in Ukraine?

At the very least, this is not *not* war.
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By Louise Loftus

Staff Editor, Opinion

"Presidents have a history of insisting they have no intention of going to war, until they do," Bonnie Kristian writes in a guest essay this week.

That was true of Woodrow Wilson, she writes, who campaigned for re-election on the slogan, "He kept us out of war," and then took America into World War I one month into his second term. And it was true of Lyndon B. Johnson and Vietnam.

What to take from that? Never trust anything a candidate says in an election year?

For Kristian, who is a fellow at a foreign policy think tank in Washington, D.C., it's that at least in those days the American public could tell that a war had been joined, that a promise had not been kept.

In recent decades "the line between what is war and what is not war has perilously blurred," she writes, and poses a question for this moment: "Are we sure Americans can reliably recognize when we've joined a war?"

This was the question that drew me in when I read the first draft of Kristian's essay. It seemed like a good time to dig into what exactly it means to "join" a war, and during the editing process Kristian and I went back and forth on that verb, "join," and how much it could either convey or conceal. It was so evasive in this context, we concluded, that it's used only twice, and very carefully, in the final essay.

I can't resist an argument that tries to excavate the true meaning of words, particularly the words that officials use to communicate with us. And when it comes to the decision to go to war it seems especially important that we all understand what we're saying to one another.

So, if we accept Kristian's argument that the line between war and not war has blurred, can we be sure that the line hasn't been crossed in Ukraine? America has sent billions of dollars in aid and weapons to Ukraine, and American intelligence has been used to kill Russian generals and strike a Russian warship.

"If we have so far avoided calling it war, and can continue to do so," Kristian writes, "maybe that's only because we've become so uncertain of the meaning of the word."

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Monday, June 20, 2022

Opinion Today: How should we celebrate Juneteenth?

Evoking both grief and gratitude, it's a day for reflection and remembrance.
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By Laura Reston

Senior Staff Editor, Opinion

When Charles Blow and I first got to talking about his column for Juneteenth, he mentioned one detail that stood out to me — a freshly starched skirt.

Those of you who read his columns regularly know he has a way with details. As his editor, I am always drawn in by them. He can evoke emotion with the most minute description: skittles and a can of iced tea, a protruding brow, the remnants of old wallpaper clinging to the wood planks of a house.

Listening to him describe his mother wearing a freshly starched skirt to the Juneteenth celebrations she attended as a girl in rural Louisiana in the 1950s, I found it hard to imagine a scene more quintessentially American. The men playing baseball, the women arriving with fried chicken and fresh baked rolls, a great-uncle barbecuing a goat.

These days, some journalists covering Juneteenth have focused on the commercialization of the holiday. But that isn't the full story, Charles told me.

In his latest column, he argues that we should be thinking "less about what making the day a federal holiday should compel and more about what it allows, centering Black people as we do so." This is an opportunity not just to celebrate the end of slavery but also to learn about the history.

Even now, few people — Black or white — know much about Juneteenth. As the Civil War drew to a close, slaveholders, fleeing advancing Union troops, migrated to Texas, on the western frontier of the Confederacy, where rebel holdouts continued fighting for weeks after the South surrendered in April 1865. A few months later, on June 19, 157 years ago yesterday, as the writer Casey Gerald describes in a recent guest essay, the enslaved in Galveston finally learned of the Emancipation Proclamation. They then "transformed June 19 from a day of unheeded military orders into their own annual rite, 'Juneteenth,' beginning one year later in 1866," the historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes.

During the Civil Rights era, many Black Americans began to see Juneteenth as an unpleasant reminder of the legacy of slavery, that even the news of freedom came late.

But in his column, Charles reminds us of the beauty of Juneteenth. And now that it is enshrined as a federal holiday, he writes, more Americans are likely to reflect on that most fundamental question: What does it mean to be truly free?

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