Killing the Dream- How WW I effects us today Tuesday, Aug 11 2009

 

The First World War was a tragic and unnecessary conflict.

John Keegan begins his book, The First World War, with this sentence.  He goes on to say, “Yet in damaged civilization, the rational and liberal civilization of the European Enlightenment, permanently for the worse and, through the damage done, world civilization also.”  He is describing a peaceful and interconnected world that thought it was on the verge of a golden age of humanity that would surpass the one of Ancient Greece.  Many religious people felt they were on the cusp of the millennium as described in Revelation 20:1-6.

Norman Algell had written a best selling book in 1910 called , The Grand Illusion,  in which he boldly stated that because of the economic interdependence of the world, war was impossible.  The world could no longer afford the disruption that war, it was now too interconnect and dependant to risk the uncertainties of armed conflict.  

The rise of international socialism had also contributed to this feeling as many believed that now workers saw themselves as an international brotherhood who would not make war on each other.  It was the time of the Progressive movement in the United States were men like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson believed it was the duty of the state to remake society into a fairer and better place.  It was a common belief among their disciples, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, that the duty of the state was to make people live up to their potential.  Their viewed the state was, Jonah Goldberg points out in his book, Liberal Fascism,  “a natural, organic, and spiritual expression of the people themselves.”  Combining Darwin with biology and sociology, they were going to make humans and society into paradise and Utopia would come to exist in reality and not just in the mind of Sir Thomas More. 

Their was a confidence and optimism in the early twentieth century that we have never regained, nor imagine.  It was a time when people felt they could do everything, an employee retired from the patent office because, as he said, there was no longer a need for one as everything that could be invented had been.  While it may not have been universal, it was the dominate view of civilization at the time. 

It was a time when many international organizations were set up to help the world with its new connectivity, thanks to telegraph and telephone and transportation, thanks to railroads. Custom and patent laws were internationalized in what Thomas Barnett called Globalization I.  The religious community, as Europe was not just legally but in practice, Christian, took on many moral crusades against prostitution, alcohol,  and slavery.    

In 1899, Czar Nichols II had decided to convene a conference at the Hague to strengthen armaments limitations and found an international court. These ideas were adopted, although it was voluntary, but it was an indication of how people thought things would now be handled, by conference not battle.  Keegan points out that while these occurred in public, behind closed doors military matters emphasised security and military superiority.  On the surface, the idea of a general war occurring in the pre-World War I atmosphere would stand in direct violation of Thomas Barnett’s ideas of connectivity and how the connected world would not fight itself. 

The problem was a very Barnett one, technology and economics had far outstripped diplomacy and this would be one of the causes that produced the vertical shock of WW I.  Diplomacy was handled as a secondary item in government, usually not even involved in any national security decisions.  Diplomats had no international stages and many did not even communicate with their peers by telephone.  Many had no idea of the military plans, such as the German Schlieffen Plan or the French Plan 17, and had no idea of the timetables or mandated moves generals had placed upon their nations armed forces. Because of this, Europe was helpless in the march to war that proceeded from the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914. In an article William J. Astore (Of Butterflies and Tipping Points: The Calamitous Summer of 1914)  describes it as:

The large-caliber guns of August seemed so out of proportion to the small caliber pistol fired by Ferdinand’s killer, Gavrilo Princip, that Europeans struggled for metaphors to understand what was happening to them and around them.  They spoke of natural disasters-especially of storms.  But in doing so, they abnegated responsibility and restricted their options.After all, that August’s storm of steel was man-made, not an act of nature or of God.   But by visualizing it as a meteorological event, as a natural disaster, Europeans saw it not as something to be stopped, but only something to be endured.  Caught in the swirling winds of their own metaphors, they were swept away by a cataclysm whose warning signs they initially perceived as being too small in magnitude to matter.

As the war unfolded with its casualties and death, it destroyed the optimism of the early century and replaced it with a dark cynicism that changed the mindset of the West.  Keegan points out:

Within fifteen years of the wars end, totalitarianism, a new word for a system that rejected the liberalism and constitutionalism which had inspired European politics since the eclipse of monarchy in 1789, was everywhere on the rise.

This liberalism and constitutionalism had been a produce of many years of evolution in Europe.  The idea that the king had a duty to provide for the common welfare of the people, came from the
English commonwealth movement which was  outlined in Edmund Dudley’s book, The Tree of Commonwealth,  in the early 1500s, by the 1550s, King Edward VI was proclaiming that the state had a duty to provide order and protect the weak.  While these view were biblical, based on being ones brothers keeper, later writers had slowly transformed them into the duty of the secular state.  Entwined with this was a move toward constitutionalism that reached a highlight in the American Constitution in 1789.  By 1900, almost all European states were ruled by Parliaments or under a constitutional monarch. Even the absolutism of the Russian empire was drifting into a constitutional monarchy under the weak Nicholas II.

Two events foreshadowed this, one was the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, this would call into question the supremacy of technology and science in the mid1910s.  Although the questioning of the boundries of scince were not new, Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein asked if there was a limit to what science should explore, but now became more widespread.  The other occurred just before the war on July 31, 1914 when French socialist Jean Jaures was assassinated by a French nationalist.  Albert Lindemann states in his book, A History of European  Socialism,that this event marked the end of international socialism and the many promises of peace that movement had proclaimed. 

By 1926 Will Rogers, the American humorist, would show how disillusioned many were with democracy by stating that the, “Dictator form of government is the greatest form of government: that is if you have the right dictator.”  Even Winston Churchill would proclaim Italian dictator Benito Mussolini as the greatest lawgiver alive.  Time magazine selected Adolph Hitler as their man of the year in 1938 and many though by that time democracy had seen its best days and was now dying.

The world looked upon the carnage of the war and vowed to never fight another one,  thus  NevilleChamberlain went to Munich and made his agreements with Hitler.  Europe was in no mood for war, even in the colonies.  England had brutally put down the Boer Rebellion in the early 1900s, but was somewhat  hesitant to battle Gandhi and the Indian Independence movement with the same enthusiasm.  Meanwhile the carnage of the war left America unwilling to involve itself in European politics and isolationism would cover the US like a giant fog.  America saw the result of the war as just more of the same when it came to European politics, and drifted under the protection of Fortress America.  This would last until December 7,1941, but echos of it are seen in Robert Taft and Pat Buchanan later in the century.

Protectionism and isolationism would rule American politics for the next decade, until the Depression would engulf the American experiment.  FDR, a progressive at heart, looked at the despair and problems of America and knew he could fix them.  He, and the Progressives, felt they had answers to a grinding poverty that drove people like John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde to crime, that forced the Joad family to the semi–slavery status in California, or drove many to despair as seen in the works of John Steinbeck.  Even Herbert Hoover, was an apostle  of this movement and many of FDR’s programs were extensions of Hoover’s ideas. These came from the pre-war idea that the state could overcome all things and make society into a just and fair place.

The Second World War soon exploded and Keegan described it , “The Second World War, when it came in 1939, was unquestionably the outcome of the First, and in a large measure its continuation.”  Historian John Lukas expands this by arguing that the war that started in 1914 does not end until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989.  The reluctance to stand up to Hitler at Munich, despite evidence that the time Chamberlain gained at Munich allowed Great Britain to build the planes that would win the Battle of Britain, would be used by American Presidents as the reason they went into Korea, Veit Nam, and Iraq. 

Thomas Burnett describes the 1990s as a mirror of the 1920s, when events and economics overwhelmed the system and brought on the Depression and subsequent war.  He also compares the 1930s to 2000s, one may wonder if the 2010s might resemble the 1940s.  The economic downturn and the rise of Isamofacist and a aggressive Russia might portend a bad storm.  

So much of the last century turned on the events of August 1914.  How different would a world look if the First World War had not happened.  Without the disruption of the war, there is no Hitler, Stalin, or even Mao.  How might the Civil Rights movement looked without many black soldiers who refused to go back to segregation after risking their lives to fight Hitler and Jim Crow.  Without the Soviet threat, we may not have had the McCarthy era, without WW II John Kennedy would have been working on his brother Joseph’s bid to be President.

 Boundaries in the Middle East, the rise of communism, and the militarization of America are all results of this war.  The French and British divided the Middle East between them at Versailles, despite protest from Indian Muslims not to break up the Constantinople Caliphate (fearing the ending of it would subject Islam to the many radical components of the religion).  Without the disruption of the First World War Russia would not have fallen to Lenin and communism may never have had a beachhead in Europe. 

At Versailles, Ho Chi Min was turned away by many powers in his bid to end colonialism in Veit Nam and found allies only with the French communist party.   After the First World War the Untied States, as it had done after all of its previous wars, cut her military substantially.  In aftermath of the Second, to prevent the mistakes of their father, the US did not cut its military, but expanded it to meet the threat it saw from the Soviet Union. 

The specter of Munich, a direct result of the fear of war by Europe, would drive American foreign policy to the present time.  Not only Munich, but the Wilsonian ideals of foreign policy, with its emphasise on internationalism, would find adherents in every American President from FDR to Obama.  

But this could not happen again, as we  have international stages for diplomacy and our economises are too interconnect for such a war.  Also, the nuclear threat, which Barnett claims prevented an American-Soviet war, would keep the major powers from such a course.  Or could it?

Imagine a high ranking, but JR. Chinese official visiting the western areas of China.  Islamic terrorist from Russian territory assassinate him in an area that is deputed by both nations.  China demands that the terrorist be turned over to them, and Russia, a nation whose honor has been hurt by the fall of the Soviet empire, refuses.  China, along with a diplomatic assault at the UN, moves troops to the border to show they are serious.  Russia responds by doing the same.  A small skirmish ensures along the border.  The response by both nations is a general mobilization, with the US  responds to by placing its armed forces at DEFCON 5,  because of the seriousness of this situation.  Russian and Chinese generals put their war plans, all nations have them, into place.  The Russian one calls for two actions to protect it forces and gain its navy some freedom to act.  They attack missile sites in Poland and send a force to occupy the Dardanelles.  US treaties an NATO commitments are in force.  Welcome to World War III.

 

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What is History: The Confessions of a Historian Tuesday, Aug 4 2009

 

It is not what ideas do to men, but what men do to ideas.

John Lukcas

I love history, I read many books and articles on history as well as watch shows on history,on TV, in films (although Hollywood has a tendency to really distort history)  and have developed  addiction to CSPAN’s book reviews on the weekends.  To me, one of the great pleasures in life is lose myself in researching some event or person for hours at a time.  Reading books, looking at old films, and going through old documents is something that can really thrill me.  I just love to read several books about some subject, person, or event.  History, philosophy, or science can be a source of entertainment for hours, or sometimes weeks.

I can get on some kick and spend months just researching a person or event and become fascinated with the time or place the person lived or the event occurred.  Sometimes is borders on obession, many might feel it may more than border on that. I am the guy in the back of the library rummaging through books, old magazines, journals, or microfilms for no reason except to figure something out for myself.

Sometimes I believe I was born too late in history, I think I might have fit in better in the 1500s, maybe in the court of Edward VI.  Why, I really don’t know, I just feel comfortable when I read of that period.  It would be wonderful if I, like many characters in science fiction, could just wander through time and live in different periods.  Just wander through, meeting the people and seeing how things were.  I would not look to change things, just observe.

History is not a time-line of people and events.  It is a great tapestry showing the grand panorama of human life from beginning to the present era.  It gives a window to see what might be in the future and why things are in the present. It is a combination of myth and fact that shows the unfolding of events of time gone by.  Seen from afar, one only sees the great figures advancing through time and the great events they look like they lead.  However, as one gets closer, one begins to see the intricate weaving of threads that make up the grand panorama.

These threads are the many thousands of people and ideas that make up the history of us.  It is a mixture of two important things, what was and what people thought was.  In describing John Wayne’s movie, The Alamo, a commentator stated that it was not what happened, but what should have happened.  Myth, therefore, is what many feel what happened, and if challenged may prove harder to get out of a nation’s conscience than any ideology. Myths are formed as stories are retold and handed down from one generation to the next.  Like my grandfather, who if asked if something was true would respond that if it wasn’t, it should be.  It becomes as important as the truth in discovering why certain actions are taken by a society. 

Because of myths, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a decisive victory of the Sioux over an outnumbered and outgunned Seven Calvary, becomes the mystic Custer’s Last Stand and is the second most written about battle in US history.  It is only out done by the Battle of Gettysburg in the literature written about the people and results of the event.  How many historians grimace when faced with people who see this event as it was portrayed in Errol Flynn’s They Died With Their Boots On when they speak about this event? Or ask a Tudor historian how close Showtime has gotten to the history of Henry VIII.

  Author Jared Diamond state that history is not considered a science, but something closer to the humanities.  Hegel said that history is a field that unites the objective with the subjective. Unlike science, which separates the object of study from the object itself. A lion is not called biology, it is an animal and the study of it comes under biology.  But an event is called historical and the study of it is also called historical. The Greek root of the word is research and implies that the researcher is judging the evidence of an event or person and determining what is myth and what is fact.  Thus, the historian is both investigator and storyteller, weaver of tales and teller of truth.  Unlike the scientist, the historian cannot test their conclusions nor can they reproduce and experiment to verify it.

A scientist can., and many times does, redo experiments changing certain elements to see what effects that has and see exactly what has been learned by their research.  Historians cannot so this.  One cannot redo the Civil War and see if things would have been better or worse if the South had won.  One cannot save John Kennedy from assassination to see if he would have ended our involvement in Veit Nam.  Despite being great fun, this is not possible. One should be careful, outcomes might not be better.  A divided America may have had effects that one does not see, such as denying the Allies the source that helped resupply Europe in the two world wars of the twentieth century and may have paved the way for German wins.   

Poets and philosphers are concerned with what could be and looking for the nature of things. The historian is concerned with was was.  That is the difference between Herodotus and  Homer, Byron and David Hume. One is concerned with could or should have been, while the other searches for what was.  Herodotus said the he wrote history :

in the hope of preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the barbarians (non-Greeks) from losing their due meed of glory.

Tacitus stated for history was:

This I regard as history’s highest function, to let no worthy action be uncommenemorated and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds.

Historians look for a pattern of change and the character or causes that are at work in theses changes. Wheather one looks,  as Augustine did for God’s revelation in history or as Hegel did for the secular laws governing and the patterns of human behavior, you embark on a journey of discovery.  Montaigne said of history that it was, “the mirror we must look at ourselves, to recognize ourselves from the proper angle.”  Or as Thomas Hobbes said, “Out of the conceptions of the past, we make a future.”

Historian Paul Hoffer warns those studying history that they cannot ignore the concepts of the past, but one must never twist things to fit one’s own interpretation of the past.  So while one may have a preconceived notion of why something or someone did what they did, one should not choose only things from documents that make your case.  One of the biggest problems in the writing of  history is when a historian takes only the documents that confirm his/her biases and ignor those which do not.  The Protestant writers of the English Reformation (Foxe, Goodman, Knox) celebrated their prejudices and wrote to prove their points.  Today, historians are carefully taught to either admit or banish their biases.

Mark Twain warns the readers of texts that:

You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you stand between it and the mirror of your imagination.  You may not see you ears, but they will be there.

Many different methods of study have been applied to this field, each emphasising different ideas of how history occurs.  One was the Great Man method which as Otto von Bismark said looked for the man who,”heard the footsteps of God and tried to catch his coattails.”  Tolstoy said of this theory that it was like a man who:

watched the movement of a heard of cattle and paying no attention to the varying vitality of pasturage in different parts of the field, or to the driving of the herdsman, attributes the direction of the heard to the animal which happens to be at its head.

Another way to express the problems of this method is the question: Did Martin Luther King take the Civil Rights movement to its great victories of the late sixties or did the movement elevate him?

Others like Quetin Skinner argue that the historian should look for the author’s original intent in writing the text being studied. Skinner equates writing with speech and urges the historian to strip away all later ideas on a writing and find what was in the mind of the author at the time he or she wrote it.  Jacques Derrida argues that any such search is futile and each generation should , like the old Jewish rabbis, find its own meaning in any text. .

Historian Micheal Foucault supports Derrida by comparing this quest to Ahab’s long search for Moby Dick.  He said that Ahab’s search for meaning in the whale’s actions was like, trying to pierce its eternal whiteness, to penetrate its madding blackness to reveal some original presence.  Ahab, like one looking for the original intent of a text, would go mad doing this.

Gibbons gives the historian’s lament of texts ( as one always finds a new or better one after completing one’s work):

the historian may applaud the importance and variety of his subject; but, while he is conscious of his own perfections, he must often accuse the deficiency of his material.

Many today wish to combine all of these methods and use whats good in each to pry away all the layers of myth and legend and find what was at the bottom of an event. Thomas Barnett does this by using his idea of history as a giant horizonal wave that is subjected to great vertical shocks that upset the rule sets (foundational thoughts) of a society.  Similar to Paul Bourdieu’s idea of habitus, it is a method where one looks at how events, shocks, to the system affect the system as a whole.  Bourdieu says they, “are products of history and subject to be transformed by history.”  Barnett simply states they are the, “meteor that separates the dinosaurs from the mammals.”

Thus one can go on this journey and look to see how the little threads affect the grand tapestry.  It is a journey into the minds of people who lived in another time and place.  It is a journey into the past, which has been described as a foreign land.   A land were we are the aliens and must seek the meanings of what is going on, since it lays at the foundation of what we are. 

It was once said that history repeats itself, the often end of this quote is usually ignored, first  as a drama then as a farce.  It was directed at Napolean III.  This is a fun part of history, dicovering the many little things that make up the past and effect the present.  Things like before Edward VI, marriage, birth and death certificates were kept by the Church.  During his administration it became the property of the state and remains so today.  

It is a land were one tries to see why John Knox rejected the Papal Magistrate for the presbytery, what might have motivated Custer to make his last charge, and what Bonnie Parker may have been thinking as she wrote her poetry and why she followed Clyde. It is a wonderful land that despite the invocation of Ecclesiastes 7:10, it may be a better one. 

 

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