Posted by
Alex on Saturday, March 13, 2010 11:30:22 PM
Patrick Goldstein of the LA Times
attempts
to make sense of the ongoing furor over Tom Hanks' "slant eyed
dogs" comments regarding the U.S. and Japan in the Second World War. He
makes a valiant attempt at being evenhanded, in the way that only a
smug liberal can: he cedes some "fair points" to conservative
commentators while oddly suggesting in the same breath that these
commentators are linked in some way to the deranged ravings of the
"Barack Obama is a secret Muslim" fringe and that these ravings in turn
are in some way linked to the War on Terror which in turn has led to
"all sorts of bigoted and ignorant attacks on innocent, devout Muslims."
Which attacks he is referring to isn't clear, unless he means Saddam
Hussein.
But I digress. Goldstein cautions against comparing our
generation's wars with the wars of the past--and then asserts that wars
in the past weren't as complicated as those of today. He then
concludes that history is best left in the past, "instead of trying to
wrestle with how it might apply to today's battles. When you talk about
war today, everyone wants to pick a fight with you."
This
throwaway line provides a fittingly problematic valediction to an essay
filled with problematic assumptions. Human nature being immutable, wars
weren't "simpler" in the past; we remember them imperfectly, and as the
result is known to us now, often view them teleologically. Because the
men of the past made hard choices--Goldstein relates his uncle saying
of the battle of New Britain in 1944, "We had pushed all the Japs back
into an enclave known as Rabaul and left them, without supplies, to
starve until the end of the war"--because these men were resolute in
these decisions, without regret, does not mean that these were easy
decisions to make.
World War II, in retrospect, seems a
straightforward matter of the virtuous Allies facing down the murderous
despot states of Germany and Japan, providing clear and grave
casus belli and a well-defined goal:
end these regimes. And indeed, the Second World War was exactly such a
conflict. But we forget certain details of the times, things that
muddle the clear view we have today of the war as a righteous crusade,
"the greatest war of all," as Goldstein calls it. Time has obscured the
memory of appeasement, a policy whose legacy is so often invoked today
yet so little understood. Or the existence of political factions in the
U.S. and Britain either sympathetic to the Axis powers, or so devoted
to isolationism that they would have ended the war without decisive
victory; first when the Allied cause seemed hopeless, or later, when the
tide turned, had the Axis sued for terms. Or the decision to embrace
the Soviet government against the Nazis; or the decision to saturation
bomb industrial centers, despite the presence of population centers
nearby; or the decision to exercise America's nascent nuclear force.
The objective, unconditional victory, seems obvious to us now that we
know it was possible to obtain. The obstacles, both foreign and
domestic, are glossed over as we congratulate ourselves for our victory
(as we should). This effect has already become evident even in the
conventional wisdom of the Cold War, only 20 years hence; the narrative
now reads that the Free World triumphed through its solidarity despite
the fact that half of that Free World spent the Cold War wallowing in
defeatism, relativism, or self-flagellation.
Yet it is almost
better that we take the perseverance and sacrifice of the past
generations for granted, and, the ambiguity and uncertainty--the fog of
war--having been stripped away, we look back with chauvinism: "War was
so much simpler then." It is better, because the alternative is to
despair of the hopelessness of it all, of the carnage and the terror, as
Europe did after the Great War. It is a weariness that afflicts them
to this day, their impressions only reinforced by the horrors of its
sequel, a sequel midwifed by their reluctance to exercise force
prudently. And that's why history isn't better left in the past,
regardless of who disagrees with you.