November 12,
2019
MY CORNER by
Boyd Cathey
Veterans’ Day
and One-Hundred and One Years of the Suicide of the West
Friends,
Last year I penned an installment in this series about the Great
War and how it ended and what it continues to mean for us, and my wish today is
to refashion that essay with additional commentary.
*****
Yesterday we commemorated
Veterans’ Day, one-hundred-and-one years after the proclamation of an Armistice
on the Western Front, November 11, 1918. I don’t think there are any veterans
of the First World War still alive: the last American, British and German
soldiers having passed on within recent memory, although it is possible that
there still may be an odd Japanese or Russian centenarian who survives….
Even though for most of us with
some age the memory of those men is still somewhat fresh, the conflict in which
they fought and suffered incredibly is now mostly a receding chapter in the
history books, and most high schoolers and, yes, college-aged students cannot
even locate the correct century in which World War I occurred, much less who were
the combatants.
The older I become and the more I
reflect on past history, the more
gruesomely critical to our present history
and historical situation I see World War I. The proper word should be “tragic,”
for that war should never have happened, should never have occurred. Europe,
after the signing of the Treaty of Paris (May 30, 1814) ending the Napoleonic
Wars, experienced a century of virtual peace and general prosperity. There
were, of course, regional conflicts and localized revolutions (1830, 1848, and
1871); the Austrians briefly fought the Italians, and then the Prussians, who
also fought briefly the Danes and the French; the Russians fought the Ottoman
Turks; and there were conflicts in the Balkans. But none of these were
generalized, European conflicts on the scale of Napoleon’s campaigns engulfing
the entire continent in which he attempted to redraw the map of Europe and
march to Moscow.
July and August 1914 would change
all that. And the entry in 1917 of the United States into what had become a
world conflagration, an entrance motivated largely through an insane Messianic
quasi-religious fervor “to make the world safe for democracy,” shaped all
subsequent history, the horrendous consequences of which we continue to experience
today.
Europe in 1918 witnessed the
unleashing of world Communism and the fall of three essentially conservative
and traditional monarchies each of which had deep roots in the history of their
respective nations. The millions of men under arms killed and maimed, the
immense loss to civilians, the huge (and unpayable) economic costs, the near
total political upheaval, and, lastly, the incredible destruction culturally, abruptly
and rudely ended that “century of peace” and stability, ushering in arguably the
most devastating, the most brutal, the most vicious seventy years in all human
history.
There is of course ample blame to
go around, although increasingly the fingers of responsibility, once so
punitively pointed at Germany and Austria, now need to be turned, sternly, to
the British Foreign Office, the French foreign desk, and the inept Russian
general staff, not to mention the conniving Serbian government. This is abundantly
and completely demonstrated in the most recent and most detailed and scholarly
accounts: Cambridge University Professor Christopher Clark’s The
Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (Harper Books) and Sean
McMeekin, July
1914: Countdown to War (Basic Books). With full access to hitherto
unexamined archival materials, both authors come down hard on the Brits,
French, and Russians—whose leaders had ample opportunity to avoid the
conflagration.
Woodrow Wilson has even less of
an excuse. And, indeed, the essential role of the American president and our
nation—without which very likely the war might well ended in a stalemate, with
a return to “status quo ante bellum”—can and must be seen for what it was: a
completely misguided wallow in fanatical Messianism, which was, in fact, in its
results diabolical.
Back in October of 1917 Professor Walter A. MacDougal authored a
critical examination, “The Madness of Saint Woodrow: Or, What If the
United States Had Stayed out of the Great War?”, in which he quoted Wilson’s declaration of war: “America is privileged to spend her blood…to make the world safe
for democracy…God helping her, she can do no other.” And MacDougal adds: “Wilson’s
optimism concerning the power of humankind to do good hailed not from his
Reformed heritage but from liberal theology, the Social Gospel, progressivism,
and, ultimately, the romantic spiritualization of religion.”
The results forever changed the course of history, not just of
Europe, but for us as well. And for echoes today all we have to do is listen to
the Siren calls of those, especially the Neoconservatives, who wish to continue
that futile and disastrous global campaign.
Anyone who has had the
opportunity to view the classic film, “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930),
starring Lew Ayres, based on a classic novel by German World War I veteran
Erich Maria Remarque, will begin—but only begin—to fathom the barbarity of the
First World War, the suffering, the slaughter, and the mangled bodies, a whole
generation of young Englishmen and Frenchmen, forcibly wrenched from their
societies, lives extinguished. And in Germany: a nation and an historic and
noble culture, with millions dead and maimed, held up as irremediably guilty of
the immensity of “war guilt.”
But, Austria-Hungary and Russia
suffered even more severely. Austria, once one of Europe’s great empires and
the center of much of Western culture, the land of Beethoven and Mozart, was
literally castrated, huge swathes of its historic fatherland sliced away
arbitrarily and turned overnight into quarrelsome petty states, none of which
was satisfied with the treaties and boundaries that followed the Armistice: a
powder keg for future war. The ancient and revered Habsburg dynasty, the
inheritor of the old Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne, was summarily dispossessed,
and Austria was left as a small rump state. As English Lord Curzon described
it: “A major European capital [Vienna] ruling over a minor state, like
Constantinople in the latter days of the Byzantine Empire.”
And the effects on and in Russia
were even more incalculable. The world’s largest country, the seat of the 300
year old Romanov dynasty, the land of Peter the Great, of Dostoyevsky, of
Tchaikovsky, of Tolstoy, the Third Rome, the shield and buckler against the
Mongols and the Tartar hordes, in eight short months fell to a fanatical
clique, a monstrous cabal of violent Marxists intent of remaking that country,
subjugating the Russian Orthodox Church, and spreading the Communist virus
across Europe and the world. The vicious and criminal execution of Tsar
Nicholas II and his family at Yekaterinburg (July 17, 1918) brought home in
chilling detail the unparalleled brutality that the war had unleashed.
After the conclusion of World War
I various historians began to examine and sift through the records, the
correspondence, the documents regarding the war and its origins. And what
became readily apparent was that perhaps unlike World War II, the First World
War was a conflict that did not have to happen, indeed, it should not have
happened.
Back in 2014 the distinguished historian, the late Dr. Ralph Raico
(Professor at Buffalo State College), authored an excellent examination of the
origins of the war that anyone interested in how that war began should read [“And
the War Came,” June 30, 2014, at: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/06/ralph-raico/wwi-revisionism/]. In his conclusion Raico, echoing the conclusions that
Professors Clark and McMeekin would also arrive at, concluded: “Britain’s entry into the war was crucial. In more ways than one,
it sealed the fate of the Central Powers. Without Britain in the war, the
United States would never have gone in.”
The German historian Ernst Nolte [d. 2016] has made the case [in
his unfortunately yet untranslated volume, Der Europaische
Burgerkrieg (1987) – The European Civil War] that in a certain manner the
Second World War was a continuation of the First, that it was, in some ways, a
justifiable reaction to the extreme injustice and unresolved crises produced by
the imposed “peace” of 1919. While in no way legitimating the concentration
camps or executions committed by the Nazis, Nolte has argued that the German
reaction in the 1930s was both predictable and understandable, and that the crimes
perpetrated were comparable, perhaps even pale in comparison, to those that can
be laid at the door of Josef Stalin.
Be that as it may, over 117,000 American “dough boys” died
during the First World War and another 204,000 were wounded (figures that pale,
however, in comparison to losses suffered by Russia: nearly four million dead,
another five million wounded; and the United Kingdom, over one million dead,
with another 1.7 million wounded).
Europe—and the world—would never be the same, and in so many
ways historic European, Western Christian culture, would never really recover.
After surviving the French Revolution and the various violent upheavals of the
nineteenth century—after the assaults of scientific and social
Darwinism—after the challenges of industrialism and tremendous social
dislocation—after absorbing the effects of triumphant political
liberalism—after all these hurdles, in a real sense, World War I effectively
dismantled the fragile remaining scaffolding, the structures in those nations,
those empires, where something of the older framework of what had
been “Christendom” still remained.
The “total war” devastation of the Second World War completed
that process, smashing to smithereens the remnants of the old order, and more
ominously, freeing triumphant and victorious the unfettered spirit of
universalized Progress. Sure, the Communists participated in this triumph, but
their interpretation of victory was at odds with that of what became known as
“the West.” For forty-five years the forces of NATO looked wearily across the
demarcation lines, across the Iron Curtain at the forces of the Warsaw Pact.
We had defeated one form of ferocious tyranny, but had replaced
it with another just as bad, and maybe even worse. Yet, both the West and the
Soviet Bloc proclaimed their progressivism and their belief in equality and
democracy, albeit with vastly different interpretations of that progressivism.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the virtual defenestration and
final defeat of the KGB commissars in August 1991 (for which Vladimir Putin,
then vice-mayor of Leningrad, deserves our eternal thanks, but won’t get it
from American mainstream media) should have signaled the real end of the Second
World War, but it only opened a new phase of world turmoil in which the forces
of global progressivism now proclaimed their inevitable triumph: the
Communists, you see, had become “old fashioned,” “reactionary,” “too stodgy and
not revolutionary enough.” But international progressivism, with its handmaidens
of “world democracy” and “global equality,” was only emboldened by the
whimpering disappearance of the Communist bureaucracy.
Neoconservative writer, Francis Fukyama, in his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) argued that the worldwide spread
of liberal democracies and free market capitalism of the West and its lifestyle could
signal the end point of humanity's sociocultural evolution and become the final
form of human government. Fellow Neoconservative Allan Bloom, in his The Closing of the
American Mind (1987), counselled the “imposition” of “American
democratic and egalitarian values” on the rest of the world; after all, we had
won the war, so it was for us to dictate the universal peace, indeed, “to force
those who do not accept these principles to do so.”
But is this futile and never-ending quest what
the millions of American men went off to battle for in 1941-1945, and why over
400,000 died in remote places like on the beaches of Anzio or in the Hurtgen
Forest? To impose American-style democracy and values over the far-off desert
oases in Libya or in the jungles of South Sudan, for what in effect has become
“perpetual war for unobtainable peace”?
I don’t think
so.
Years ago in 1992, back when I was chairing the
Buchanan for President campaign in North Carolina, I recall that a major supporter
(whose name eludes me) declaring that what we were fighting for was “to repeal
the Twentieth Century.” Of course, that was said metaphorically. But surveying
the ruin and devastation inflicted on our civilization over the past century,
that sentiment is a completely understandable one.
Better yet, on this bloody anniversary, perhaps
we should shout from the rooftops: “Time to remember the reality of Original
Sin and the deceptions of human progress.” Would that not be a truly
significant manner in which to memorialize our veterans and their unpaid-for
sacrifices?
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