A couple days ago Matthew Yglesias took time out from thinking about tough issues to note that WW I was really, really a terrible thing. Jim Henley commented:
The fascinating thing about recent American "conservatism" is how many Republican commentators have tried to rehabilitate WWI as a noble cause. It was when Tacitus made that argument that I first really understood that he was insane. I’ve since seen it from others.
On cue, Instapundit linked to this, by Trevino (a.k.a. Tactitus):
Americans simply do not wish to suffer, and do not have the senses of patriotism, pride, and honor that buffered such suffering for earlier generations. It is true, I think, that these qualities are less evident now than they were in the past. The ability of a society to see through grinding conflicts like the Philippines Insurrection or the Boer War augers well for its future, lest it lose the mere capacity to conquer, and be susceptible to humiliation by any small power with no advantage save mental fortitude. It is indeed difficult to imagine now the methods that transformed the Philippines for us, and South Africa for the British, from bitter foe to steadfast friend being applied in Iraq. Would that they were. But patriotism, pride, and honor are nonetheless still present in the American character. It is the American political class that lacks them in corresponding measure.
Republicans, the suffering for suffering’s sake party? It all reminds me of this post by Henry from way back at the start of 2004.
Usually, we think of conservatism as an effort to keep things the way they are. However, there’s an important strain within US conservatism that is interested not only in revolution, but in permanent revolution. The struggle itself is what is important, not a successful resolution, which is dull, and somehow slightly distasteful. The everyday politics of policy and markets just aren’t very interesting. Some conservatives never seem more comfortable and happier than when they are engaged in an epic struggle between good and evil.
Only now I guess feelers are being put out into ‘beyond good and evil’ territory. Conservatives will indignantly respond that Trevino is not an immoralist, leading to predictable rejoinders – then he must think he’s Green Lantern:
A lot of people seem to think that American military might is like one of these power rings. They seem to think that, roughly speaking, we can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force. The only thing limiting us is a lack of willpower.
Do you think the problem with people who think this way is that they don’t read enough comic books, or do they read too many? (I read a lot, so sometimes I worry.)
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Rob G 11.14.06 at 9:42 am
No, their problem is that they confuse comic books with real life.
Belle Waring 11.14.06 at 9:44 am
I think my right winger is even crazier than yours, honey. this round…to me!
readers, I realize we ought to do something more productive with our time than making fun of people. sorry. but you should be working, too.
Belle Waring 11.14.06 at 9:51 am
now I’m not sure. we have to ruthlessly brutalize smaller countries in order that they become our staunch allies? maybe it’s a tie.
abb1 11.14.06 at 10:05 am
Bah. By the time I finished reading my first Tactitus’ post I knew he was insane.
X. Trapnel 11.14.06 at 10:39 am
Right (to Belle). It’s not suffering for suffering’s sake, it’s pride, patriotism, and honor for the sake of suffering, for the sake of conquering, all in turn for the sake of making friends. In the end, they just want to be loved.
Doddle 11.14.06 at 10:50 am
What was that remark about placing tariffs on foreign pundits. How about a customs impound of foreign academics.
The rehabilitation of WWI went over the top with Niall Ferguson’s treatise on why it was such a gosh darned good war and why critics of WWI folly are such wispy whiners. Ferguson is popping up like poppies.
Stephen O’Shea’s Back to the Front has been a useful antidote to the renewed ecstasy over war pornography of the Western Front.
Uncle Kvetch 11.14.06 at 10:53 am
Republicans, the suffering for suffering’s sake party?
No, the “Other People’s Suffering for Our Sake” party.
kid bitzer 11.14.06 at 10:55 am
“The ability of a society to see through grinding conflicts like [the Somme] and [Ypres] augers well for its future”
Thank you, General Haig, for your deep insights into WWI. I think that next human wave going over the top should just about secure England’s future.
daniel elstein 11.14.06 at 11:43 am
I think doddle’s criticism of Niall Ferguson is back to front. As I understand Ferguson’s view, he thinks that Britain should have allowed Germany to conquer Belgium and create a European superstate. I.e. he’s an anti-WWI extremist. Which just goes to show that there’s more than one kind of wingnut.
Anderson 11.14.06 at 12:00 pm
It’s not suffering for suffering’s sake, it’s pride, patriotism, and honor for the sake of suffering, for the sake of conquering, all in turn for the sake of making friends. In the end, they just want to be loved.
Don’t you pity whoever’s in a *relationship* with one of these wackjobs?
Or, I dunno, maybe they sublimate it into their punditry. In which case, carry on, wackjobs, carry on.
Steve LaBonne 11.14.06 at 12:18 pm
Hey, I resemble that remark!
SamChevre 11.14.06 at 12:25 pm
I think you are missing the successful in “successful resolution”; isn’t Tacitus’ point that in the past, we achieved successful resolutions (the Phillipines, Germany and Japan are our allies), but that we seem to have lost the ability (Viet Nam and Iraq are not our allies).
spartikus 11.14.06 at 12:37 pm
Trevino doesn’t mention Germany or Japan. Perhaps because even he knows WW2 and the other examples are “different”.
I’m not sure anyone would hold up the Philiphines or South Africa as a model of a successful colony. Though I’m sure Josh would say we simply haven’t waited long enough.
bob mcmanus 11.14.06 at 12:45 pm
“It was when Tacitus made that argument that I first really understood that he was insane.”
“It’s not his fault!” See! See! Therein lies the whole problem, and why the Islamofascists and Christian Conservatives will destroy Western Liberalism, this failure to move from the aesthetico-scientific bourgeious concept of conflict as hygeine and Platonian dialectics of misunderstanding in ignorance…never mind. You simply can’t understand.
Spent two hours in the middle of the night looking for some Georges Sorel. Seriously considered learning French or hangin at Oswaldmosley.com until I saw the good stuff was available at Questia. Signed up for my free trial.
(PS:It spoils my act of performance art to admit the irony of returning to fin de siecle anarcho-syndicalism. Part of what’s so funny about it is the complete lack of the remotest possibility of a committed violent Left.)
lemuel pitkin 11.14.06 at 12:55 pm
John, I like comic books too. As, I suspect, do a shockingly high proportion of CT readers. So why don’t you write a post on that. There’s some value in thinking about good things and smart people for a change, no?
Me, I’m a fan of Adrian Tomine, Local, 100 Bullets, some of those French guys like Schuiten and Bilal. But I bet there’s great stuff that you read that I’ve never even heard of. So share!
apunkt 11.14.06 at 1:02 pm
“Thank you, General Haig, for your deep insights into WWI. I think that next human wave going over the top should just about secure England’s future.”
Shouldn´t that be Field Marshal Haig?
Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, for those who did not understand the reference…:
http://blackadder.powertie.org/transcripts/
and especially http://blackadder.powertie.org/transcripts/4/6/
apunkt 11.14.06 at 1:05 pm
I just have to quote this too: about the life in the trenches, as seen by Captain Edmund Blackadder (from the second link):
Ah, Captain Darling. Tomorrow at dawn. Oh, excellent. See you later, then. ‘Bye. (hangs up) Gentlemen, our long wait is nearly at an end. Tomorrow morning, General Insanity Melchett invites you to a mass slaughter. We’re going over the top.
George: Well, huzzah and hurrah! God Save the King, Rule Britannia, and Boo Sucks the Hairy Hun!
Edmund: Or, to put it more precisely, you’re going over the top — I’m getting out of here. (goes inside dugout)
George: (follows Edmund in Oh, now, come on, Cap! It may be a bit risky (tries to speak in a rousing Cockney dialect, but fails miserably), but it sure is bloomin’ ‘ell worth it, gov’nor!
Edmund: How could it possibly be worth it? We’ve been sitting here since Christmas 1914, during which millions of men have died, and we’ve advanced no further than an asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping.
George: Well, but this time I’m absolutely positive we’ll break through! It’s ice cream in Berlin in 15 days.
Edmund: Or ice cold in No Man’s Land in 15 seconds. No, the time has come to get out of this madness once and for all.
roger 11.14.06 at 1:07 pm
I’m sorry, Belle, but you are wrong. Trevino is far crazier. My proof is this passage:
“The ability of a society to see through grinding conflicts like the Philippines Insurrection or the Boer War augers well for its future, lest it lose the mere capacity to conquer, and be susceptible to humiliation by any small power with no advantage save mental fortitude. It is indeed difficult to imagine now the methods that transformed the Philippines for us, and South Africa for the British, from bitter foe to steadfast friend being applied in Iraq. Would that they were.”
Now, anybody who knows anything about the Philippines or the Boer war knows that the winning of them was not about mental fortitude, but about building concentration camps. In fact, the term – first used by the Spanish governor of Cuba to designate his barbed wire method of suppressing the Cuban revolt – was Englished specifically to refer to the imprisonment of civilian Boers by the English in the Boer war.
So: here we have a man lamenting that the Americans are too sissy to use concentration camps, like in the good old days.
This ups the ante of craziness in the “world series of right wing craziness bowl” (which, I believe, is going to be filmed, next season, by ESPN. Will Reynolds stake his “rubble and trouble” doctrine against Ledeen’s “I was never for this war, but for nuking Iran first” statement? And is Hitchen’s Killing Fields remark the dark horse for the big, million dollar pot? Tune in and see!) Next, we need a right winger who, while blasting the inhumanity of Saddam Hussein, distinguishes it from the methods he used to conquer, which should be copied by America’s essentially benign military power to the end of promoting a muscular liberalism that will transform the dysfunctional Middle East.
Ginger Yellow 11.14.06 at 1:10 pm
“It is indeed difficult to imagine now the methods that transformed the Philippines for us, and South Africa for the British, from bitter foe to steadfast friend being applied in Iraq.”
I don’t know. Iraq seems to be dividing along ethnic lines quite nicely.
KCinDC 11.14.06 at 1:14 pm
But if you ruthlessly brutalize dumber political commentators, will they become your allies?
Barry 11.14.06 at 1:16 pm
Draft the wh*resons, and send them to Iraq. Not as soldiers, but as EODSl’s, ‘Explosive Ordinance Detection Slaves’. Give them to Marine and Army infantry units, along with copies of their writings. Explain that these guys are now classfied as expendable ordinance, to be used to save the lives of soldiers and marines. They can be sent up to suspect cars at checkpoints, for example, to see if they are suicidal car bombers.
I expect a high casualty rate (in fact, I’d hope for a high casualty rate), but the few survivors can expect – well, nightmares, I’d bet.
y 11.14.06 at 2:14 pm
“Not on a single issue, or in one direction or twain,
But conclusively, comprehensively, and several times and again,
Were all our most holy illusions knocked higher than Gilderoy’s kite.
We have had a jolly good lesson, and it serves us jolly well right!”
Jim S. 11.14.06 at 4:29 pm
I am sorry, but has anyone read Fritz Fischer and his Germany’s Aims In The First World War lately? Perhaps there should be less categorial judgement.
This from a person who does not like any of the present wars-not GWOT, not Afghanistan, and certainly not Iraq.
eugene 11.14.06 at 4:35 pm
KCinDC wins the thread.
Donald Johnson 11.14.06 at 4:39 pm
Roger is right–he just forgot to mention that along with the concentration camps, the Philippine War also included the American use of torture.
Those were the days. Or these are the days. Or something.
Dan Simon 11.14.06 at 4:45 pm
A couple days ago Matthew Yglesias took time out from thinking about tough issues to note that WW I was really, really a terrible thing. Jim Henley commented:
Why can’t WWI have been a really, really terrible thing and a noble cause? Wasn’t WWII?
My understanding is that those who argue that WWI was a noble cause don’t deny that the carnage was horrible, or that the Entente’s military leadership squandered thousands of soldiers’ lives through sheer incompetence and stupidity. However, they argue that the Germans’ plans for Europe after their anticipated victory were scary enough to be worth fighting a prolonged war to foil. Obviously, it would have been better had those whose deaths served absolutely no purpose been spared–but again, the same could be said of WWII, without negating the overall justice of the Allies’ campaign.
(Note: It may be that the “noble cause” claimants have their facts wrong about Germany’s intentions towards the rest of Europe in 1914. But that would make them ill-informed on a fairly obscure historical point–not, as Jim Henley suggests, insane.)
P.D. 11.14.06 at 5:05 pm
“The ability of a society to see through grinding conflicts like the Philippines Insurrection or the Boer War augers well for its future…”
You know the drill: Buy the premise, buy the bit.
BruceR 11.14.06 at 5:07 pm
You’re both wrong about Ferguson. Among other things, he argued that Britain should have acquiesced in the invasion of a neutral Belgium for realist reasons, but that the tendency of British and French armies to capture more prisoners than the Germans was to their advantage in the long run because it encouraged further surrenders, and conversely that the German choice to engage in unrestricted warfare against neutral shipping was incredibly stupid and counter-productive for them, if only because it brought in the U.S.
In other words, that the available moral grounds (the principle of territorial integrity of neutral countries) did not justify British participation,
but that in the end the side that possessed the moral advantage did win, if only because their interpretation of morality had a greater functional utility.
Whether you agree or not, saying that Ferguson was either pro- or anti-WW1 in The Pity of War seems a bit simplistic.
Geoff R 11.14.06 at 5:38 pm
WW I views diverge. In Kimball’s The Betrayal of Liberalism Oz culture-warrior Windshuttle sees WWI as an imperialist war and blames the evil Woodrow Wilson for US involvement.
Doddle 11.14.06 at 8:41 pm
Oh my. This is simplistic but then again this is a throwaway observation: for Niall Ferguson the error of WWI wasn’t so much the industrialized bloodlust and destruction but that it produced so little that was useful. If the needs of Empire and especially the British Empire could have been serviced by even the horrors of trench warfare then so much the better. And in that, I suppose, the Great War can still be said to be a noble cause. Such are the bookworm charms of the conservative strategist. It’s also a sentiment that the war eradicated in the most straightforward way. It gunned down many of the adherents. Its return is more farce. While Ferguson is a bit higher caliber than Ollie North they both traffic in the lie that Owen memorialized in one of his poems.
RobW 11.14.06 at 9:02 pm
The ability of a society to see through grinding conflicts like the Philippines Insurrection or the Boer War augers well for its future, lest it lose the mere capacity to conquer, and be susceptible to humiliation by any small power with no advantage save mental fortitude.
What’s Incitatus complaining about? That Iraq’s not enough of a “howling wilderness” yet?
nick s 11.14.06 at 10:03 pm
This is probably ad hominem, but wasn’t Trevino discharged from the military on account of his mental health? If not, things would have to be bad to accept him now: he’s well down the Kurtzian path to ‘exterminate all the brutes’.
And yes, Ferguson’s thesis (in essence, ‘the British could have chosen to stay out, and should have done so’) is one that he’s held for many years.
Stephen Frug 11.14.06 at 10:12 pm
Do you think the problem with people who think this way is that they don’t read enough comic books, or do they read too many? (I read a lot, so sometimes I worry.)
The problem is that they don’t read the right comic books.
Ray Davis 11.15.06 at 12:01 am
So what would’ve been the right thing to do? From what I’ve read of the period, WWI propaganda all round was a lot more convincing than any war propaganda since. All kinds of sensible people on every side thought it was now or never, and I’m in no position to say they were dumber than me.
Where we might be able to agree is in how the victors’ spoils were handled. But the lesson everyone learned from WWI was to pamper the asshole fascists after WWII rather than offend anyone who might cause trouble. I’m not sure that was a great ethical advance, even if it turned out to be practical.
bad Jim 11.15.06 at 4:36 am
Why are we arguing over World War I? In parts of the U.S. we’re still disputing the Civil War. We’ll get around to re-evaluating the Spanish-American War by and by.
Consider, though: had it not been for WWI, the Russians would never have been able to win WWII.
Jon H 11.16.06 at 1:17 am
I’d kinda like it if the blogosphere took to calling Tacitus “Tacticus” – the skewed version from Discworld.
It’d help deflate him a bit more.
TomU 11.16.06 at 7:48 pm
Ok guys altogether! Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil. It worked work for the US until 9/11. Maybe your strategy will work again. The only positive thing is that you guys are not reproducing. If conservatives are so unhappy, why do they reproduce at a greater rate.
TomU 11.16.06 at 7:50 pm
Your comment is awaiting moderation???
I’m going to a site where my thoughts aren’t sensored.
Wax Banks 11.17.06 at 12:42 am
I am posting a comment solely because tomu’s masterful punchline needs a Doonesbury-style anticlimax.
Done!
bianco 11.18.06 at 8:32 pm
“The ability of a society to see through grinding conflicts like the Philippines Insurrection or the Boer War augers well for its future,”
yes. mark twain saw through the rationale for the killing in the philipines, just as many in the here and now saw through colin powell’s sales pitch to the UN. is war hysteria ever completely opaque?
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