I just read an excellent bookon World War I, and it made me incredibly sad.World War I was thebeginning of all the horrors of the 20thcentury and of problemswe still have to deal with in the 21st century. It all startedthere.
What's so sad is that we really learnednothing--not from World War I, not from World War II, not from Koreaor Vietnam or the Cold War. It's almost as if world leaders in everycountry manage to get through school without learning anything aboutthe past.
The Experience of World War I, by J.M. Winter(Oxford University Press), lists some of the errors that helped tobring on or make worse the horrors that killed 10 million people,mostly young men in the armies and air forces.
One error was demonizing theenemy. What that does is precludenegotiations. You can't negotiate with Satan, so if you brand youropponent an unmitigated evil demon, then you guarantee conflict. Asyou can see from the way both Bushes demonized Saddam Hussein (afterthe U.S. assisted him in the 1980s), this error continues to berepeated.
Another thing that grew out ofthat war was crushing dissent byquestioning the dissenters' patriotism. That, too, still goeson.
Of course, there's alsolying. It is an old cliché now thattruth is the first casualty in war. Truth is killed not only byoutright lies but also by excessive secrecy and propaganda. Iwouldn't believe the Bush administration if it issued a press releasethat the sun rises in the east.
There's the prostitution of thepress and the clergy. Every war, in thebeginning, is cheered on by the press and from the pulpit. It's onlylater, if things go badly, that the press might begin to carp alittle, forgetting entirely its earlier boosterism on the behalf ofwar.
Then there's the punitivepeace. The Versailles Treaty, which endedWorld War I, produced World War IIand was the mother of the ThirdReich. It was punitive and humiliating to Germany, which had not feltdefeated and thought it would sign an armistice, not a surrenderdocument. It gave Adolf Hitler every grievance he needed to rise topower. After the first Gulf War, we imposed the same kind ofhumiliating peace on Iraq. I said at the time that Bush I had, ineffect, guaranteed Saddam's survival because Iraqis would so resentthe conditions imposed on them that none would dare to be thought ofas an ally of the U.S.
Of course, World War I alsogave us the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and millions around theworld would die as a result of that.It created the mess inthe Middle East when Great Britain decided that Jewish colonizationof Palestine would be a workable idea.
World War I shattered theexisting world order.
Empires collapsed or enteredtheir death throes.
Faith in religion wasshattered.
Aristocracies becamemeaningless.
The world economy sooncollapsed.
Communism and fascism rose fromthe war's ashes and for a while contended with the West forsupremacy.
Politics wasmilitarized. It gave us the tank, thefirst bombings of civilian cities, chemical weapons, the machineguns, aerial warfare and mass murder on a genocidal scale &endash;all of those things that continue to consume blood and treasure likea vast, dark hole.
It's been only 86 years since the Treaty ofVersailles was signed.
The world is still broken and inferment.
The neocons' celebration of a new Pax Americanawas grossly premature.
The new world order so many have sought has yet totake firm shape. The future remains uncertain.
It seems we are still, as Matthew Arnold put it,
"on a darkling plain
swept with confused alarms of struggle andflight
where ignorant armies clash by night."
October 8, 2005
© PROMETHEUS 100/2005