THE WAR

I've finished watching all of the episodes of the Ken Burns documentary on World War II.  The war was the big event of the life of me and my friends.  Our dads were either in the war or working in war industries making the ships, planes, tanks, guns, bombs, ammunition, etc.  We had nightmares about the Germans and Japs, as all called them then.  Of course, we didn't know any where I grew up.  It was hard to say who was more evil, while we, of course, were the good guys.  We dehumanized, caricatured, and animalized the enemy to make it easier to hate and want to kill, not realizing that in denigrating them we diminished ourselves.  That was war.

The documentary, while holding my attention, had the same effect as when I visited, with my family, the Holocaust museum in Wash. D.C.  "I've seen all this.  This is old news," I thought.  Maybe the newcomers will appreciate it.  My concern now is to understand what happened, so I read a lot about how our world came to be as it is.  It's not pretty, how we got to here.

The newspaper comment on "The War," by Ken Burns usually notes that today's kids know little or nothing about The War.  Well, duh... they didn't live through it, thank goodness.  You'd never want your kids to live through a war.  They can always find out when they're interested enough.  By the time you taught them enough to appreciate The War, their minds would be warped, like ours, no doubt.  I can still remember trading nightmares with friends from the block I grew up on in Staten Island, N.Y. where my dad, Leo, operated a crane to build ships in the Bethlehem Steel shipyard.  School friends had lost fathers.  After the war we'd bring cans of food to school for the food-drives to feed the starving children in war-torn Europe.  Europe, to me, still has those two modifiers in front of it, in my mind, despite two visits long after any sign of the war was visible to tourists.  The mental furniture is still in place out of WWII.  Yes, we're friends now with Japan and Germany, but isn't that amazing?  And our then ally, Russia, led by Josef Stalin, the arch ogre alongside Hitler, became our arch enemy after he was our friend because then he was fighting Hitler.

Strange place the world.

What Burns doesn't do is to explain why there was this big complicated war in the first place, and what happened afterwards.

What happened afterwards was that in cutting up Germany, we became rivals with Stalin and that began the Cold War which lasted until the fall of the Wall in Berlin in 1989, followed by the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.  The Cold War is now over, isn't it?  I'm not so sure.

How did WWII begin?  From all I've read, it was an outgrowth of WWI.  Germany was defeated in that war, and the victors, particularly Britain and France, imposed such impossibly harsh conditions on starving Germany (subjected to a British naval blockade that worked) to punish it, that the Germans resolved to turn the tables.  It took until 1933 until Hitler was elected, more or less democratically, I'm afraid.  He invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939.  Japan attacked us in 1941, on Dec. 7.  From 1942 through August, 1945, we were in this terrible war.  Almost three solid years.  That's less than Vietnam or Iraq.  Still, that was "The War."  Those, I don't know what those are except that they are wars and our boys continuing to die for reasons I'm waiting to hear a good explanation for.

In WWII you didn't need anyone to explain why the free world was fighting the forces of totalitarianism.  You had a clear choice.  You fought to rid the world of The Emperor of Japan, his prime minister, Hideki Tojo, and Adolph Hitler.  There was no choice.  The good guys vs. those devils.  Carpet bombing of Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, and other cities?  Germans.  What did you expect.  They started the war.  We were attacked.  Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?  Civilians?  Military plants?  What was the difference?  They were supporting the wrong guys.  Got what they deserved.

That's how we thought.  Assuming my thoughts as a kid, acquired in conversation with friends my own age and in listening to the adults, accurately reflect what I recall hearing.

Yes, it's a pity that our youngsters today don't know the meaning of WWII, according to the news commentary, but maybe it's good they don't know the horror and the unsettled feeling of waiting until peace returns, as we hoped and prayed it would. 

We've had Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq since then, all involving that unsettled feeling of hoping and praying that peace would return.

I heard presidential candidate addressing a London audience on a fund-raising tour overseas.  "We Americans love peace," he said.  You'd never believe it to look at the way we throw our weight around, would you?  Right now we're talking about attacking Iran, as though Iraq were not enough.  We don't seem to be happy unless we're smashing something to make the people there respect us, or at least fear us, which I think we prefer.

Peace-loving is that last of our concerns.

Our leaders want us to be afraid so that we will support the next war, if not the present one.  I foresee a future of non-stop wars.  We can't bring ALL the troops home from Iraq.  Iran will do something stupid that we'll take as an affront to our leadership and we'll have to attack Iran.

Phillip Bobbitt, in "The Shield of Achilles," traces the history of European war.  He considers WWI, WWII, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, all part of an over-arching conflict which he calls "the Long War."  It seems to be our very own Hundred Years war.

And what are we fighting about?

We seem to be fighting for our way of life as opposed to the fundamentalist Muslim way of life, or any other totalitarian arrangement such as under the Kaiser, or the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, during WWI, or Hitler and the Emperor of Japan in WWII, or under Milosevich or Saddam Hussein more recently.

There's no shortage of bad guys worth taking out.

And no shortage of guys like Bush who are willing to commit our forces to doing the taking out.

Do you see things looking up?

On what basis, pray tell?

Comments

[Ken Larson]

I am a 2 tour Vietnam Veteran who recently retired after 36 years of working in the Defense Industrial Complex on many of the weapons systems being used by our forces as we speak. I believed another Vietnam could be avoided with defined missions and the best armaments in the world.

It made no difference.

We have bought into the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). If you would like to read how this happens please see:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703

Through a combination of public apathy and threats by the MIC we have let the SYSTEM get too large. It is now a SYSTEMIC problem and the SYSTEM is out of control. Government and industry are merging and that is very dangerous.

There is no conspiracy. The SYSTEM has gotten so big that those who make it up and run it day to day in industry and government simply are perpetuating their existance.

The politicians rely on them for details and recommendations because they cannot possibly grasp the nuances of the environment and the BIG SYSTEM.

So, the system has to go bust and then be re-scaled, fixed and re-designed to run efficiently and prudently, just like any other big machine that runs poorly or becomes obsolete or dangerous.

This situation will right itself through trauma. I see a government ENRON on the horizon, with an associated house cleaning.

The next president will come and go along with his appointees and politicos. The event to watch is the collapse of the MIC.

For more details see:

http://rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com/2006/11/odyssey-of-armaments.html