1914 and the Case for American Optimism
By Alex Ricciuti

Throughout the months preceding the war in Iraq, when the Bush administration was attempting rather half-heartedly to secure the backing of the UN Security Council, several administration officials began to muse openly about the lessons of Munich. The calumny of 'appeaser' was leveled rather bluntly against some of the US's closest allies, although to no great effect. (If people have become jaded by polemical references to Hitler and the Nazis this is of no great surprise.) Yet, asked to look to the lessons of British-French appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938 we must also look to the root of the whole mess that became the history of the 20th Century. In 1914, the leaders of Europe fell into the Great War's all consuming abyss, the repercussions of which the world has been left with to this day.

To suggest that guilt for the First World War is as equally attributable to Germany as is that for the Second is an assumption that retroactively applies excess fault. Sure enough Germany was the aggressor. It was an authoritarian state. Though not totalitarian as it tolerated political parties such as the powerful Social Democrats. The Western Powers were democracies, however immature compared with today. But Germany only desired that which its late coming unification denied it with respect to its rival powers. Imperial Germany wanted an empire to match that of the British and the French, although dominion over Europe would do in its stead. As war fever swept Europe, the social democratic parties fell victim to the mindless nationalism of the day and renounced their pledges to unite along class lines in Europe and deny their governments a war. There was a romanticism about war in the national psyches of the major powers. Many believed it would be an adventure and one that would end quickly too. The Western Powers (including an enthusiastic warrior named Winston Churchill) welcomed war and its opportunity to finally defeat the growing threat to their dominance by their arch rival Germany.

With hindsight we can safely assume that any alternative would have been far less bloody. A policy of enlightened engagement (a la Cold War) with Germany might have brought about an entirely different world. One we cannot even imagine now. Consider what followed and the results which we are still living with today; namely in the Middle-East.

The 10 million dead in the war itself. The provocation of the Russian Revolution, leading to Stalin and his terror which murdered tens of millions in the Soviet Union while enslaving the rest. The treaty of Versailles whose punitive extortions on Germany facilitated the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. The failure of the League of Nations to secure peace in the coming decades. World War Two with 55 million dead including 6 million murdered in the Holocaust by the Nazis. For Europe it has meant the diminishment of the continent as a region of unrivaled economic and cultural significance and the shifting of the center of gravity of Western culture to the United States. For Britain it meant the loss of empire, having taken 300 years to build and only 30 to liquidate it. By 1945 Britain, although victorious, was heavily in debt and an exhausted economic and military power. Then came the subsequent Cold War and the world facing near nuclear annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Most relevant to events today, following the war came the arbitrary arrangements made by colonial powers Britain and France which created the map of the Middle-East today, with all of the ensuing conflicts and contradictions. Finally, the Great War set in motion a nihilism bred by all these wars which I cannot help but believe contributes to the depravity of suicide terrorists today.

Americans don't Make Good Nihilists

Out of 1945 there grew that particular continental brand of existentialism which runs though much post-war European cinema and literature, most notedly in countries such as France or Italy. We see it in the black heart that inhabits a film like Hiroshima, Mon Amour or in the casual, episodic decadence of Fellini's La Dolce Vita. These are both excellent films that speak truth to the human condition but the indulgence is there. A vain philosophical musing that assumes a human (and European) supremacy, as if only human events are what matter and define this world. It smacks of self-centered teenage angst, ultimately superficial despite its feigned attempt at profundity and seriousness. This is something that my Canadian soul, rooted in the spiritual universe of our vast wilderness, absolutely abhors.

I have always had the odd notion that ultimately Americans don't make great warrior/conquerors because they lack the nihilism for it. They are too much the individualists to go marching off to die for their 'patrie' like Romans or Germans. (This despite a haphazard and sometimes ugly conformist streak that can run through society, which can be explained, as opposed to smaller Western societies, as a fear of a majority that can be so large and powerful). The personal lives of Americans are invested with too much purpose for them to want to go off and civilize the world as other great powers have done before. And as frightening as Christian fundamentalists are when they speak of Armageddon and the return of Christ, most Americans like to believe in a higher power that is more loving and forgiving than that. They want a meaning that ultimately spells the decency and liberty of the individual.

When American filmmakers appropriate some of the conventions of post-war European cinema and try to invest their films with an air of philosophical sophistication, it becomes all the more glaring how out of place such abstract flirtation is within the framework of American culture and American life. Such transplanted existentialism is most often employed as a variation on Anglo-American prudishness, which only multiplies its silliness. It becomes particularly egregious in such films as Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut or in the tired cliché of the suburban satire. The only kind of meaninglessness that American films do well lies in the pointless car chase (My personal favorite being the chase sequence in To Live and Die in L.A.).

American films not only resonate within American culture but they do so around the whole world. People look to Hollywood films for the inspiration found in the lighter shades of gray when the flawed hero still nobly tries to do the right thing. Americans have a want for moral purpose although they do not necessarily require simplistic versions of good and evil. In film noir of the 40s and 50s, American cinema culled the light and shadow of German expressionism and the despair of European outcasts who emigrated to Los Angeles to make movies and then lent its own moral dimension to the films that came of it. Ethically compromised characters were ever present in the genre, but underlying it all was a commitment to morality and to reality. Even with Hitchcock there was a humor, often black, which together with his cameos invited a healthy realism and a call to never take it too seriously. There is nothing more pretentious and cumbersome than a French melodrama where the characters just talk and have sex and seem aimless. I very much prefer the mythologically infused melodramas of the American sort. Where the eternal conflicts of self vs. society, man and morality, hero and nemesis are woven together to tell a gripping story with interesting characters.

The Romance of War

Both the general (and vague) War on Terrorism and the war in Iraq have personally touched but a small minority of Americans. The vast majority don't have relations who have been victims or are serving in the military and as taxpayers their payment on those wars is being deferred thanks to tax cuts and record deficit spending. The sanitized images in the US media have provided them with an additional option of a distance absent any emotional investment at all. One of the reasons cable outlets such as Fox News or MSNBC could have been so jingoistic in their coverage of the war in Iraq was that it went quickly and not too many American soldiers were killed. No extended struggle to sour on nor a grim accounting of continuing casualties to spoil a romanticized telling of events. (Consider the apparent embellishment of the Jessica Lynch story.)

But if familiarity breeds contempt, then perhaps romanticism breeds nihilism in turn. Romanticizing war is a crime which we should have somehow morally codified after the experience of 1914, where cultish nationalism married to industrialization led to mass slaughter. But much of the American media indulged war romanticism, with the constant resonances of WWII, never bothering to look at the trajectory from romantic vision of war in 1914 to the nihilism of the Nazis. The pathology of the suicide bomber has it own perverse version of the trajectory, the nihilism of the act justified by a romanticism about the afterlife.

Jacques Barzun in his preface to From Dawn to Decadence, an ambitious account of Western history from the Reformation to today, points out an irony of the modern age. When a terrorist detonates a car bomb, or a suicide vest of plastic explosives, or crashes an airplane into a building, it is Western technology that is being employed by those who oppose Western societies. I also suspect the terrorists are borrowing some Western nihilism too. With their extremism not too different from the fanatical ideologies and blind nationalism that became a substitute for sober humanity in 20th Century European history.

When war comes to us, we invariably must make a moral descent. Humans must kill other humans and we are no longer in control of events and maintain moral order. Wars escalate quickly and degenerate into wanton murderousness with frightful ease. We can point to what Allied bombing against Germany and Japan had become by the end of the war for one example. During the Battle of Britain, when Britons were facing the threat of German invasion, the Churchill government was prepared to use chemical weapons to repel it and probably would have done so had it come it. Churchill, that infinitely quotable man, in one of his less memorable pronouncements told the British people "you can always take one of them with you", sounding more like a crazed and desperate criminal looking to shoot it out to the end with the cops than a celebrated war leader.

Although the Allied Powers are not absolved of their legal and moral responsibilities in the conduct of the war it is ultimately the Axis governments (and in large part Stalin too) who carry the blame for all of the horrors unleashed upon the world. If there is a moral argument against democracies initiating wars absent an imminent threat it is this. That we cannot know the consequences of them, but we are morally accountable for whatever they may be.

The Case for American Optimism

One of the oddest prejudices propagated mostly, but not exclusively, by the right wing in America is that Americans are somehow a 'moral' people and hold fast to traditional values while Europeans are libertine and decadent. The culprit for this misguided view may be the fact that European political culture leans far more to the left than does America's. But in fact, just the opposite of that prejudice is true. It is Europeans who are the conservative ones (in the dictionary meaning of the word). They stick to their jobs, cars, homes and families much longer than Americans do. Their rates of divorce, teen pregnancy, drug abuse and crime all much lower than in the United States, often by several factors rather than mere percentage points. (Surveys of sexual behavior also reveal Americans to be both more adulterous and promiscuous). It is Americans who are the liberal and progressive ones (only not always politically which keeps the prejudice alive), more open to new ideas and new ways, and this is, despite America's social ills, its most positive enduring quality.

The United States presides over the most dynamic and advanced economy in the world not because, as American conservatives believe, it is a more liberal market than Europe's but because of the entrepreneurial spirit of its people. Americans don't necessarily have better public infrastructure, legal systems or build better products than Europeans, in fact the US often lags behind in those regards. Yet the European Union, with 90 million more people than the United States, still cannot match its GDP. There is still truth in those worn-out platitudes about American ingenuity. It is that spirit which embodies for Americans a sense of purpose.

With the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 America faced its own 1914. Of course, circumstances were different, the consequences of war in a nuclear age made war unthinkable and were plain to see. But the terrifying episode made clear that men (and Americans) were able to pull back from the brink on purely moral grounds, understanding that indulging our warring impulses would have been the ultimate reprehensible act. Facing the absolute horror of nuclear death gave a meaning to the preciousness of life and brought upon America, and all of us, a sobering humanity. Kennedy went on to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty and propose civil-rights legislation just months afterward. Even Ronald Reagan would come to fight the Cold War almost exclusively on moral principle and proclaim that he would like to one day see a world free of nuclear weapons.

For Europeans, war in the 20th Century brought only despair. For Americans, every war that it won augmented its power, most significantly the Cold War. Historically, when European powers waged war abroad it was exclusively for selfish interest. American have waged war in the name of freedom and democracy and have done so earnestly. Sometimes they have not, but what the Unites States has as opposed to others is a record of correcting its mistakes on its own and not as a result of total defeat. America's power is not only the accidental consequence of demography and geography but of it's values and history and ability to make amends for such things as the exclusion of African-Americans or women from the liberties enshrined its constitution or the misadventure that was the Vietnam War.

In the long run US foreign policy, with its many blunders and often immature temperament, is always more easily reversible than bad policy was by other great powers in history. The United States possesses the uncommon ability to self-examine and correct itself that other powers have in the past and until today very much lacked. The Europeans only came to cooperation once they realized the utter futility of fighting each other for supremacy, after centuries of rivalry. There may be loads of criticism for American excess in fighting the Cold War, as well as a crimes committed in tolerating human rights abuses by aligned dictators, but the major debate in America was always between a policy of containment or roll-back of Communist power. A debate based not only on narrow American interests but on a moral plane of human rights and liberty.

Politics will become interesting in Washington once the bills on the Iraq policy become due and Americans see, in the bare terms of enlightened self-interest, what the return has been on their investment. The fickleness, petulance if you will, of the American people, so often criticized by ideologues of all stripes, will once again save them from extended trauma. Once the Bush administration, or another presidency in 2005, realizes the return on the investment is not what the brokers had promised, the course will quickly be changed. President Bush has already committed himself to becoming a peace maker. This may at first just be a superficial attempt at creating a 'grand strategy' presidency but the administration will soon realize it is about more than the image of the President. In the fight against terrorism, and to end bloodshed in Israel and Palestine, certain fundamentals have to change in the Middle-East. The current administration has committed the United States to it and cannot easily fall back into complacency. And America, with Democrats on Bush's heels, or with a Democrat president in 2005, may just be able to do it.