With the demise of conscripted military service, thought leaders like Mr. Brooks and our new breed of Washington patriots only get to view war through the security of movies and TV shows. Perhaps if more experienced the real thing we wouldn’t be so quick to engage in conflicts.
5
And Brooks hits another one out of the park!
Meanwhile, progressive murmurers seethe at his failure to kneel before Snipes, Pelosi and Hillary.
Brooks quotes Kubrick's earlier anti-war film “Paths of Glory”:
Colonel Dax is finally overcome with disgust and explodes at one of the generals: “You’re a degenerate, sadistic old man. You can go to hell!”
The general — cynical, crafty, bureaucratic, incapable of emotion — replies: “You’ve spoiled the keenness of your mind by wallowing in sentimentality. … You are an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot. We are fighting a war, Dax, a war that we’ve got to win.”.
War is seen as merely a projection of old, degenerate, and sadistic men's elitist drive toward Empire [Vive L'Empire].
However, as the 'Great War', renamed the 'First World War' of Empires, to distinguish it from its inevitable spawn, the Second World War of Empires, proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, that any and all participating and succeeding states in World Wars of Empires became Empires themselves.
Brooks' conclusion that "the reality of endless political trench warfare" (between two Vichy parties in a zero-sum battle) devolves into a "paranoid melodrama" with no progress.
Of course, Kubrick's ultimate anti-war/anti-Empire film, "Dr. Strangelove" predicts the insanity of Empire reaching a unitary destruction of all life whether or not any other competing Empire even exists.
2
I will hug a Republican, remind myself that America only achieves greatness when we are mostly aboard, but nothing will shake the feeling that Trumpism must die (and all who support it must be shunned).
6
@Robert
This President will be a memory in a decade.
But those progressives intent on destroying the Constitution and the personal liberties it protects seem determined to take this country down no matter how long it takes.
@L'osservatore - I think your Mr Trump is doing the job you seem to think *progressives* want.
7
Timely column. I was just roundly attacked on Twitter for advocating Michelle Obama's concept of "when they go low, we go high." I spoke about the importance of remaining decent, compassionate, and civil when resisting the rising forces of authoritarianism in our country. I was called everything from a sell-out to a white supremacist, and told that my civility was an open endorsement of the murderous actions carried out recently by far right extremists. I fear that our nation may be too polarized to ever be a healthy society again.
3
Today's New York Times article on the plays of Harold Pinter prompted me to view Pinter's 2005 Nobel Prize lecture (the link is contained in the Times' article).
In his talk Pinter assesses United States foreign policy post WW II and describes the damage it has done to sovereign nations. He cites the grotesque numbers of innocents who have been slaughtered by our nation, while the United States at the same time assumed the false stance of standard bearer of democracy.
He pulls no punches. He names George W. Bush and his own Prime Minister Tony Blair as the war criminals they are, the only difference being that Blair is more vulnerable to being prosecuted for violation of international law, while Bush cleverly neglected to endorse the international body as well as the process which would bring him to justice.
He gives his lecture with such an air of profound sadness beneath the indignation. It is well worth listening to.
If we don't face these painful truths, we will never end the slaughter.
7
We're living in the dark ages. The dark, dark ages.
2
The sweeping assertions are not supported by evidence. For example, there was generally considerable respect among the troops for junior officers in the trenches. It was a lieutenant who habitually led his men over the top, and the life expectancy of a subaltern on the Western Front was, precisely, six weeks and six days. The mortality rate among junior officers was many times greater than that of enlisted men, as a glance at any war memorial in any British school or University will show. From 1917 officers were increasingly drawn from the working class, because the professional army had been destroyed by 1915, and the public schools/Oxbridge had been drained almost dry in the following years. My grandfather left school at 13, to work in a steel mill, and, aged 16, joined the Naval Division to fight at Gallipoli. In 1917, when he became 18, he was selected, and agreed, to become an officer, because he admired the leadership, courage and devotion to their men of those who had led him for two years. And where does this nonsense of antagonism between students and dons come from? Of course, men returning from war were much older than the traditional student and had seen a great deal more of life, and were therefore naturally somewhat averse to the traditional disciplines of University life. No great point there.
4
"Disillusionment was the classic challenge for the generation that fought and watched that war. Before 1914, there was an assumed faith in progress, a general trust in the institutions and certainties of Western civilization. People, especially in the educated classes, approached life with a gentlemanly, sporting spirit."
I am sure that the hundreds of millions, living in the colonies and still suffering the effects of colonization, appreciated the gentlemanly and sporting spirit of their European colonizers.
8
Fight or Flight.
That's what it comes down to, absent that rare setting where there is comity, where human interaction can be either enjoyment or avoidance.
Trump has been able to reduce fear among his followers by focusing on fight, on identifying evil and then promising to vanquish it. At the very least we liberals should be able to put ourselves in "the other's" shoes.
Here's an exercise. We assume that because 2/3 of us are pro-choice, that we can dismiss the 1/3 who are "pro-life"
That's absurd. All of us who favor allowing abortion even for a viable fetus are universally against infanticide. How this for stretching our thinking: what if we were back a century, and diseases such as tay sachs could only be determined at birth. The child never develops, and in a few short years dies a sad death, often destroying the parents emotionally in the process.
Would we then still be against infanticide, if it's life could be ended at birth. sparing the parents and the child years of emotional suffering? If so, than at least we can understand the sincerity of those "pro-lifers" who most of us condemn for simplistic religiosity.
It take effort to attempt to understand others. And when at war, as we are now, it's impossible. But this war has no truce even on the distant horizon. So, stretching ourselves , even if it hurts, just might be in order.
4
I read this commentary without realizing who the author is. I read David Brooks, enjoy for the most part his commentary, and sometimes even align with his thoughts. But this piece really captured my attention, and made me appreciate David’s viewpoints anew.
Stanley Kubrick has directed many interesting and thought-provoking films. A favorite of mine is Full Metal Jacket, another commentary on war and warriors. I put Paths of Glory among the finest movies commenting on war and its ultimate affects and effects ever shot. David’s commentary clarifies the distinguished, and very important, meaning of this film.
In every anti-war, and pro-war, sentiment, there exists a truth. In The Great War, there was idiocy, stupidity, naked ambition, and amoral attitudes by all participants. There was heroic action and deeds, altruistic efforts, and for the many, a real reason to fight to win, at all costs.
David, thank you for making all of us (I hope) think.
2
I suggest you read the true story of a WWII incident called 'A Higher Call' written by Adam Makos. If there ever was a man that 'stayed human above the fight' it was Franz Stigler.
Mr. Brooks article touches me because I have personal experience with the events of WWI. I had a great uncle I came to know late in his life. He was born about 1896, died at 95. He was a self-taught Scandinavian socialist. He was in the US Army, poised to go to Europe when the 1918 flu epidemic held him back. I affirm what Mr. Brooks said about what WWI did to faith in the notion of continued upward “Progress”, in Europe and the United States. That is because I heard it directly from “Uncle Ed.” He watched the ramifications of this disillusionment to the end of his life. He told me he wasn’t surprised at all that this led to WWII, nor to the wars that followed. He of course tried to maintain his optimism, and did so to the end. He went through Marine boot camp in his 50s, and served in the Seabees in the South Pacific during the second war. I feel privileged to have known him. And I worry very much about the future fall-out that could be caused by the attacks on our institutions by President Trump and his Republican sycophants.
2
Because WWI commemorations may lead to renewed interest: Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August
The Australian films Gallipoli with Mel Gibson and on the same theme, Breaker Morant (Boer War) are excellent.
David Brooks writes: "[The film “Paths of Glory”] is weirdly relevant today...a French colonel named Dax lives in the trenches and leads his men in battle. Far away in the palaces, pampered French generals order his exhausted men to take a nearly impregnable German position. When the assault catastrophically fails, the generals look for scapegoats."
It was especially relevant during the Iraq War. Pampered pundits who faced no danger and who had just received generous tax cuts on their high incomes helped gin up rationales for an unnecessary war that wasn't in the interest of the United States. When the occupation catastrophically failed, leading to the deaths, displacement, and mutilation of millions, the pundits looked for scapegoats, such the opposition party or anyone who had the temerity to question the reasons for invading in the first place.
Sound familiar, David?
5
Sure: a war that is pointless from the standpoint of any ideals may broadly generate a paranoid Manichaean mentality, and the destruction or rendering impossible of a political civil society where antagonisms become hatreds, and argument violence.
But at least one is other question is also worth asking here, even if it takes the risk of invoking an oppositional politics that Mr. Brooks would surely disparage as part of the problem. The question: what is the role here of ruling elites and classes, and of something like political economy? Who benefits from the simplified thinking of a militarized popular mind?
Do mentalities alone explain social problems? This is like saying that they explain themselves, and in practice it adds a tactic to the toolkit of the psychological policing of peoples.
It is true enough today that the mentality of the most powerful leaders, including those whose actions could direct end all life on this planet, is not that different than it was in 1914. These powers also have interests, which tend to be economic, though legitimated by nice-sounding ideas, including nationalisms.
Modern wars tend to be ideological, and fought against populations. This phenomenon and that of totalitarian governments have obviously furthered each other. War and policing both are meant to combat "evils," and this means the others who do not count, foreigners and the poor.
Could it be not only how we think that should be contested?
"Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War..."
Au contraire, we face a very great horror today. It is called the Republican Party, which has lost its way and has little if any virtue left as it gobbles up power and money as fast as it can.
In this regard, Trump is a symptom rather than a cause. This has been going on since before Republicans tried to sell "trickle-down economics" as good for the little people.
Meanwhile, a few good people are trying to combat them and have succeeded in flipping more than 30 House seats, seven governorships and state legislatures so far. I can only hope they are successful in combating the growing failure of the Republicans to be honest, sincere and decent.
5
As usual moderate Republicans (Mr. Brooks) like to play the "let's all calm down and figure out how to get along" after the latest incarnation (Trump) of Republicanism has attacked our shared morals in addition to the usual attacks on our democracy. This is no answer to the current crisis ... nor is it in any way parallel to the dehumanizing horrors of modern war. We do not need to rediscover our humanity for resisting Trump and the ugliness of modern Republicanism to the MAX 100% of the time.
4
And yet, within the last two weeks, you, David Brooks, defended nationalism. When will men realize that nationalism is the trenches?
5
Does anyone feel like Trump and his followers have declared war on the rest of us? The constant blatant lying & propaganda is quite literally the posture taken in wartime. Instead of inflating the number of planes shot down Trump inflates his crowd size, and so on. As Churchill said “In war, the truth is so precious she must be attended by a bodyguard of lies”.
4
I'm sorry - but in this reference to current times - it is the GOP that is bringing the trench warfare. Look no further than how they gerrymander, block extended voting or voting by mail or at the post office efforts, move polling stations further from urban or Democratic leaning locations - and then we get voters having to stand in rain for 3 hours and their ballots get wet - and the predicted slow recount has Republicans screaming foul as loud and as long as they can. No - it is the GOP that needs to end their incivility - not the resistance.
5
All time favorite movie. Kirk Douglas was terrific, perhaps his best film, and Adolph Monjou was the quintessential, aristocratic, detached, arrogant, incompetent old man.
It is too bad we do not have "A little visitation o tenderness amid the fight now".
The so called Leader of our country does not know what the word tenderness means. Nor do the Republicans in Congress or the rest of Trump's Administration.
I have not seen or heard one humane comment from Trump's mouth or from any member of his Administration.
So the revisit to this movie should serve to alert us unless we have compassionate leadership, we will fail as a country.
5
Here's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" per Paul's suggestion.
Anthem for Doomed Youth
BY WILFRED OWEN (1893 - 1918)
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
African-American soldiers fought in World War I. Over one hundred were honored by the French for bravery. When they returned home, thinking they had earned respect for their service, many of them were beaten and lynched.
They were not only killed, but their bodies were desecrated. It was entertainment for white people. Now, one hundred years later, there is a woman running for Senate from Mississippi joking about attending a public hanging. She refuses to admit that she has said something vile.
The inhumanity lies with the willfully ignorant and stupidly insensitive people such as this woman.
4
Some readers may really appreciate John McDermott's song "The Green Fields of France".
I can only smile grimly at David Brooks columns.
He writes about the Hemingway experience of WWI:
“Ernest Hemingway captured the rising irony and cynicism in “A Farewell to Arms.” His hero is embarrassed “by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression, in vain.” He had seen nothing sacred in the war, nothing glorious, just meaningless slaughter.”
Ah, but in 2002 and 2003 David Brooks was writing about the glory of invading Iraq! The valiant call to arms! The duty of America to impose democracy in the Middle East! To oppose the war, to even question the weapons of mass destruction, was, in the eyes of David Brooks, close to treason.
It’s the same guy. A man who never looks in the mirror and asks “What have I done?”
4
Thought-provoking column, as usual from Mr. Brooks. If there's anyone who can watch the movie scene he describes at the end without being moved to tears, well then... See this scene on YouTube: https://youtu.be/dGmuICb8a7Y
12
G-d bless Kirk Douglas, who has done SO MUCH to enrich our lives in this way, and who will be celebrating his 102nd birthday December 9! Carry on, sir, in strength and good health, taking satisfaction in the wonderful impact you continue to have, Films like Paths of Glory elevate us and remind us of the humanity we cannot afford to lose, against such fearsome obstacles.
Also, for those curious, the actress in this glorious scene is Mr. Kubrick's wife.
6
@KJ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gyyGHHXfck
("trench scene paths of glory" on youtube)
1
Kubrick was obsessed with "man against the impossible obstacle". Its in Spartacus, Paths of Glory, Barry Lyndon, Full Metal Jacket, even 2001.
Paths of Glory floored me viewing it as a young teenager, I have seen it probably 8 times over the years. It never loses its power.
It's actually more specific than "man against an impossible obstacle." It's man against the machinery that though created by man himself, threatens to overpower him. This machinery can take the form of Hal in 2001 or the machinery of military slaughter in Paths of Glory, or "bourgeois psychology" in "Eyes Wide Shut" or social codes in Barry Lyndon.
In that sense Kubrick's work continues the Frankenstein theme: man's creativity and brilliance when combined with hubris is more curse than blessing, tampering with forces that are beyond his moral capacity.
1
@Andrew
@Andrew
Not to mention the most obvious (except for Hal in 2001) example, military training in Full Metal Jacket (R. Lee Ermey: yikes) systematically tearing young men down to rebuild them as killing machines.
Then again, the therapy in Clockwork Orange is just as good an example.
Then again still, military machinery, procedure, and psychology in Dr. Strangelove all becoming untethered and launching nuclear armageddon. And the title character himself, barely hinted at in 99% of the film, a personification of Darwinized medical science whose eugenicist thoughts of species propagation and preservation have stifled all morality to the point he welcomes a nuclear holocaust....
Yes, Kubrick presented characters fighting formidable obstacles, but the obstacles were of a particular sort that may be summarized as science or "enlightenment" (so-called) gone amok.
During human evolution, and into historical times, men who were victorious in war killed their enemies, and took their enemies' land and often their women. They benefitted biologically by having more children who survived and reproduced than men who avoided war and men who lost.
Later in history armies have usually been recruited from poor men who seldom benefited if their side won. Nevertheless, victorious nations benefitted. Great Britain won an empire. The United States expanded "from sea to shining sea."
During the twentieth century, victorious nations were usually worse off after winning than before fighting. The United States would have benefitted by avoiding the War in Vietnam. So would have North Vietnam.
During human evolution men have benefitted by winning wars. Women have benefitted by avoiding wars. If their side lost their husbands, sweethearts, and male relatives were killed. They were raped and carried off as slave concubines. If their side won they had to share their husbands with captive women.
As women acquire more political power countries become more peaceful; military budgets are reduced.
3
“Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War...”
At best, Who in the world is we?
At worst, What planet do you live on?
6
Two excellent works cited: the movie Paths of Glory, and Paul Fussell's book The Great War and the Modern Imagination. I'd always felt that the first war was, in a way, eclipsed by the second for those of us who lived afterwards. The roots of the First World War go back into the 19th century and we live with the aftershocks to this day. All of the men who fought that war are gone now, but the last British Tommy, Harry Patch, apparently retained humanity enough to observe, “Irrespective of the uniforms we wore, we were all victims.”
2
We had the cavalier deployment and use American Military in Iraq by American Conservatives. Over 5,000 brave Americans died for nothing.
It may happen again, and much, much easier under Trump and under the current stock of conservatives.
2
@CarolinaJoe, Most Democrat leaders were OK with the war too. Give credit where credit is due.
I spent some time re-reading Robert Service's book "Rhymes of a Red Cross Man." No glory to be found there, only the pain, the blood, gore and tragedy of trench warfare.
I also reflected on the armistice that seeded the horrors of WW-II by trying to grind Germany into ruin.
Finally, I thought about the Middle East and how the maps drawn by Sykes, Picot, and Balfour along with the gifts given to the friends of T. E. Lawrence planted seeds that are troubling us to this day.
I served my country in Viet Nam and only learned the futility of war. Yes, my fellow veterans served "with honor" but what really came of all of that war? What seeds were planted that will yield yet another international crisis?
We have to learn that the problems "over there" will come to visit us and how we deal with those problems will haunt us for generations. Much like the crisis in Mexico and Central America fueled by our national addiction to illegal drugs. As Pogo noted: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." We never learn, only repeat, repeat,....
3
Beautiful words inspired by a film whose message is so needed NOW. Thank you, David. Today's madness is spawned by many who look like us, but who clearly do not talk like us or think like us. We look to other leaders in this moment other than our own elected one. Thankfully there are those on the world stage willing to point out that nationalism in the present day is an evil to be eradicated in favor of a preferential option for all those we call less fortunate. May they be heard, followed, and ultimately may they prevail.
1
Who is this “we” who face no comparable horrors? Millions of Yemeni and Syrian and Central American refugees? Children snatched from parents and put in cages? Citizens unable to gather in schools or houses of worship in safety from gun violence? Look around beyond your bubble.
6
The phrase 'false atrocities' came up in this article. WWI was the mother of real atrocities, mass warfare on civilians, hideous reprisals, chemical warfare, absurdly ruinous casualty counts.
None of those atrocities were make believe.
The theme of most David Brooks essays is an oblique attempt to hang the greater, or all, along with the sins of the fewer, who get things rolling. German militarism wasn't an on the one hand & on the other proposition.
If the war had not commenced, those corrupt French Generals would not have been in position to squander their countrymens' lives.
There are degrees of corruption. We need to attend most carefully to the greatest among them.
World War I might have been The mother of all atrocities, but World War II, it’s child, was worse. And while both sides have much to be ashamed of, let us not forget the American and British firebombing of Germany and Japan, which killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, and that was before our use of nuclear weapons. as Brooks suggests, “when you are fighting a repulsive foe, the ends justify any means...” I doubt history will look kindly on America’s history of military aggression & our collective ability to demonize the enemy du jour.
@michael kauffman
All of which proceeded from events & templates established in the first war.
My argument is not from a pro-American perspective, in case that was the impression. I am concerned with cascading effects. Iraq is the current front-and-center disaster, just the latest cascade of arrogant, falsely well-intentioned malevolence now roiling the region AND the west.
One might have expected that David Brooks would take this opportunity to apologize for aping Trump on their mutual misguided glorification of the word "nationalism." But I guess Macron did that for him.
1
In the breast of all humankind lies a sleeping monster. Awaken it with much trepidation. For once it is awakened it will never resume a restful sleep again and you will walk your life fighting yourself.
3
David Brooks deserves his measure of credit for the "fight" we're in. His passionate support for the leaders and decisions that led us to this was consistent in these pages and surely of consequence, given the respect The Times and its writers can expect.
He declines here once more to look back over his trail of misjudgements. Nothing about the Right's terrible betrayals is new or surprising. They trampled their own tenets long ago, turning their backs on prudent foreign policy, individual freedom, small government, fidelity to the Constitution, basic integrity, fiscal restraint, etc. Brooks' bona fides as a Conservative in those days could have been proven by his sober objection to the recklessness of the GOP. He didn't have it in him to call them out.
Now Donald Trump speaks for the Right, and he says nothing we haven't heard for years. Only the tone is different. Brooks, apparently unable to face this, delivers Hallmark cards and book reports and movie reviews, not to counsel us about what the fight is, where it started, the real nature of the enemy, or how to win; but just to stand as far from the fray as he can get.
North Korea is pursuing its nuclear weapons program. A California is replacing gas generators with battery storage. The president wants to end birthright citizenship by fiat. These are the fields and the skirmishes. The fight we're in isn't about feelings or moods, it's real, it's now, and we're in the thick of it. Any thoughts, David? Didn't think so.
5
David Brooks seriously upholds the fictional virtues of a fictional movie character as he alludes to a refined age before WW1, when "gentlemen" "dined" rather than ate. Perhaps he forgot how Parisians "dined" on rats during the siege of that city in 1870, or how millions died in the Napoleonic wars, or in the rape of the Americas. There was no golden era, and no Colonel Dax. Doubtless Mr. Brooks sees himself as a latter day Dax, outraged by by the attitudes of some leaders in the Republican party that he has supported throughout his adult life. Nevertheless, he continues to fight their battles.
7
Thank you for this, and especially ending on that tender note to make us weep at the senselessness of it all.
2
We have a commander in chief who has no understanding what war is all about, he just knows how to avoid being drafted. Every war is horrific and currently once again we are involved at some level in numerous wars. When our soldiers come home we abuse them again and on the one holiday dedicated to them the commander in chief is to busy.
I am delighted that so many women are being elected and not the hawk GOP women who would enjoy going to a lynching but women who can get us out of this madness.
Every war is terrible and the body count should not decide which one is the worst.
1
One of Brooks' best pieces ever. Thank You!
2
David keeps coming to this point from every direction. And always seems to be at a loss as to how we got here. He seems to look for the other or the everybody did it excuse. My questions for Mr. Brooks are: Were would we be today Ronald Reagan did not take the solar collectors off the White House Roof? Where would we be if Richard Nixon had not gone with this Racist Southern Strategy. What if we did not have the Demagoguery of Lee Atwater, Newt Gingrich, Karl Rove and Steve Bannon? Where would we be if the Republican Party had worked on building it's base, rather than systemicly repress the vote. I say Pundit Heal Thy Self.
7
Humans didn't get to dominate the planet by being nice, in fact there are mass graves from previous encounters dating back to antiquity. Manuals like 'Art of War' were written 2600 years ago! Stop turning history on its head.
Sometimes I'm tempted by the cynicism of George Carlin who knew that the only way to keep one's sanity in this giant folly was to remain a spectator and enjoy the show.
David Brooks deserves his measure of credit for the "fight" we're in. His passionate support for the leaders and decisions that led us to this was consistent in these pages and surely of consequence, given the respect The Times and its writers can expect.
He declines here once more to look back over his trail of misjudgements. Nothing about the Right's terrible betrayals is new or surprising. They trampled their own tenets long ago, turning their backs on prudent foreign policy, individual freedom, small government, fidelity to the Constitution, basic integrity, fiscal restraint, etc. Brooks' bona fides as a Conservative in those days could have been proven by his sober objection to the recklessness of the GOP. He didn't have it in him to call them out.
Now Donald Trump speaks for the Right, and he says nothing we haven't heard for years. Only the tone is different. Brooks, apparently unable to face this, delivers Hallmark cards and book reports and movie reviews, not to counsel us about what the fight is, where it started, the real nature of the enemy, or how to win; but just to stand as far from the fray as he can get.
North Korea is pursuing its nuclear weapons program. A California is replacing gas generators with battery storage. The president wants to end birthright citizenship by fiat. These are the fields and the skirmishes. The fight we're in isn't about movies. It's real, it's now, and we're in the thick of it. Any thoughts, David? Didn't think so.
1
I can't resist mentioning that I thought the best popular anti-war song that came out of the Viet Nam War was titled "Path of Glory" by Petula Clark.
1
@Sequel
I had never heard this song before your post, but you may be right. The full title for those heading for YouTube, is 'On the Path of Glory':
Blessed are the meek, they say
They shall win where others lose
But when man is forced to stay
He is never asked to choose
He must fight for his country
Fight for what he thinks is right
He'll defend his wife and children
On the path of glory
Red or yellow, white or brown
All alike, one thought in mind
Who will wear the victor's crown?
Never mind the lame and blind
In the pride of their country
Good will triumph in the end
Evil will be brought to justice
On the path of glory
Big or little, fat or thin
All are heroes in the end
Unforgivable, the sin
To submit, they don't pretend
They will die for their country
They will die for you and me
Amid the pungent smell of death
That's on the path of glory
Why should man be forced to kill?
Why should they be made to die
Shattered on some peaceful hill
Torn and bleeding where they lie?
Far away from their country
Ask yourself the question now
Why should they be forced to set out
On the path of glory?
David Brooks is officially out of ideas. After two years of book reports, he's now on to movie reviews because he refuses to look inward at what is happening to this country at the hands of his beloved conservatives.
There's no need to recast today's issues into metaphors or refract them through a different lens. There is only the need to stop the assault on democracy and the war on truth.
3
"all the young people who were ashamed of never having fought in the war brought warlike simplicities to political life"
Sounds to me what I saw in the 80s: the rise of Reagan's conservative movement fed by the right wing lie machine/intelligentsia, and the fruit of their branch-- our current so-called president-- but without any shame for none having fought in the war, a thing which is of course beneath them, better suited for the unwashed masses. Instead they brought to American politics the ammunition of Hollywood-inspired imaginings of how they would have won the war if only they had been the generals and the liberals, government stooges, and George Soros hadn't kept them in kid gloves.
Does Mr. Brooks ever engage in anything that doesn't count as platitudes and pablum? Anything that doesn't rationalize his weak-kneed Center-Right views?
Of course, that characterization is exactly what Mr. Brooks criticizes in this screed. But that is a fine excuse for that many, many times he and his Centrist brethren have been proved astoundingly wrong over the years. For their incubation of the extremists that now hold office and are busy tearing down the foundations of our democracy.
The only part of this op-ed that doesn't sound like a pretext for excusing his bland, corporate whitewashing is the little vignette about how the common soldier turned on higher society. It is how we peasants now turn on soft, weak-minded shills such as him now. A man who asks us believe that the outrage and reaction to an increasingly corporatist, authoritarian regime is just shrill, lower class inability to deal with difficult times. The times needs a more dynamic set of Op-Ed writers; it is becoming the very old, failed establishment Mr. Brooks writes about that seeks to excuse its civilized "moderation" in the face of what it views as faceless, screaming Visogoths, when in reality it more resembles establishments worldwide that have fecklessly bowed to Autocratic governments in their ascension to tyranny.
David Brooks deserves his measure of credit for the "fight" we're in. His passionate support for the leaders and decisions that led us to this was consistent in these pages and surely of consequence, given the respect The Times and its writers can expect.
He declines here once more to look back over his trail of misjudgements. Nothing about the Right's terrible betrayals is new or surprising. They trampled their own tenets long ago, turning their backs on prudent foreign policy, individual freedom, small government, fidelity to the Constitution, basic integrity, fiscal restraint, etc. Brooks' bona fides as a Conservative in those days could have been proven by his sober objection to the recklessness of the GOP. He didn't have it in him to call them out.
Now Donald Trump speaks for the Right, and he says nothing we haven't heard for years. Only the tone is different. Brooks, apparently unable to face this, delivers Hallmark cards and book reports and movie reviews, not to counsel us about what the fight is, where it started, the real nature of the enemy, or how to win; but just to stand as far from the fray as he can get.
North Korea is pursuing its nuclear weapons program. A California is replacing gas generators with battery storage. The president wants to end birthright citizenship by fiat. These are the fields and the skirmishes. The fight we're in isn't about feelings or moods, it's real, it's now, and we're in the thick of it. Any thoughts, David? Didn't think so.
1
Imagine yourself an intellectual in Berlin in the early ‘30’s, David. Another time when the forces in power, or bent on attaining more power, were promoting division and “us versus them”. How would you be asserting your humanity there and then? Would you brazenly insult the leader while simultaneously bemoaning that both ‘sides’ were becoming extreme? Or would you join Antifa? Or at least declare yourself the equivalent of a Democrat until a reasonable alternative ousted the Evil?
Having stood in the line of battle fifty years ago I slowly became aware that we had been sold out by President Johnson, Secretary McNamara and General Westmoreland. Recently we have learned that Westmoreland wanted to use tactical nuclear weapons on a nation that we were ostensibly attempting to save. Thirty thousand more Americans died after 1968.
We have seen something like this again in Afghanistan and Iraq. The truth is always the first casualty of war, certainly in America's wars.
3
Sadly it seems we have a callous and vile commander in chief much like the pampered French general mentioned in your op-ed. It is quite possible Trump will send our troops into a futile battle risking their lives as cadet bone spurs Trump has no idea of the horror of war but is only concerned with his ego being massaged. Trump knows all great presidents are war time presidents so his fawning staff of Bolton and Jared will give him his war perhaps Iran. Of course it will be a disaster and cause disruption of oil supplies and could escalate to include Russia Iran's ally. Trump will surrender to Putin at the Ritz Trump hotel in Moscow gushing over his Russian master.
David Brooks, I disagree with your conclusion that "today we face no horrors equal to the Great War..." as I believe this is a simplistic binary conclusion. First, we have the similar signs of unrest, disillusionment, inhumanity, lack of empathy, cynicism, aggression, everyone the political & human enemy with unequal & unjust spread of wealth & economic resources. Your statements appear a conclusion as if our history is complete. It is not. More individuals have died by guns in the US since 1968 than all wars the US has fought. Killings continue in our cities, amplified by drug addiction. Lives taken by improperly trained police who shoot to kill & no responsibility for the unnecessary taking of life. Mass shootings continue as weekly entertainment affecting all involved for a lifetime. Citizens lack their constitutional rights to enjoy their freedoms of life, liberty, happiness --freedom to feel safe to practice their religion in a place of worship,to go to a movie, concert, cafe, school, university. Freedoms & liberties denied for an abusive interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. Undeclared, continuous wars fought overseas for 17 years -kills & maimes troops, return dismembered, often impoverished & emotionally traumatized. I believe those facing these unnecessary horrors, would find them no less horrific than the Wars. And an unfit, incompetent, emotionally & verbally abusive & dangerous president puts us all at risk. A Great War today would be distinction.
2
There is one small (actually fairly significant) error in Mr. Brook's wonderful discussion of the film: Mr. Brooks describes the targeted enemy position (called "the anthill") as "nearly impregnable." It's important to the story as presented that the "anthill" is not 'nearly' impregnable, but *clearly* impregnable. The obvious futility, utter uselessness, and wastefulness of the assault, and the wantonness and cruelty behind its authorization are very critical parts of the story/message.
1
"Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War, but there is the same loss of faith in progress, the reality of endless political trench warfare, the paranoid melodrama, the specter that we are all being dehumanized amid the fight."
Really, it's that bad?
Kind of depends on who we are talking about. If you are one of the many who have felt their way of life threatened by changes in society and the economy, I can understand, There is a lot of angst that contributes to the kind of dismal political discourse we have today. But if you live in some of the high-tech areas of the country and have a good job in these industries life is pretty good, outside of having to watch the spectacle of unqualified and hate-mongering politicians vying for influence.
And is it possible that the kind of angst Mr. Brooks describes is really more of a problem among conservatives? If you been feasting on a diet of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News for a decade or two you might be excused for believing that civilization as we know it is coming to an end. The GOP has lurched from Reagan to Gingrich to the Tea Party and now gone full potato with Trumpism, so you might also be excused for believing that times are desperate. As far as I am concerned however, having elected an even-keeled intellectual like Obama as President tells me that many of us still believe that there are still adults in the room. And the midterms reaffirm my faith in democracy.
4
Faith in democracy means knowing my state rep was re-elected who supported: anti abortion laws, pro bump stock legislation, vote against a law that would automatically register voters when they come of age, a proposal to ensure education classes in high schools to teach our democracy and voting structures was opposed by her and the leader of her party (the gop) denounced opponents (Democrat’s) as violent had her full support.
Though, as will be apparent in my other comment below, I usually strongly disagree with Mr. Brooks, I love this essay, not least because it offers a rebuttal to neoconservatism (see my other comment) that I wish Mr. Brooks had embraced long ago.
But let me focus on Mr. Brooks' exceptionally clear, accurate, wonderful discussion of Kubrick: Perfect!!!! Mr. Brooks, this is a masterpiece discussion of a cinematic masterpiece, exactly conveying both Kubrick's medium & message, & how these must speak to us today.
Dax's conflict w/ his "superior" officers, the latter's utter inhumanity, the vicious treatment of subordinates as expendable dirt-- all these not only apply to us today, but they must me considered in terms of Kubrick's general critique of dehumanizing technocratic institutions, including capitalism itself. Mr Brooks perfectly captures Kubrick's message/style.
But let me celebrate my other (besides the final one, among many other tours-de-force) favorite scene: Douglas/Dax leading his men out of the trenches into their suicidal charge. Courage was never better depicted in cinema.
We have a minutes-long shot of Douglas, clearly miserable and fearful, but so self-controlled that only stoic, grim determination shows, striding towards the ladder he must climb, according to his orders, at a precise moment (neither a second before or after) to lead the charge. He has expelled all emotion. At the exact split-second (shown on his watch) required, he emerges from the trench.
2
@Andrew
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gyyGHHXfck
If you don't see this, there will always be a gap in your life, trust me.
If the link doesn't work, it's "trench scene paths of glory" on youtube. Bravo Mssrs. Kubrick, Douglas, and anyone else connected to this masterpiece (the film as a whole, or this astoundingly perfect scene).
Those interested in a more succinct commentary on trying to 'maintain humanity during war' will be well served by reading Mark Twain's "The War Prayer". This is available online at warprayer dot org.
Mr. Brooks tears up over a movie about a war that ended 100 years ago.
Yet any issue of the TIMES like all American media these days is filled with stories depicting various foreign nations as dangerous to our country and threatening our freedom and absolutely necessary to immediately confront with military force--from the Baltics to the South China Sea to the Persian Gulf--in other words, exactly the same old militarist song that lead to such disastrous mass slaughters as depicted by Kubrick in his brilliant film.
Cognitive dissonance, anyone?
I would recommend: A Soldier of the Great War, Mark Helprin
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
3
Where was David Brook's humanity when his guys lied about WMD's?
2
I need to see "Paths of Glory." Republican though you be, thank you, David.
1
Britain always had an "us vs them" streak. It's called the class system. The lower classes hoped that fighting the war might actually give them some credence afterwards, but it mostly settled back to the class system. It continued throughout WWII and was only put to sleep in the 60s, when failing labour governments taxed the wealthy from their stately homes. Although, the British Army continued it's us and them routine long after in many regiments; not so much the para regiments, perhaps, which were routinely first called upon for active service here, there and everywhere, but certainly the more traditional regiments. Endless wars have since eroded that aspect out of recruitment necessity most likely. The British Army was always a convenient drop-off for the higher class Ruperts straight out of public school with no family businesses to fall back on. I know, I was driver to one of them in the 70s. His directions got us repeatedly lost; once onto a rutted, muddy tank firing range during a large NATO exercise in Germany! He never thanked the young farm hand driving him for reversing his Land Rover and communications trailer out of trouble for half a mile. Seeing the state of the vehicle on return, the SM asked: "Where'd that bloody Rupert get you lost this time, sapper?"
It was us and them for a reason. Stay on the lower side of "us" and you might live longer.
Leave it to Brooks to cherry pick examples that can be rigged to support his compassionate-conservatism agenda - but which totally ignore reality.
Brooks won’t mention other Kubrick movies like “Clockwork Orange” which provides a searing portrayal of an amoral modern society where the Holy Grail of conservatism – freedom of the individual - is unleashed resulting in human depravity.
Or how about Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” that depicts a world where technology has gone haywire, dominates humanity, and is used to implement ideology; where a zealous nut in a position of power can order a nuclear attack; where a paranoid fear of infiltration from outsiders reigns. Any of that sound familiar?
But no, the ugly realities those films depict can be magically whisked away with a little “tenderness,” “faith in progress” and a belief in whitewashed history. We just have to believe!
Brooks says: “Before 1914, there was an assumed faith in progress, a general trust in the institutions and certainties of Western civilization.” Slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow? Apparently they never existed. Native American genocide? Wiff – it’s gone. The labor wars and strikes involving hundreds of thousands or workers that raged before and after 1914? The Robber Barons? Just have faith and – poof! – they’re gone!
Per Brooks: it’s abstract faith, not blood reality, that animates progress.
But Brooks’ blind faith and dishonest history are precisely what appeal to Make America Great Again.
5
A fitting nod to WW I remembrance: Watch "Paths of Glory" and listen to Britten's "War Requiem".
No, Mr. Books. The world is not falling apart, and the US is not falling apart. It is just the end of the Republican party, and they deserve it for their cowardice in confronting a populist demagogue. Once Trump is gone, which may be sooner than many think, the divisions will ease. He is a unique combination of terror and anger, and there will be no replacement. Pence will oversee the decline and then something new, hopefully, will come forward with rational, responsible, conservative views.
1
So Brooks, yet another appeal to the Democrats to be nice to the republicans, because it's the decent thing to do. Well, that hasn't produced anything expect a more strident, hateful, racist, xenophobic version of the right wing. Now the Democrats are fighting back, and you republicans don't like it. And furthermore, because of your inferior numbers, you are destined to lose and become extinct. If you want to talk to anybody about that, start with the guy staring back at you in your bathroom mirror.
8
Perhaps another way to look at WWI is that the chickens came home to roost. Long before Europeans turned mechanized warfare loose on themselves they practiced it on natives in colonies they captured. They never considered the natives really human. Likewise, the stratification of European society that existed before WWI continues today.
1
The best book on WWI, in my opinion, is still "All Quiet on the Western Front." The war was pointless and senseless. Slaughter, then leave to spend time in French villages, then back to the slaughter. The soldiers had no idea what they were fighting for. Sadly, neither did the leaders.
64
@kathleen cairns I would like to add to that the war poetry of Wilfred Owen.
Dulce et decorum est pro patria more.
6
@Spencer This elegant aphorism from Horace deserves to be exposed for all of its horror.
No, no, no. It is not sweet and proper to die in battle. That is the cult of the warrior. Along with drum-banging and blaring bugles, it has driven young men to war with their heads filled with nonsense.
A defensive war may be a necessity, but is never sweet and proper to die in what is almost always an old men's fight.
4
If we dehumanize those who dehumanize us how are we any different?
It is only through acts of love in the face of hatred that those burdened by the chains of hatred can break free.
It is a message as old as time that sadly most seem to never learn.
51
@Didier
In the context of war between nations, can you offer an example or two to illustrate your middle paragraph? I dearly wish it were true. Thank you.
@Robert Fine
Suggested reading: Forgiveness: Breaking the Chain of Hate by Michael Henderson and A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary.
3
"Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War..."
No?
Thanks to 24/7 TV news coverage, we can witness and experience it anytime we want. There is always war somewhere. If it isn't the ongoing fake Iraq war, there is the ongoing and ongoing failed Afghan war and the attendant horrors and aftermath for our soldiers and us.
There is Yemen. You probably have already forgotten Syria, Sudan and the other motley African wars, Myanmar, etc.
And these are all fought with little or no reason or purpose other than those in charge could wage them.
War is the ultimate atrocity.
2
This is why I always read Brooks. Don’t always agree, but the guy is a thinker and can understand both sides of a situation, whether it’s a World War or American politics.
1
Mr. Brooks, I'm going to use a WWII reference. The Democrats had been acting like Neville Chamberlain up through 2016. They've now got some Winston Churchill in them. That's a good thing.
1
"My name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell.
Each Christmas come since World War 1, I've learned my
lesson well.
The ones to call the shots won't be among the dead
and lame.
And on each end of the rifle, we're the same."
Quoted from 'Christmas in the Trenches', by John McCutcheon. It's a timely song about the Christmas truce, where the soldiers of both sides decided to quit fighting each other. It's worth a listen.
1
Brooks just keeps trying to sell the vision that we are all bad actors in our current situation. He is desperately trying to save any piece of conservatism from Trump. It is failing. The reality is that the majority of Americans (non-Trump supporters) want to take care of all people. We are not trying to get our own above doing what is humane. Kindness is not just applied to those who look like us or are our friends. Time to claw back everything the 1%ers and the GOP/Trump have pillaged from us.
1
David Brooks op ed brought back very fond memories. Paths of Glory was my husband s favorite movie. He passed away in 2000.
he was a veteran of the Korean War. But was so impressed with the movie and its definition of war that he would refer to it . Strongly opposed the Vietnam War.
1
It's easy to fall into believing in a sentimental picture of Europe pre-1914 and to see the Great War as a departure from, rather than a culmination of, the brutalizing effects of colonialism and laissez-faire capitalism.
It is worth remembering the enthusiasm with which the outbreak of war was greeted and how little that enthusiasm was dimmed by the appalling slaughter of the Battle of the Borders in its early months. The opening scenes of Remarque's All Quiet are often forgotten by its conclusion, but they speak a profound truth about how generations of young men couldn't wait to go and kill.
Even by the summer of 1918, men went into battle with ferocious enthusiasm - the German offensive in that spring showed no dimming of bloodlust and the butcher's bill soared as the offensive was halted and then reversed.
We have to learn the right lessons from WW1 - and one of those is how powerful bloodlust is once invoked, and how difficult to stop.
1
Here's an excerpt from N. Podhoretz's "Eulogy for Neoconservatism," explicitly celebrating the movement's automatic -deliberately, designedly so- pugnacity, cultivated as a value in itself.
"And as to the people, they are people whose intellectual and political skills were developed and sharpened and energized by contact with the special style of discourse that the neoconservatives brought with them from the Left and into the conservative movement.... It is also readily recognizable from the way it synthesizes a number of qualities that are rarely found together, let alone coexisting in such perfect harmony. It is, at its best, exuberantly polemical and combative..."
By way of context, consider what NP says neocons were (and still are to some extent) "exuberantly polemical and combative" on behalf of: anticommunism & anti-counterculture. While the former stance has much to recommend it (I hope obviously, but respecting one may differ), the neocons specifically demonized those challenges to capitalism's abuses/excesses (exponentially accelerating inequality, abuse of workers, & commercialization of all aspects of life & vitiation of participatory & egalitarian democratic culture, including liberation movements/activism) that came from the left. In a word, the neocons stood for a power-worshipping techo-capitalist social darwinism.
No movement better exemplified the for-its-own-sake-adversarialism--"post-morality"--nihilism Mr. Brooks decries than neoconservatism.
1
One of Kubrick's masterpiece efforts, and arguably Douglas's best role.
Also I might suggest re-reading Barbara Tuchman's 'Gun's of August', which brilliantly records the events of 1914 which resulted in the horrible stalemate that lasted until the end.
Also, A. Solshenitzen's (sp) August 1914, a historical novel about the incredible cockups on the Eastern Front. (I'll get the proper spelling and post)
@Chris Morris
'Solzhenitsyn!'
(I knew a lot of z,y,e,s involved, just not the correct order!)
As Paths of Glory depicts, WW I made clear that the ruling classes simply didn't care if other classes lived or died -- so long as they continued to serve. This is best demonstrated by the way the upper class commanders for years ordered an entire generation of working class men (and boys) to charge machine guns with their bare chests -- despite year after year of failed attacks which demonstrated the utter futility of this tactic. It took until the end of the war to develop the answer to the machine gun -- the tank. This slowness to replace bare chests with armor plate was emblematic of the disdain the ruling classes had for working people's lives. Today, we see the same disdain in the GOP's obstruction of changes to bring global warming and guns under control -- an obstruction which now, on an almost weekly basis, is murdering people as surely as the WW I machine guns. See, e.g., the California fires and mass shootings too numerous to name.
2
". . . the specter that we are all being dehumanized amid the fight." Kinda' sounds like us, today, struggling to stay afloat against the rising tides of alt-right nationalism and wild-west capitalism--no rules, no referees, buyer beware. Social Darwinism. The rule of the fist. Might is right. And you know the rest of it.
2
Taking into account that America's latest "deployment" is happening at it's southern border to guard against shoeless, exhausted women and children, armed with rocks, how is one supposed to find common ground and civility with those who clamor for the latest war to end all wars, Trump's endless "War on Sanity"?
6
The South Very Much Needs to Again Be Crushed, plus southern Indiana and All of Kansas!!!
Thanks for your very thoughtful piece though even though time for your taking your thoughts has come and gone. They have run out quite a while ago.
I'm going to complain along with many others that my state stop supporting Alabama with our taxpayer money
3
I don't know how on Earth you write a column about WWI and NOT mention the rise of Fascism. You focus on "left-wing intellectual circles" and a "loss of faith in progress" and say nothing about the conspiracy nurtured by German rank-and-file soldiers, including Hitler, Goering, and Hess, and how the war provided the pinnacle of human existence, the type of violent striving that suspends all critical thought and relies entirely on instinct and action. This is of the utmost importance to Fascist ideology.
Faith in Western liberal democracy is shaken when the middle class upon which rests its survival shrinks. The same thing in the Great Depression led some to look to more radical ideologies - Fascism would not have existed without these two developments.
Maintaining humanity in the midst of the war was only one theme of Paths of Glory. Dax is also unwilling to abandon the rule of law and the concept of justice. His pre-war background as a lawyer meant that it wasn't only preserving the soldiers' humanity - it was preserving the society and its laws for which they ultimately gave their lives.
I'm surprised at you, Mr Brooks. I know you're all about the conservative way, but under fascism that ideology is as dead as all others. Call out fascism for what it is.
6
While the American people snipe at each other, our government and it's leaders work to take more and more for their rich friends. The Repubs have clearly dropped all pretense of following ethical and constitutional rules by ignoring them and using bald face lies for those who they have trained to hate "libs" and the people who are coming into the country to "rape and pillage". The left has chosen to ignore the middle class and those who they say they are going to make their lives better but really never do. The middle class is left holding the bag by both sides. Peoples fears are real and the last election clearly showed that the tone deafness of the left was front and center. We as a people need to stop taking the bait and see each other as all in the same boat. The courts being packed by the right are meant to assure that corps and the ever richer rich control all of the money and deny everyone the same opportunity. Stop being sheep who have been led away from each other and hold these folks who work to gain and keep the power in a few hands. Until we see ALL OF US as Americans who deserve integrity from those WE elect. Until we demand accountability from them, we will never be heard. Wake up.. Stop seeing "libs" or "reds". See the potential of the power we still hold. If we don't we will find ourselves unable to do so. Our leadership is keeping us divided/distracted and our anger pointed at each other instead of them. Think about it. Who has the power? Unitied.... we do.
3
Great David. Loved the "Faithful Hussar" example. Made me try to think of a Trump-attuned tune that would make us hum and sing and weep.
Only "We will rock you" came to mind. Instantly I had an image of Trump the Terrific striding to the edge of the stage in real tight spangled pants, calling that song out to all of us. Produced no humming or singing here. But weeping. You bet.
1
@Dennis Maxwell Weeping... and laughing, in equal measure. Trump the Terrific indeed.
@Dennis Maxwell
I agree with you Dennis, but I would submit Roger Water's "In The Flesh, Part 2" from "The Wall".
The similarity to today's situations and the current administration is at times terrifying.
I am reading a book about World War II, and there is an interesting fact I noted: What was the solution that we human beings came up with to limit the carnage and the horror of men charging to their deaths against machine guns?
Hint: it wasn't the abolition of war from our cultural framework. It wasn't putting into place more peaceful resolutions to a country's problems that would preclude invading another country.
It was the tank.
5
An inspiring column. Too bad it's based on a work of fiction.
1
Some horrors equal to World War I: Yemen.
1
Suggestion: Force all retiring flag officers to hang up their uniforms; stay off of TV; stay out of public events especially military-connected ones; stay out of business and other commercial enterprises; stay out of the press; raise bees and begonias; play with their grandchildren; enjoy their golden years.
1
My father rarely spoke of his experiences in WWII, but one day he sat on the porch with my neighbor, a former U-boat sailor and talked all afternoon about their time at war. I went to tell him it was time for dinner and as we walked back, I asked him if it was odd talking with a German about the war. "Why?" he asked me, knowing exactly what I was thinking. "Well, because we won and he lost," I said with my 14 year-old wisdom. He gave me a very sad look and said, "So, you still think that people win wars."
11
"Before 1914, there was an assumed faith in progress, a general trust in the institutions and certainties of Western civilization ... The war blew away that gentility, those ideals and that faith in progress."
It should have, but -- as evidenced by this very column -- it didn't. Let's start with the obvious: the First World War was born of the nationalism David Brooks embraces elsewhere and the very us versus them mentality he decries here. The war was the direct result of the age of nationalism and empire. The obsession with an idea of "Western civilization" and its accessory, empire, created the conditions for the war and triggered it. The problem wasn't the disillusionment caused by the war; much valuable, beautiful, incisive work has come out of that. The problem was the idea of "Western civilization" itself, with its allowance for self-righteous violence, greed, and appetite for destruction. That problem is what created the war, and the horror of the war served to put that problem in relief.
Now, a century later, David Brooks sees fit to reinforce that problem instead of interrogating it. That's one powerful problem.
3
I offer a few suggestions for further reading on WW I. Barbara Tuchman wrote two histories about this period, "The Proud Tower" and "The Guns of August". Two works of fiction of note are "All Quiet On The Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque and Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "1914". I commend also Adam Hochschild's essay, "The Eleventh Hour; If you think the First World War began senselessly, consider how it ended", found in the November 5, 2018, issue of "The New Yorker".
Woof says, in a favored comment, "Most Americans believe their country spreads peace. A quantitative analysis shows : It spreads war."
WE THE PEOPLE are going to make that past-tense. WE will prevent The Con Don and his International Mafia Robber Baron/radical religion Good Old Boys' Cabal from destroying OUR lives again.
Socially Conscious Women are stepping up to take one-half the power to bring balance to OUR world. The male power-over model of fear-anger-hate-Lies,Lies,Lies-death-destruction-WAR- rape pillage-plunder that we have lived under for centuries is about to go into the dustbin.
OUR story of inclusion and Social/Economic Equity for ALL Americans starts NOW!
3
Perhaps my disagreements with Mr. Brooks can be summed up by how I view his headline. I am always human. It is not a choice. I struggle to remain civilized. That is a choice.
One is not the same as the other.
6
Required reading for high school seniors should be be " All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque who was a German veteran of World War I. As young people setting out into their adult lives, the influence of this poignant, heartbreaking novel might just provoke empathy and kindness that will forever effect their fresh world view.
1
My 2 cents: "Paths of Glory" was a good political thriller with WWI thrown in as background. For my money the best WWI and greatest anti-war movie of all was the 1930 version of "All Quiet on the Western Front."
David Brooks mentions the disillusionment caused by WWI. If you want to know why the War had such a crushing on European countries I would highly recommend the first several chapters from John Keegan's book, "The First World War." It puts into context the horrendous casualties and its' impact on day to day life in various countries. It is just stunning.
2
@C.G. I've read many more books on WWI than WWII. It's just more fascinating to me. See: The Guns of August, et al.
1
“A little visitation of tenderness amid the fight.”
I would edit Mr. Brooks’ words to “A little visitation of the female perspective amid the fight. May the over 100 women elected to the House have such an impact.
6
OK, use a war metaphor in that embarrassing, dreadfully unserious Hollywood way if you must, (go on, call me a cultural snob) to depict the current never ending, it would appear, US political argument is an entertaining deployment of imagery. But to be serious, like some 100 year war, this internecine US bloody political battle drags on in it muddy way, or so it seems from this side of the pond. Employing your war metaphor, the NYT and the Media - all of the officer class, denoting their lack of socio economic diversity and the Democratic guard are perpetually assembled on the Hill ever ready for battle, while Republicans gather in the trenches below, or reverse this scenario if your tiringly must, each side determined to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. When you are fighting a deplorable foe, the ends justify any means the General advice their troops, and this motto serves as a rationale for any bias or selfishness. One is reminded of adolescent children and their pimply warring elements and in the view of many on this side of the water, America is an adolescent country. Speaking of adolescence to see Macron espousing globalism without any understanding of the etymology of Nationalism and it patriotic underpinning, was to view adolescence par excellence, but then he married a Teacher thereby signing up to the pervasive world view of the soi disant (so called) educated classes. God save us, from the political class: so the war must go on, or must it?
Mr. Brooks are you happy for playing the role of intellectual in the Republican party's march to the right? Are you proud to be one of the many responsible for the rise of Trump?
5
The pervasive billionaire-backed brainwashing machine backing the GOP bears far closer similarity to the fascist propaganda of Goebbels in WW II than any parallel David can draw with WW I.
6
Excellent column. What is to be done?
Excellent article from David Brooks. Well done.
On item I would disagree with, and I am sure others have commented on it as well:
"Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War,"
Yes we do. Climate change will make any war, anything made by man, pale to insignificance.
2
I really love that movie; this makes me want to see it again. Kirk's character Dax has a lot in common with Jiggs, his role in Seven Days in May.
What do you love about it, dan? Hundreds of thousands of men losing their lives - and women/families losing their lives - so a couple of men like Anwar Sadat of Syria can try to keep their unearned supposed power?
Think about it.
1
You can’t equate the PTSD from trench warfare of World War I to the current trench warfare between Democrat and Republican, as if both sides are afflicted with pointless paranoia. One side (guess which?) is literally supporting, passively or actively, the betrayal of the ideals of American democracy. One side (guess which?) is enabling a wannabe strongman to dismantle our system of checks and balances,, undermine our key alliances, and subvert our core institutions. One side is suppressing voters, packing the courts with ideologues and know-nothings, gerrymandering Congressional districts in (vain) hopes of cementing a permanent majority. One side is supporting climate policies scientists that warn will have a catastrophic impact on our landscapes, oceans, and atmosphere; on human civilization and all life on this planet. One side side is fostering the rise of a Christian Right that increasingly resembles a proto-fascist mass movement, while genuflecting to the NRA and its murderous misinterpretation of the 2nd Amerndment.Brooks’ column is maddeningly consistent sophistry masquerading as sweet reason. It may seem mean-spirited not to buy a carton of these Girl Scout cookies, but this is a “which side are you on” moment in American and world history. And history will judge those who sat murmuring on the sidelines or swooning with the vapors while the principles and institutions for which those poor doughboys made the ultimate sacrifice are systematically dismantled.
3
Apropos of nothing, I was taught in school that the Allies were the victors in WWI. They weren’t. The true victors were the Anarchists, who successfully caused the downfall of monarchies in Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.
One can see the modern day Anarchist in Steve Bannon, who simply wants to sow discord wherever possible, even if it ultimately leads to a Hitler, just as the Anarchists’ actions did in 1914.
2
In Britain, the officers were chosen from the upper classes. The saying was that the military were lions led by donkeys. There is some resemblance to our current political leadership.
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And a few days ago the event about which Brooks writes was commemorated. Yet our Grand High Exalted Mystic Ruler avoided much of the event for he dared not risk even a drop of moisture on that dead ferret that crowns his fat head. This is what we've come to, America.
Yet we've also come to a Democratic majority in the House, and for that I thank the American voter.
4
Allied troops never marched on German soil in WWI yet Germany lost. This is something the German people could not understand and which led to the "stabbed in the back" paranoia that fuels much of modern day American conservatism.
First drink,hero, from my horn:
I spiced the draught well for you
To waken your memory clearly
So that the past shall not slip you mind!
_Hagen to Siegfried
Die Gotterdammerung
Suggest, if you can find it, an excellent essay on this and how it evolved from WWI to the modern day by Kevin Baker in the June, 2006 issue of Harper's
@Paul The ending of Götterdämmerung (the immolation scene) is one of the most sublimely beautiful pieces in all opera.
Samuel Johnson told Boswell that "Every man thinks meanly of himself for never having been a soldier or never having been at sea." Perhaps our president finds military cemeteries uncomfortable or maybe it's just the bone spurs acting up. "Paths of Glory" showed a French military tradition of executions "pour encourager les autres" but it would be well to remember that the French army experienced mutinies toward the end of the war based on the pointless sacrifice.
2
I feel like I missed the point of this article. Was not the Kirk Douglas character absolutely correct in his rage, in his observations that his so-called leaders were incompetent buffoons content to send countless men to pointless deaths?
PTSD is real. Memories of the horrors of war are real. Disgust and rage at the cartoon character fouling the Oval Office and assaulting our most basic freedoms is real.
What are you doing about it, David? Counseling us to chill?
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@alexander hamilton The real hero of the film is the gun battalion commander who refused the order to fire on his own French troops.
David, is it not time to stop self-delusion and recognize that the Republican Party is morally bankrupt and has been for many years.
Time to switch and become a Democrat!
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A recommendation for another great, anti-war film that I believe too few have seen: Renoir's 1937 "La Grande Illusion." C'est magnifique!
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@Mad Max I've seen the film several times. Excellent. See: trudging through the snow to freedom.
“Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War.”? Wait, is “horror” only a matter of figures? If so, I suppose you are right. But if it’s about human suffering, I don’t get it. There are still plenty of horrors going on, slaughters remain slaughters, in many countries.
I just want to add that my own grandfather was based in the trenches of the so-called “Great” war and that I’m not oblivious to the fact that it was horrible. As any war is. How can people write or speak of a “bloody”, “horrible”, “cruel” war without being aware that this is pleonastic?
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I appreciate this article. It reminds me of a song by Randy Newman called Lines in the Sand where he sings, “the old men will guide you, but they won’t be there beside you, “We wish you well. We wish you well.”” It was written for the Iraq War and clearly indicts Cheney and Rumsfeld - two outstanding war criminals, who, like those generals from the Kubrick movie, safely reside in the comfort of their known knowns, etc..
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"As Christopher Isherwood put it, all the young people who were ashamed of never having fought in the war brought warlike simplicities to political life."
One correction: All the young, middle-aged, and, yes, old people ashamed of never having fought in a war.
You can spot them today wearing MAGA caps.
3
@Gerard GVM
To be "ashamed of having never fought in a war" is shameful.
Trump asked a question in public, so why can’t we use nuclear weapons? And many cheered. Spare me the fake equivalence, we are at war with monsters. Human greed.
4
At this point....it might be a good time to pull that old SciFi Novel off the shelf. RE=read John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar".
1
"Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War, ..."
Oh yes we do. "The struggle to stay human amid the fight" has never been so difficult.
When misguided wars of retribution are fought on foreign soil, beamed live in living color onto every screen of the nation, and when those far away from the visceral consequences of that war feel only the glory of their own anthem:
"And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?";
When wars are fought with drones so no one you love has to die; When those who think differently than you are the enemy; When you decide what you believe is what you read and see on your various screens; When you have removed yourself from the reality of the suffering of others, even those in your own country; then you have lost "the struggle to stay human amid the fight."
Forget your soaring anthems, that righteous anger you feel justified in nurturing. Your nation is tearing itself to bits, California is burning, your coasts are sinking, and you are wasting your precious human resources fighting each other.
Why not stop the fighting? If we do that, there is no struggle. We become what we are. Human beings as we were meant to be.
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And so we have a “President” who did not visit an American military cemetery in France because it was raining.
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Trump has managed to create many of the feelings of hopelessness and cynicism you describe - in an era of huge prosperity and progress!
When you destroy the meaning of truth. When you trash the press which is fundamental to democracy. When you try to destroy anyone who looks at you cross-eyed, you make people feel it is all hopeless to even try or to expect decency.
Trump is the greatest threat to America's future we have had in my (long) life.
4
On this Veterans Day we should allow our thoughts to stay with the real wars we are waging rather than the metaphor of the political tranches.
Somehow the military that we are spending over 800 billion dollars a year on has disassociated from defending the nation and taken on a life of its own.
Congress doesn't even know how many overseas bases we have or where our troops are deployed. Best guesses are that 2/3rds of our navy is arrayed against China, along with nearly 400 bases.
NATO, and American invention, under American command is in the Baltic states, Poland and will soon add an ABM site in Rumania. Both deployments are armed to the teeth, including nukes.
Advisors now dot all across Africa from east to west and as we saw from the deaths in Niger, they are "advising" by leading combat missions and drone strikes.
Then there are the known wars in Syria, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq and Afghanistan along with military missions all over Latin America and now troops in Texas and Arizona.
We needn't look back a hundred years to see cynicism, despair, lies and aggressions. Bush and Cheney should be indicted for crimes against humanity. Instead we give on an art exhibit and the other his own custom tailored documentary.
Obama destroyed our faith in the rule of law by declaring national unity was more important than investigating their crimes.
So where is our humanity? Where are our Colonel Dax's who stand up for principle and humanity? Who will sing a song to make us feel?
1
Nice to learn from history.
What I get is the difference between the war and today's life is that the "degenerate, sadistic old man" run the corporation, fires people to strike fear in the rest of the employees so they will not ask for raises. If they do not have a living wage, that is too bad.
This Colonel Dax is like a supervisor standing up for his workers. Good luck with that.
I love Conservatism.
1
"Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War,..."
David, tell that to the people of Yemen, tell that to the Rohingya, tell that to the killed and displaced of Syria...and so on. And in the process, consider how inclusive your "we" is.
1
Although I understood your point, you might want to edit and reword the last two paragraphs so you are not suggesting the capture and subjugation of a female prisoner is connected in any manner to the word "tenderness"
There is always a subtext. WWI was a bad war. WW2 a good war. Korea a good war. Vietnam, bad war. The first Iraq war, good. The second, bad.
Yet they are all bad. They all have horrors that would squeeze the marrow from David's bones. As I age, I am increasingly moved to an unblinking pacifism.
America has been invaded by batallions of lies directed by the White House and the GOP. Patriots are resisting this abomination at the voting booth and through demonstrations. Truth is the path to glory. That idea predates the movies. Step up, David. Become a patriot, too.
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Kirk Douglas -- now 101 years old -- delivered a wonderful performance in this film as Colonel Dax.
But for my money, his greatest performance was in “Lonely Are The Brave” as Jack Burns, an aging cowboy who refuses to come to terms with the conventions of modern life.
Douglas, I believe counts this as his favorite film. So do I.
The movie shows him in a great bar fight with a one-armed man and has a young Gena Rowlands in it to-die-for.
1
... has a young Gena Rowlands in it worthy of dying-for.
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Mr Brooks,
“Simple antithesis everywhere.” Nothing describes America today better than those three words.
You’ve strayed from what made you one of my closely followed columnists for many years. Since 2016 your efforts to somehow forgive, if not normalize, the extreme, detrimental acts of so called conservatives have rendered your humanity suspect to me.
Occasionally, however, you’ve still got it. Today was one of those occasions.
Mr. Brooks reliably shows his elitist credentials: "People, especially in the educated classes, approached life with a gentlemanly, sporting spirit." Yes, but which people? Oh, right, those with money and security. Mr. Brooks probably watched "The Grand Illusion" and thought it was a terribly sad movie.
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Conservative "ideas" are the basis for the selfish belief construct Brooks describes here. Being a conservative Brooks cannot see that truth.He points to various and sundry causes for this lifeitis. The war Brooks references is a symptom of the self-centered philosophy of conservatism that values that which is had as opposed to that which exists.
1
Why does WWI hold such a different place in our thoughts than WWII? Trench warfare and gas are horrible, but many times more people were killed and maimed in the second war than the first. The simplest answer seems to me essentially right: WWII was about something meaningful, the first one wasn’t. Yet the people who went to war in 1914 had to learn, at terrible cost, that the ideas they held were not worth any part of the cost that had to be paid. And WWII is meaningful only because the world allowed the horrors of Nazism, fascism and Communism to flower before the fighting started.
The problem, dear David, is that the political system, paid for by elites, requires anger and cynicism to get votes to win. One cannot run on an agenda of transfer of economic and political power into fewer hands. So like the pre-1914 elites, war fever is whipped up to get masses of voters to support the selfish behavior of the few.
The difference, is despite the media's disdain for reporting real and profound issues regarding democracy, they sell papers by chasing around Trump and his ilk for spicy quotes.
More Americans are like the Russian armies that withdrew from the great war to come home and save the homeland.
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It would have been interesting if Mr. Brooks had included in this column the troops stationed on the southern border. Leading up to the election, all we heard from the president was the horror of the invading horde and the need for military intervention. Of course, the military couldn't actually do much except serve as pawns in the narrative. So there they sit, away from their homes and families, ordered there by a man who wouldn't visit a WW I cemetery in France because it was raining. He also didn't visit Arlington Cemetery on Monday, which is customary. Curiously, the caravan seems to have dropped out of the headlines.
Humanity? Ask the soldiers what it means to them. Ask the people in the caravan, too. I'd skip asking the president, though, he doesn't seem to know the meaning of the word.
2
One problem is the romantic version of the war. The first thing I noticed in the picture of Mr. Douglas, aka Dax, is how clean his uniform is as well as those of the men behind him. How dry the dirt is as well. Ah, Hollywood.
My dad was in the trenches in WWI and believe me, his description was nothing like that! It was mud and rats and bad food and worse. Rushing "over the top" to be shot at and possibly killed was terrifying. Now that's enough to get your hate and misery going.
My dad picked up some shrapnel and, although left for to be dying in triage, was recused by his buddies and lived to tell the tale. He had PTSD and discovered long hours of farm labor helped. He had a chest so scared that no hair grew. He carried a small piece of shrapnel near his heart until he died. He had no use for war. He had sympathy for the young boys fighting on the other side and no hate for them because he could see they were a lot like him. Being Germans didn't make them less human. My dad placed the blame on those who lead us into war, be called heroes although they had not faced the ever present dangers therein.
My dad went on to graduate from college thanks to an early version of the GI Bill for Purple Heart vets. He was a warm, loving and always realistic husband father to his wife 9 children. His wonderful sense of humor helped us all understand that you can survive the things that traumatize.
I am not sure what you're getting at here, David.
This quote maybe comes close: "As Christopher Isherwood put it, all the young people who were ashamed of never having fought in the war brought warlike simplicities to political life."
The poster child for that, our so-called president, is calling the press the enemy -- warlike simplicity. Are you criticizing him or just 'splainin'?
Are Democrats angry mobs or just the opposition, opposed to the destruction of the last vestiges of limited, shared-powers government circumscribed by checks and balances?
Actually, the 17-year-old US war in Afghanistan might be another horror we face. Of course, we're not asking the people who are living in that horror, so mission accomplished, eh?
1
A couple of points Mr. Brooks. “Paths of Glory” does not end right with the singing prisoner and weeping soldiers. The final scene involves a thoroughly disillusioned Colonel Dax, having revealed the arrogant, sadistic general for what he is, is preparing to lead his men in the next pointless assault. The “tenderness” did not last very long and nothing had really changed. The second point is that in 1917 perhaps as many as 20% of the French forward infantry units mutinied and refused to engage in suicidal “over the top” frontal assaults into massed artillery and machine guns. At some point the French Poilus had enough of abject stupidity, pointless brutality, and useless death and said “Enough!” History shows that when people are pushed beyond their limits by arrogant, sadistic, fools, at some point they will rise up and scream “Enough!”
Go to Gettysburg, Arlington or any military cemetery like the ones visited this weekend if those in the graves could speak their wishes would to be in the arms of those who loved them not sacrificing their lives for political leaders who determined their fate.
And so it goes. We've created worship of a mythical American warrior that's all wrapped up in religion and patriotism and pick up trucks and keeping America safe. Nurses, teachers, parents, and other nurturing heroes are walked on/over. Yet the US military and leaders blew through $2 Trillion, killed hundreds of thousands of people; de-stablized the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Not a single good thing to have come from our longest war in Afganistan and Iraq War. America has no serious threats from outside but we're dying from within.
1
It's certainly not the same, but tRumps sending of troops to guard his boarder during Thanksgiving while he eats his burgers at Mar a Largo is the same attitude that the WWI generals had. None of them thought of the troops as human.
IMHO the greatest and least gory anti-war movie was On The Beach. The very last scene is riveting and a prediction for European American America.
As Brooks says, today there is no war. The cynicism of the Republicans is not that the end justifies the means—they have no worthwhile end. Power and greed, pure and simple, is their motivation. Unfortunately, this Op Ed is a digression.
1
I love that film. Adolphe Menjou cooperated with HUAC and ratted on many Hollywood celebrities. It is a beautiful historical irony Mr. Kubrick played on him that he would be the corrupt general that thought Colonel Dax was selfish opportunist like himself who would send others down the river just so he could make gains in military, and in real life, political prestige. There is a different Trumpian parallel to this film.
"A little visitation of tenderness amid the fight." David, is it your intention that we bring this statement into 2018? Somehow equate it with the task of repairing a country being spat upon by the congressional Republican supporters of Trump?
How will his minions stand behind his disrespect of the WWI fallen? Nothing appears to dampen their love of the orange.
America is rearranging it political mentality in the way we are forced to adjust our thinking to war. This hole we are digging gets deeper and deeper.
2
World leaders and their generals -- and the dons and other elite back home -- earned the disrespect. It's too bad Tolstoy wasn't around to write of the Great War and its aftermath. Something tells me he would not employ the wistful tone of nostalgia for hierarchy and authority found in Eliot and others.
Most of Kubrick’s films are continually relevant because human’s can’t seem to quit killing each other with bones.
David, following are my grading comments:
1. Thesis: the thesis needs to be more clearly stated. The first several paragraphs were simply a survey of various possible reactions to war. Interesting but without a central organizing principle.
2. Organization and coherence: The essay makes some viable points, but the points are presented randomly at times; the essay needs more structure for its argument
3. Paragraphs: Paragraphing needs work (think of the rule of thumb of PIE: most paragraphs in a critical essay needs a Point, an Illustration, and an Explanation).
4. Transitions: edit for more effective transitions between paragraphs
5. Supporting arguments: NA. Since the thesis is not clear (perhaps: "it is good to maintain human civility even in difficult circumstances"?) there can be no supporting arguments.
6. Introduction. The introduction fits the body of the essay [Good job here David]
7. Conclusion: The conclusion restates the introduction, but again does not support a coherent thesis
Overall: B-
Also please note that this week's assignment was to write about current events. You touched on current events briefly; please make them more central in next week's essay.
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@Chip Leon Excellent!
Mr. Brooks,
The distorted view of the "enemy" in this case the press can be laid to the Reagan administrations stripping the requirement for fair and balanced views in the press and tv. People on the right have been exposed to the bacillus of lies by the likes of Rush, Alex Jones and Faux News. It has infected a large portion of our fellow citizens. It is difficult to converse with someone who repeats the lies of these people. Trump and his minions lie and support lies on a daily basis, then claim bias and worse when the press directly quotes them. Cynicism, cowardice, you name it, Donald J. Chaos & Co. have it in spades.
1
War is proof of human absurdity.
Cowards, from a safe distance away, loudly proclaim to cheering followers, “We will win!
Quiet, jaw-clenching bravery, close to a wounded brother, whispers in the terrifying chaos, “Hang in there, buddy, we’re going to get out of this!”
These two types of voices haunt us these days.
1
Tenderness, humanity, ah, yes! If only . . .
And yet men (and socialized and/or brainwashed women) abuse, enslave, and destroy young girls in Afghanistan. Saudi princes kill reporters. Presidents ban journalists. Bullies are liberated to bully. Corrupt politicians pilfer their country's wealth, leaving homeless children to starve.
What does tenderness do in the face of this? The dilemma is more than just a choice between war and peace.
Peace at times may allow the horrors of war to continue under a different name.
No simple answer, no simple emotional reaction.
It's comforting to read your essays, David Brooks. That someone as thoughtful and articulate as you clearly feels the same hurt as ordinary me... it makes watching what's going on with my beloved country feel less lonely.
I've seen Paths of Glory in part or whole innumerable times. When it's on, I'm ON. A great pity someone isn't making a similar movie about our war disasters in Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. -- though how you cover two separate theaters of war within a four hour plot is anyone's guess. Perhaps a title like: Apocalypse Repeated would do. I wonder what the movie would make of our current generals. See: George Macready & Adolphe Menjou (actors).
“People, especially in the educated classes, approached life with a gentlemanly, sporting spirit. … [T]he upper classes used genteel words … The war blew away that gentility, those ideals … .”
It is impossible not to like David Brooks – a keenly intelligent man, as decent as the day is long. But it is also, sometimes, impossible to know what he is talking about. The world WWI blew away with its bottomless slaughter was the same violent, meat grinder of a world as that of trench warfare. The only difference was that the pre-war meat grinder was economic. The capitalism which supported all those genteel people with their genteel words was violent – grindingly exploitative of working people and minorities. For violence, Mr. Brooks, comes in many forms and not all of them depend on shot and shell. Many of them, as Woody Guthrie once sang, depend on a fountain pen.
All WWI did was translate this reality into the starkest possible terms when the genteel, upper class commanders brutally – and uncaringly – for years ordered entire generations of working class men to charge machine guns with their bare chests, as Paths of Glory so effectively depicts. For example, it took years for the WWI general staffs to develop the answer to the machine gun – the tank – an innovation which did not appear in force until the end of the conflict. This lethargy was emblematic of the violence with which the upper class had long treated the lower classes.
Almost all recent Brooks columns are devoid of contemporary references, as if they were written well in advance, are intended for general-market anthology, or wish to avoid affiliation with the leaders of his shameful GOP.
There was another officer, a corporal, who served in WWI and thrived, as he enjoyed positive feedback from superiors lacking in his father or artistic peers. He spent decades fueling resentment from WWI and Versailles treaty by honing his cruel language about immigrants and religious minorities, often tweaking his terms for future speeches by observing the passions aroused by specific slanders and slogans.
Can you guess his name? He was, perhaps, the most famous nationalist of all time.
2
Beautiful, tragic and profoundly true. This column defines how many of us across the country are hurt and struggling right now.
We simply must find ways to reach out and connect with people with whom we disagree. To stop demonizing each other and the opposing party, whatever our affiliation. It has to start somewhere, or this insanity will only get worse. Acting unethically isn't the exclusive domain of Republicans or Democrats. I believe that there are still people of integrity on both sides of the aisle.
Indeed, perhaps it lies to the citizenry, to stop heeding the loud public voices of vitriol, which sadly includes and is often led by our commander in chief, and instead, find and create ways to come together and talk, despite him.
I believe it can be done. I must. Because if we don't find ways to dialogue, and work together again, and instead insist upon continuing, even celebrating, the assaults and raging generalizations against "the other side," we are throwing fuel on a fire that will at some point consume us all.
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@theDolphin
Your argument, unfortunately, is full of false equivalence.
Firstly the left doesn't "demonize" the right . Right-wing websites have t-shirts boasting about "liberal tears", apparently a goal of the right-wing electorate. The left simply doesn't exhibit a wish for such pain towards right-wing voters.
You are also correct that the "two sides" aren't talking to each other, but that's because the right has abandoned objective reality. Try to have a rational discussion about any significant issue with a Trumpist, and they simply reject any factual information that hurts their argument.
A few examples, off the top of my head: The immigrant crime-wave is a national emergency (immigration, crime, and immigrant crime are all low by historical standards), Democrats are trying to take away health insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions (the opposite of the truth), voter-fraud is a massive problem but voter suppression doesn't exist (the opposite of the truth), Islamic terrorism is a foundational threat to the US (actually most of the terrorism in the US is from right-wing extremists), the North Korean nuclear threat has been eliminated by Trump (false), etc. etc. etc.
These aren't just matters of opinion, but of documented, unambiguous evidence.
I would love to "reach out to the other side" and have a rational discussion about any number of issues -- but the other side simply dismisses rationality, thus ending the conversation as soon as it starts.
29
@theDolphin
Thank you for your clear, generous comment. I admit that I have said many of the things that TM says about "the other side". But he is referring to that vaunted Trump base, which I don't believe are the majority. I've been looking for voices of wisdom and David Brooks opinion is an arm around my shoulder, as is your comment. Thanks.
5
@mediatwo
Good point, and I am also constantly trying to separate the extremists from the core. However, there is a false-equivalence here as well. While the left and right both have extremists, only the right has them *leading the party*.
You are also correct that Trump's base is not a majority of the country, but they are a majority of the Republican party. As of a couple of years ago (the last poll I saw on the topic), only 1 in 4 Republicans believed that President Obama was born in the United States. That's just a stunning dismissal of basic factual information.
There is simply no equivalent on the left.
11
While I agree with today's relevance, I think there is a bit too much unspoken false-equivalency here.
I think John Dean's book 'Conservatives Without Conscience' has it right: the right in the U.S. has alarming conformist and nationalistic tendencies similar to that which triggered both WWW I and II. They are easily led over the cliff.
While the left-wing is as well guilty of shallow group-think, this does not manifest itself as flag-waving and chest-thumping jingoism. I was struck by a parallel column today talking about the false nature of 'cultural Marxism', the author of which (predictably for Ivy professors) labels it an evil untruth. Leftist group think is, indeed, a form of 'cultural Marxism' and just as certainly has the ability to lead its followers over a cliff.
Civility can only survive when each of these extremes retains some shred of self-awareness as to the implications of their individual thoughts and actions in terms of enabling worst behaviors.
48
@dmckj
Right wing think and left wing think dichotomy has no application to today's American reality.
We clearly see a rise of white nationalism with neo-nazi coloration, racism and political rally hateful rants.
Who is the left wing?
6
Let me see if I understand this. My 18 year old kills their 18 year old. One’s a hero and one’s a martyr.
It is jarring to re-read an old, obscure 1960s sciFi futurist novel, "Stand on Zanzibar", by John Brunner.....He paints a picture of an overpopulated planet, with endless local hot wars going on everywhere, while psychotic people snap at work or at school killing people...meanwhile regular people are whipped up into riots by "flash mob" techiques diseminated via social media, only to be controlled by riot police who spray the crowds with sedatives and legal pot. The Black president shakes his head with dismay at the world's state of affairs...there are so many people that there's standing room only in Zanzibar.
1
Also worth watching: “All Quiet on the Western Front.” The closing scene is enough to make Hitler or Stalin weep.
1
WE THE PEOPLE are staying human, Mr. Brooks.
It's the Robber Baron/radical religion Good Old Boys model that you have promoted your entire professional life that is struggling.
Socially Conscious Women are stepping up to take one-half the power and bring balance to OUR out-of-balance world. No more fear-anger-hate-Lies,Lies,Lies-death-destruction-WAR-rape-pillage-plunder. that make up the HIStory you see to revere.
OUR story of inclusion and relative peace and prosperity for ALL human beings starts now.
5
You see the best economic minds decided Germany needed an Empire to pay for all the benefits modern society was to provide for it people and stop communism. You know England and France had empires too. Oh I almost forgot they wanted a big military too.
You see nationalism was the least of it. Conquest to provide welfare state.
Kubrick's anti war movie might be considered left wing anti war propaganda. Soldiers lives are nothing to their superiors and it takes a real man to stand up to the farce.
Good luck trying to keep your soul in war.
2
Dear Mr. Brooks can you bring up the topic of US support for Israel's genocide of Palestinians? There is no better example of how savage we are. Once upon a time we watched Schindler's List and said "never again" but now?
Your silence is deafening on this issue.
Well, David is exercising his self-appointed role as mediator between the GOP and everyone else.
This time he chooses a parallel with WW I to point out that conflict is damaging and stupid. He picked WW I because both sides were at fault.
But the closer parallel is with WW II and the struggle against fascism. That is the more illuminating and accurate parallel, David,
5
""stupidity, futility, cruelty and cynicism of war"
and yet David thought it was a good idea to invade Afghanistan (the Taliban did not attack us) and Iraq, resulting in more American deaths than on 9/11 and millions of other deaths.
When will we ever learn?
4
If you are a Republican pretend to be a Democrat for one day and watch Fox News . If you are Democrat pretend to be a Republican for one day and watch MSNBC.
Leave all your ideology behind and just watch. Don't think about facts or what is true or not true... What do you see? How do you feel? Do you see an enemy? Are they against you?
I watch from time to time. Fox News acolytes are against progress, fairness and decency.
@William I started to watch Fox News. Do so time to time.
Apparently shouting down liberals passes for intelligent debate. I do not like it when Chris Mathews talks over other people, but Fox people SCREAM at people who disagree with them until the time is over.
From what I watch, Conservative have no positive agenda. Hurting poor people is what appeals to them. Think of the abortion issue. Who pays? Poor women. Rich women can go anywhere for this procedure and the Conservatives never say a word. The more poor people that get hurt, regardless of policy, the higher GOP approval. Think NRA.
Again and again in our history. Old men sending young men to their death.
74
@Ron - I would only add to that with 'old men that never served'. Bush, Cheney, Trump, Rumsfeld, OReilly, Hannity, Reagan and a host of other cowards come to mind. Congress used to be made up of a good percentage of veterans but now all we have a bunch of old draft-dodgers hellbent on war.
12
@Ron This simple truth has informed my deepest fears since childhood. Formative years filled with images of Walter Cronkite and young men dying in Vietnamese firefights. Stories of cannon fodder and men being mowed down by machine guns, sent over the top by old men telling them their gods was on their sides as their lives were cut so short Turned into young fertilizer. Names on a monument perhaps. Many the curators of my freedoms and long lucky life most likely. The more I have learned the more grateful I am the selective service never came calling about that card I had to sign. The more filled with horror for all those who were called to die as a pawn in futile armchair general enthusiasms. Why them? Why not yet me? To bring peace wherever I may in the face of this absurdity is all I can think to do.
7
@Ron
Since the times of serfdom, the rich pick fights for ego and legacy and enlist (or enslave) the poor to fight on their behalf. The individual combatants--almost universally drawn from poor communities--are easily talked into peace after even a brief experience of combat as they have little to gain and much to lose from war. The rich are easily convinced that aggression is the best tactic as they stand to gain much and are rarely involved in the fighting and dying.
3
Before, during and after World War I Africans in America were still separate and unequal. Facing domestic ethnic cleansing color aka race terrorism from the white American majority. See [email protected]
President of the United States Thomas Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist nationalist evil prejudiced bigoted son of Confederate Virginia. Wilson made separate and unequal official government pollicy. Wilson extolled and promoted the white supremacist nationalist myth making propaganda film " The Birth of a Nation".
Two of my great uncles served in World War I under the French. One was from South Carolina and the other Virginia. There are family pictures of them in uniform. After the war they fled the Jim Crow South for Jim Crow Baltimore and Chicago.
1
We have now had--what?--16 years of war, starting with "shock and awe" in and against Iraq, followed by the destabilization of the entire Middle East.... surely as many have died--innocent civilians, for the most part--as in WW 1. America's hands are bloody, and nothing will wash them clean.
4
"As an endless dream it went on; the spirit of the past brooding over a new generation, the chosen youth from the muddled, unchastened world, still fed romantically on the mistakes and half-forgotten dreams of dead statesmen and poets. Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a revery of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken...."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
1
Great choice, David.
The girl that sang in the cafe at the end became Kubrick's wife. A nice footnote.
Trump was a disgrace at the ceremony. This pathetic draft-dodger had no business being there dishonoring those who gave so dearly.
4
To see Paul Fussell’s “versus habit” and “simple antithesis everywhere” playing out today, one need look no further than Donald Trump’s constant demonizing of everyone from immigrants and “globalists” to African-Americans on the one hand, and his championing of Nazis, white supremacists and racists on the other, what he described as “very fine people”. It is, in fact, these latter groups who have “invaded” not only our country, but its values and institutions—not people hundreds of miles away “yearning to breathe free”. The very people who chant “Jews will not replace us,” elect and re-elect bigots like Iowa’s Steven King and terrorize synagogues, churches and our mails, at the same time openly and brazenly champion and lionize Trump as their hero.
In such an environment, anything even remotely resembling, humanity, sensitivity and sensibility, struggles to survive. Why else would the president of the United States erroneously chastise California for its forest management while offering no condolences or sympathy for the loss of life and property? Or single out African-American reporters, athletes and celebrities for his mean-spirited invective? Or pass on a Veterans Day cemetery visit because of a few drops of rain that were the least of the worries of the men entombed there?
Although it has been quoted often during these dark and desperate times, it once again applies: Sir, have you no sense of decency? Sometimes, to ask the question, is to answer it.
2
The War ended Europe as it had been at the start of it. It destroyed all the old empires. It destroyed the belief that European culture was the apex of human possibilities. It destroyed so many soldiers that only Germany and Russia could field enough men in 1940 forty to fight another long war to it’s conclusion alone.
The veterans of this war addressed the challenges following the war and through the Second World War differently. They were fascists, Nazis, nationalists, socialists, bolsheviks, democrats, capitalists, unionists, and of every other kind of view of how society should be organized. Many men like Hitler lost all respect for human life, many others sought lives devoted to helping others, many hated the war but came to love comradeship and sought other cooperative efforts throughout their lives.
I think that World War I did not shape anything but demanded a world shattered to reshape itself. Arguably this happened in 1945 with the world order that Tump thinks is all wrong.
1
This is a nice essay, Mr. Brooks.
Is it really written by the same person who wrote on 5 November, in "Do Democrats Know What Unites Us?", that he can hear nothing from Democrats but "Crickets"?
Because that essay exhibits the same sort of mindless "us vs. them" tribalism that you denigrate in this essay.
1
Noble sentiments David and yet it is still too easy to remember that you were a cheerleader to the GOPs 25 year strategy to seize power for the wealthy, the conservative misogynistic Christians and the corrupt white nationalist politicians who put party way before country. You’re part of the reason we’re here and we will never forgive nor forget.
3
The truth of this article is evidenced by the virulent, uncompromisingly partisan responses it elicited.
"Moderation is taken for cowardice. Aggression is regarded as courage. No conciliatory word is permitted when a fighting word will do." This is the tenor of our times and the approved and applauded manner in which we are conducting our political and cultural disagreements—turning them into "wars." Our president may be the leader in this process, but he is eagerly followed by actors on both sides of every issue. Balkanizing our country is not the way to achieve greatness, solve our problems or heal our wounds. As studies of failed democracies have shown, a democratic process demands an underlying consensus on broad cultural values. We, and our leaders need to work toward this consensus, not further polarize and demonize. We need a healer not a conqueror to lead us.
3
45, the Draft Dodger in Chief and his VP did not go to Arlington Cemetery to honor our fallen on either Sunday or Monday.
FoxNews and the right wing media=Crickets
44, saluted with a cup of coffee in his hand while disembarking Marine One.
FoxNews and right wing media=Hair on Fire
I am a vet who was drafted 5 days before 45 in New York and served!
4
Nice column, Brooksie!
David has seen his Party fully exposed for the sham it is: their "Religion" is ill-religious and wildly hypocritical, the vaunted Republican prudence with budgets has proven a total lie, their devotion to the Constitution, the thinnest gruel they've been feeding us all these years. Their fake inclusion shown to be virulent racism and impatience...and on it goes.
The Party of Greed and lies, and in many ways not so different than the Party their hero, neo-imperialist, Dulles-style CIA operative, William F Buckley represented.
David is turning a corner. You can do that in a tighter arc, or a broader one. Take it easy on him; Mark Shields does and he knows a lot.
Mr. Brooks gets the "unconscious Freudian apologist for my party's horror of a President" award .... again. NeoCons getting all "I love you man" about WWI just daysafter their version of....President ripped each ideal that WWI supposedly left us with. That is the real piece of work here. How much sad Republican disconnect can we put up with? No.. really...."I love you man". Whitewash that party!
1
Another WWI movie displaying the cynicism of the elite and sangfroid manipulation of lesser humans as expendable pawns was "Lawrence of Arabia". The French and the British saw Lawrence as a useful idiot, ridding Arabia of the Ottomans, while they genteelly carved up the spoils.
1
Thanks Mr. Brooks for mentioning the late and great Paul Fussell. Not only was he a great supporter of Vets and historian , but a wonderful English Literature prof. All his writings are worth a read or a reread.
4
Mr. Brooks, you've missed the jumping off point of sentimentality, honor and brutality amid the distribution of power and social class. There are no difference between German aristocrats and Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Further, there are zero differences between Trump, Nixon and Joseph McCarthy or more broadly, Benito Mussolini. Authoritative personalities demand obedience without creed or morality.
1
“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1946
"War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things"
USN 1967 - 71
Viet Nam 1968
7
First this, then that, then the Vietnam War; two or three or four million slaughtered.
Even today, mothers in Vietnam are giving birth to babies with severe birth defects due to the residual Agent Orange we left and didn't clean up.
How to go on.
38
Is Dax's disgust at the shallowness and cruelty of his superiors the underlying driver of the bloodiness of the French Revolution a century before WW I or the American revolution? Is this disgust the driving force for the woman's march against the republican trumpism we are now seeing?
Let us hope so. And let us hope that the citizens of the US will be able to remember the dream of those listening to the song of humanity and justly cast the cowards of the new republicans from our governing elite.
1
Yes David, and 95% of the nastiness that you see is the direct result of ONE of our parties, and you know which one it is.
8
David
This is for you, not for the rest of us. You certainly grasp the nature of what is wrenching our society apart. You describe it in abstract terms suggesting that it reflects a general infection or degeneration. What you say is without fault but for one. In this conflict there is one institution that bears a clear responsibility for the mess and that is the Republican party. I know it must seriously pain a lifelong conservative like you to attribute this to the standard bearers of your favored political leaning but that is undeniable. We have no idea what the democrats would do if they had unlimited power but they didn't do this when they could have so we have to really pin this on the republicans and no one else. You should at least acknowledge this. You should doubly dislike them for utterly betraying conservatism your lifelong intellectual leaning. Man up and say it straight for once,
5
Trump's scowling Armistice Day performance in France, his complaints about rain and "bad hair day," his refusal to visit the American cemetery, disgraced our country in the eyes of the world. What a pathetic travesty of a president have we elected our "commander-in-chief."
6
"stupidity, futility, cruelty and cynicism of war"
Many of us don't have to read about war nor view any masterpiece, to understand your quote.
I was close with my grandfather who served in the US Army during WWI. The war ended before he was to be sent to Europe.
A few years after he passed, (1970's) my wife received mail from a cousin who did research on their family history. They had a mutual cousin who served in the Austro-Hungarian army during WWI, but disappeared during the Holocaust.
If WWI lasted a few more years, my grandfather and my wife's cousin might have faced each other in trench warfare.
2
Eisenhower observed that one who had seen war could understand “the stupidity, the brutality, and ultimately the futility of war.”
His Chance for Peace speech remains one of the great presidential statements ever. Here is an excerpt:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.[1][5]
Powerful essay.
I had the opportunity to see its devastation still apparent in Europe nearly fifteen years after World War II had ended. In fact, during the time I lived in West Germany, threats of more war came from Soviet-backed East Germany. The fear of invasion from the East was quite real and one can reflect on one’s insignificance, helplessness, and expendibility within the looming threat, with no place to run.
Most Americans have never experienced war or it’s aftermath, much less a threat of invasion to this country. In my view, the creation of NATO and world institutions of international laws made perfect sense. The successes of these man-made solutions can only be surpassed by world-wide humanity.
These alliances and international cooperation were created to fight Nationalsim that led to two World Wars. Nationalism is inherently anti-democratic, purposely inhuman and exclusionary. Nationalism was and remains a movement of hate and fear, as demonstrated today by countries supporting it, and demonstrated by recent 20th century history of unthinkable suffering and genocide, consequences of loss of human emotion. The elevation of a class of loyalist Nationalist elites creates fears of constant internal invasion with no place for them to run.
A memorial at the former Nazi concentration camp at Dachau reads “Never Again”. We must never forget.
2
"To maintain SOME contact with 'goodness' in circumstances that are inhumane," David?
Look no further than the rampant lynching by materialist/nationalist whites -- upon their return from the Great War -- to gentlemanly transcend the misunderstood "sporting spirit" of Lee's surrender at Appomattox only half a century earlier. Without this, America's GREATNESS could never have diverged from the very order -- anathema to an IPO ever in need of renewal -- about which our more perfect union is perpetually formed MOVING FORWARD.
I would recommend three courses of action.
1. Visit Verdun
2. Read Wilfred Owen's poem: Dulce et Decorum Est
3. Destroy all statues of generals
4
There are many things to say and consider about this rather insightful piece by Brooks. I am grateful for it. Cynical as easy to become when forces of darkness are all about ... which it feels like to me often these days ... exhibitions of gentleness still overpower in effect. Sentimentality, the experience of, is not well regarded because, so it seems, it is so powerful in effects as to interfere with the forces that either intend to dominate, including through bullying, or fight back, lex talionis. Tragically in these, as Brooks points out, the war wins. We allof us these days may benefit by allowing the guidance of music of kind that calmingly heals and beautifies and instructs. Even, if for the sake of our very selves, allowed unilaterally. Unobjectified living in hope is just living in hope.
1
Let me bring some "warlike simplicities to political life" for you. You don't get to chose the conditions of your surrender. You helped build this republican monster, you don't get to disown it now.
5
Who didn't know that this was where we were going.? At the head of our government is the man who is simultaneously the epitome of privilege and degeneration. This fascism grew out of the GOP and it was nurtured by sophists who watch old movies and spin phantasms of shame for those that would fight. There are sides here, and one is righteous and the other a failure of humanity. It is not a failure of all. It is us versus them, and rightfully so, because one side is evil.
6
Beautifully written.
1
Huh? No “us versus them” before the War to End All Wars? Then what caused it?
Thank you for an article on WW1
The lack of interest/understanding/coverage of November 11 here in the US has been staggeringly sad
I encourage every fellow American to red Wilfred’s Owen “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
He was a poet killed one week before the end of the “great” war
He forever changed the perception that dying for your country was a just and noble cause
78
@Paul Apparently, Wilfred Owen's insight wasn't sufficient to overcome blind patriotism, which still reigns. Until we develop Gandhi's sense that "All humanity is one undivided and indivisible family," it won't.
10
@Paul
I've been thinking the same regarding the lack of interest in WW1. I've always thought that this "great war" was the canary in the mine of the human species.
The war was covered week-by-week at this site:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAzseue8qvw
Like you, I cannot understand the lack of interest in studying and thinking about this piece of history--especially among the generations born after the Vietnam war: they are now steeped in sound bites, mindless twitters, 24/7 texting and aggressive blockbuster entertainment. Perhaps "Paths of Glory" should be required viewing in history syllabuses (if they still exist). (There are also several outstanding documentary series on the subject)
Perhaps this lack of attention for this subject is designed by the ruling class to be "hidden" from the working classes who fight all wars.
6
Again, analysis paralysis from DB.
Men in battle again and again and again relate that what THEY are fighting for is each other, to stay alive and keep each other alive in the face of the simple, awful fact that the men on the other side are doing the same thing and trying to kill them.
When you say "Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War" I find that at most myopic, at worst condescending. How many millions died in the Iraq/Iran war we encouraged?
Even today, people in Syria--civilians, not soldiers, are being gassed without gas masks. Yemeni civilians are being bombed with weapons far more deadly than WWI.
Vietnam is over 40 years ago, but Napalm did horrible things to human beings unknown in WWI.
White Phosphorus, toxic Depleted Uranium--the ways to kill other humans,horribly, have only increased since then.
Paths of Glory is one Kubrick's greatest and least-known films, where people were still people and not puppets expressing ideas. It's a far more poignant and powerful movie than his later Full Metal Jacket.
I remember standing at the NW corner of Troy (Hissarlik, Turkey) in 1999 and looking across the water of the Straits at the WWI memorial on the west bank, and getting chills & shivering on a 95 degree August day as I realized people had been fighting and dying over this same piece of water for 3000 years...and for what?
For what?
3
David thinks because he watches a movie he knows about WW 1. I will bet if he watches John Wayne, the draft dodger, he thinks he knows about WW 2. Or if he watches Apocalypse Now he knows about Vietnam. Does he also believe that Stone’s JFK shows the real assassination story or Selma is a true story. War is worst then any Director’s cut. It is time for those who haven’t seen combat to recognize this.
5
Fight for one's country? I could and never will understand how young men and women voluntarily sign up for the slaughter machine of war. Call me a coward or an idealist. I prefer you call me human - with a heart to tender to ever want to pull a trigger or order another into the brutality we falsely stand proud for.
2
The USA was fortunate to have stayed out of that idiotic war until it was almost over.
The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian Empires over their desire to resolve the matter of which country controlled Serbia as it broke out of the Ottoman Empire is still almost beyond comprehension.
If Trump and Putin succeed in smashing NATO, it is a world we will find ourselves entering again.
5
Great essay by Mr. Brooks.
We hope to evolve and be able to leave our vicious tendencies of survival behind.
For the most part we are succeedibg. Or were until 1989, when the world order changed. And, instead of taking humanity to a better place, the Cheney Republican war machinery took over. It's been devolution ever since.
But there is still hope. After the trumpian nightmare is over, we may once again continue on our quest for evolution.
3
Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War
Who is your "we"? All over the globe mostly in places that at best are names to be inserted into an article by you, but more often invisible through the narrow lens you see the world through, massive bloodshed, dislocation, hunger, starvation, climate horrors are happening every second of every day.
And often enough the "we" you are actually talking about, who in the crunch you identify with, plays a huge role in helping create this global misery.
105
I’d argue that the prospect of nuclear war is a greater horror than the Hrest War.
4
The survival of our species is in doubt due to several potential disasters (climate change, bioweapons, nanoweapons, excessive human population, & runaway AI spring to mind). Meanwhile global capitalism has brought pervasive sociopathic narcissism, the decline of empathy, and is well on its way to installing a system of global feudalism (and serf-dom for the masses).
Might humanity survive ? Very possibly, but just as likely not (or in a very reduced form).
No horrors ? I agree with Mr Roth (and Mr Jenkins). There are plenty of horrors. Mr Brooks has a lack of perspective, intelligence, or imagination.
11
"Before 1914, there was an assumed faith in progress, a general trust in the institutions and certainties of Western civilization. People, especially in the educated classes, approached life with a gentlemanly, sporting spirit."
Another way of looking at it:
Before July 28, 1914, warning signs existed about the potential for social upheaval. People in the upper class—the class of owner-industrialists—felt unease about by the rise of labor unions, especially the International Workers of the World. In London, the campaign for women's suffrage was becoming violent and anarchistic. Yet adherence to the rules of gentlemanly decorum ensured an atmosphere of blindness to the weaknesses underlying Western civilization. The outbreak of the war temporarily shifted the focus away from internationalism and social change to patriotism, belief in religious authority and the preservation of national order.
76
World War I wasn't the first tragic or pointless war, but it was the first war where nations accidentally stumbled into it, and "honor" in the old-fashioned sense of the word, where men bravely fight an adversary face to face on the battlefield, became an absurd notion. Men on battlefields with sabers and horses mixed with mustard gas, machine guns mowing down infantry even before they had a chance to fight, and, near the end of the war, fighter planes flying overhead. This was the first war where thousands of men returning home were hollow to the core, many of them with mutilated bodies, many of them "men without faces."
So are the lessons of World War I about idealism collapsing into disillusionment? Yeah, sure. More, they are that the elites and leaders of states are mostly driven by pride, which, unchecked, leads them to insist on clear-cut "victories" over "enemies."
Prideful, arrogant leaders pepper history, of course, but they are far, far more dangerous in modern times because they are willing to lead not merely hundreds or thousands of their own people to slaughter (not uncommon numbers even in ancient warfare), but literally millions. We see this with Hitler and Stalin in spades, but it's also there with Lyndon Johnson and the Vietnam War, Syria's Assad, and the Saudi leaders in Yemen.
The lesson of World War I is that the quality of mind and the moral character of national leaders matters. Permit me to connect the dots: With Trump, we are all at risk.
3
Recently when I watched another great film, "Darkest Hour," which pitted the doves against the war hawks, I thought of "Paths of Glory." Although Chamberlin has been maligned historically, he was only trying to stop the slaughter in WW II because he remembered the horrors of WW I, especially the use of weapons of mass destruction. "Darkest Hour" defends and sentimentalizes a truly just war. One movie clearly justifies the utter madness of war found in the other. Unfortunately, that madness seems to be, at times, a necessity of the human condition.
1
Re: Hemmingway’s hero being embarrassed by the “sacred.”
Do we still hold anything sacred today? If so, what do we consider sacred and why? Furthermore, what individual or group has informed our decision? How does this notion or lack of it determine our humanity and our involvement in the democratic processes in the age of Trump and beyond. I’m pondering this message.
5
"Paths of Glory" is one of my top ten "must-watch-movies." Mr Brooks you articulated my thoughts in your essay. Thank you. The Great War changed everything. Faceless killing on a mass scale stripped us of ourselves figuratively defacing our humanness. What ideals were once relevant and meaningful became hollow and meaningless. Now 100 years later we, collectively, struggle to reclaim these seemingly lost aspects of ourselves. As the ending of "Paths of Glory" shows there is hope for us. I think?!
1
Scientists, researchers, doctors and nurses, teachers and students, voters, entrepreneurs, parents and countless others wouldn't do what they do every day if they had lost hope in progress toward a better future. That's all I'm saying.
7
Glad you mentioned Paul Fussell. Also very highly recommended: “Goodbye To All That” by Robert Graves. The indispensable WWI memoir, and also an introduction to one of the great novelists and poets of the last century. Once read, never forgotten.
5
@Michael Judge
Thanks for the Robert Graves mention. So many writers and poets came out of this era. Many killed in action depriving us of unknown artistic efforts.
JRR Tolkien fought in the trenches and became ill and was removed from the battlefield. When he tried to return, his entire battalion was literally lost.
His great literary efforts are a great expression of how he tried to cope with the trauma of that loss and the war.
1
The split personality syndrome of us versus them, fails to recognize the simple truth that we are all connected, each one of us. We live on one planet, anything that happens on one end of the circular planet, has an effect on the other side of the planet. It's true for climate, all living creatures, below above and sideways. When earthquakes and tsunamis strike they do not single out nations because they do not recognize artificial human made borders. When air pollution reaches the ozone layer it does not matter who is spewing out the most. When viruses emerge, international and global travelers carry them far and wide. We can us and them till we are blue in the face, but the fact is, we are all invisibly connected, it is like a most complicated and intricate web of interconnectedness inter dependence, entangled involved mesh, pull one end and it jiggles in its entirety.
11
"It’s the eternal argument. When you are fighting a repulsive foe, the ends justify any means and serve as rationale for any selfishness."- David Brooks
We have met the battlefield, the battlers are us. There is no "visitation of tenderness" as we sing the battlecry of our own republics. We shoot, we bayonet, we club those whose uniform and allegiance differs from our own.
The violence is bad enough, but the pride that should goeth before the fall abides. WW1 failed as a war to end all wars, and politics today has failed us all as we slog through the mud of muckrakers and kill before killed those whose beliefs are not our own.
There is no "tenderness" nor soft, sweet ballads sung to loosen our rage. There is only the cry of Vonnegut's "So it goes." So does it still.
7
Hierarchy devalues human beings by characterizing and treating those without their chosen characteristics as subhuman, less than. To resist those forces is a noble duty, not partisan trench warfare where both sides share equal blame. David is cursed with the disease of false equivalency. His clinging to the Republican Party is the fatal flaw of conservatism, that is, to stick with tradition, come what may.
18
"Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War," says Brooks.
Perhaps we don't face them here, but the Yemenis are facing them; the Rohingya are facing them; the Syrians are facing them; and the tens of thousands who are boarding anything that floats to try to escape from Africa across the Mediterranean to Europe are facing them. That others are facing these horrors is partly our doing, by the way.
Perhaps if we were also facing them, we'd do something to stop them.
32
@Vesuviano, the short sightedness of the George W Bush administration, dragging us into two unfounded unfunded wars, had repercussions beyond human comprehension and we are still seeing the ripple effects of those misguided acts. History is witness to so many such foolish acts that by now we humans ought to have learned them lessons, but we remain obstinate stubborn thick skinned and dim brained species.
7
Is there any reason to salute progress today and be optimistic about this country? The wealthy rebelled against the postwar gains the working people made and have taken it all back with a vengeance.
Our president is a venal and corrupt person, his party has embraced him completely. His only major legislation was a tax cut for the wealthy.
Tell me why we should be optimistic?
12
When this Trump era is all over, I am waiting for a book that explains how Trump dehumanized us all. In our local area, even school board referendum have resulted in some pretty terrible language on social media---do the point of involving law enforcement officials---Even canvassing with my wife last week was a startling reminder that given the right circumstances (or wrong), human beings, even well educated ones, have the capacity to behave very poorly.
11
@ACJ As long as there are people who continue to be shocked and outraged at the daily shocking and outrageous behavior of Trump, we won't be dehumanized. When we become inured and numb to what happens before our eyes, then we should worry. It was no accident that the midterms set records in sending the opposition party to Washington.
1
Stanley Kubrick is a more relevant choice today than ever.
In all his films he shows how the implacable logic of language is the weapon that defines us and that it is what we turn to each time we are committing mass suicide. The Second Amendment, for example, is language and you bring it to mind, especially with your sentence, "When you are fighting a repulsive foe, the ends justify any means and serve as rationale for any selfishness." Was there ever a more clearly written piece of language to justify mass suicide than the words of the Second Amendment? Language, as a weapon, is always attacking the body. Language, as a weapon, is based on hypothetical fears, not real ones. Kubrick would be delighted to find you in his philosophical camp. There's hope for David Brooks!
3
America's top officials, president and vice-president, were both raised by autocratic, get-them-before-they-get-you fathers who came up in the era Brooks mentions here. Both are cowering, fearful man-boys who mask their weakness with all the usual suspects: anger, denial and lies. And until the world puts forth leaders who are learners, prepared for a world that no longer exists, and who display considerably more emotional depth, we'll continue on this very destructive track.
It's a blessing that we have elected so many women to office this mid-term. May they inherit the future and may younger men have the wisdom -- seize the chance-- to learn from them exactly what kind of leaders the world needs.
17
@Lois, sadly behind these men, sons of powerful men, were women who allowed it to happen. Don’t forget that all the ill that happens in the world happens with the permission of half the human species which is female. Behind all jihadi martyrs are mothers sisters wives aunts grandmas who help them put on the suicide vests. It is the sad truth that we women are complicit in what is happening in the world.
3
@Lois Thank you for your comment. I noticed that Brooks referred only to "gentlemanly" concerns in his statement.
A cliche that old men send the young to fight wars is still relevant. Then treat them shamefully if they survive and return. Cried my eyes out at Arlington cemetery and the Vietnam Nam wall.
6
I guess David wants to draw a parallel between the senseless destruction of WW I and the pillage of the partisan politics here today. Unfortunately, I see no parallel. While using a giant propaganda machine to misinform their supporters, the GOP is pillaging the Country and deliberately exciting base passions to inflame divisions and erase thought.
All the excesses and sins of WW I are to be found on only one side here today: the mendacious marauding greedy grasping GOP.
12
This is an excellent analysis, using an excellent work of fictionalized account of historical events. Both are ageless. Poor leadership (civilian) has blatantly and gratuitously killed millions of soldiers. Most of them have earnestly wanted to part of the best human impulses.
4
“We are all being dehumanized” Our President, someone we are supposed to respect, reacts to deadly fires by threatening to cut off funds to those affected.Respinse to that and other of his actions is not “political melodrama”, It is people struggling to fight climate change and racism and cruelty.
8
All wars bring disillusionment. Anyone who goes to war is forever changed by that experience. Periods of progress follow wars, because what was destroyed needs to be rebuilt - infrastructure and lives.
I disagree with you Mr. Brooks, we do face horrors equal to the Great War today. The war we are engaged in is ideological, with far reaching consequences into the future.
We have a "loss of faith in progress" because since Trump took office, progress has not only come to a halt, it is back peddling. It is dehumanizing when racism, misogyny, and xenophobia become the norm they once were. We still have a Republic, but the landscape has changed in the last two years as Trump leaves scorched earth wherever he treads. He is the person who is dehumanizing this country, with his lies, and with his inhumanity to immigrants (especially their children) and with his support of white nationalists.
Trump has taken us out of the Paris Accord, disregarding the fact that climate change is occurring. He has disgraced us before the world with his treatment of our allies, and by embracing the world's bullies. This past weekend he disrespected those who paid the ultimate sacrifice of war, when he decided to stay in his hotel room because of rain, when other world leaders were honoring those who died in war, despite the weather.
We are engaged in a war of decency versus amorality at the highest levels of government, a government headed by a man and a Party with no moral compass. I do weep.
10
One of Brooks' better columns. Unfortunately, some things never change. In fact, humanity seems to be totally absent from the current white house occupant and his party, and there is no innocent young woman who can sing sweetly enough to bring it back.
2
The Republicans are responsible for the current division(s) here in the Divided States of America, plain and simple.
4
@KB
I thought the Democrats were.
1
@KB and JoeG
You both are wrong
Obviously, the moderates.
Disillusionment might not have been the word you wanted to use. Disillusionment is the removal of illusion; and therefore, leaving a clearer perception of reality. The reality of World War I was that the European Monarchs were willing to sacrifice millions of people for their pride and power. It is was the most horrific display of the hubris of the ruling class in the history of mankind. You bemoan the aftermath and not the idiocy of the war itself? After that war, disillusionment was necessary and even a bit of cynicism was healthy. The powerful needed a reckoning for what they did, but it wouldn't come until they botched the peace, and that led to another World War. To me the parallels between that time and now are nearly nonexistent, but the Democracies that were paid for with the blood of millions over the course of the first half of the twentieth century are under the same threat that led to those wars. We are a giving into an idea that the rich and successful are capable of leading us and that what we need is order and obedience to our leaders. What we found in the time between 1914 and 1918 was that leaders cannot be trusted. We must only trust ourselves and the institutions that protect our sovereignty over ourselves. We must disillusion ourselves from the idea that we are to be led by great men. We are to lead great men and make them our conduit and our voice. In times like these; we need to act as partisans for ourselves against the powerful.
8
@Socrates. May I add one of my favorites: "Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious ". - Oscar Wilde
4
How revealing that the armistice day celebrations in France included not one representative from then-colonized countries that provided millions of soldiers and thousands of lives to the war. Oh, how convenient! I condemn the war mongers and their living descendants.
4
I guess then we should celebrate the wisdom of president bone spurs who saw the futility of war and found a way out.
Now he "cries havoc and unleashes the hounds of war" knowing that he is protected.
So, nothing has changed.
4
Let none overlook that in past writings Brooks often chose genteel words when simple ones would have been better. And a great many of his words, especially the genteel ones, have ben to try to convince us that the Republican Party has not become Trump's minions, and did not prepare the way for Trump with great piles of falsehoods and bigotry (and then cheat the rank and file by not delivering in full). Good luck with that.
6
@Marvant Duhon
I neglected to mention: Brooks for years worked for the master of using genteel speech to support Jim Crow and other villainies: William F Buckley,
1
The GOP and American LIbertarians embrace a philosophy of government based on dog eat dog capitalism, They think that just as there are winners and losers in the free market, human relations are all about selfish competition and defeating the opponent. They take Market competition as the template to which all societal relations SHOULD conform.All is fair in the Market and war. Especially when you conflate the two.
Feminism sees a different way: that humans have succeeded by cooperating and looking out for each other.
So that is what I am seeing in the gender gap in politics. Men are still thinking it is all about fighting other people; winning a gunfight. Women are thinking about how to see that everybody wins and everybody survives.
8
@Christine
To me that's way too simplistic.
Humans, male and female are more complex than your comment gives credit to.
What I find is way too many people believe what they are told and either don't know how to use critical thinking and how to research what is truth. Is that a failure of public education laziness or just tribal behavior?
I went to Public Schools and learned Critical Thinking and how to research there. I like to think I think, but that's me and I believe in balance in government.
@Alecfinn
I am sure that you are right that individuals are complex. And also right that there should be more than one POV crafting government policy.
Actually, that is the view of government that I am talking about and which I describe feminism as holding to. So we actually are in agreement. YAY!
On Nov 2 2004 I was standing in line to vote for John Kerry in Washington DC; behind me stood a friend and Republican who told me he was also voting for Kerry. I came home with hope, only to feel like I had been punched in the stomach after it turned out that W won again. I was very depressed about the mentality of America and the conversations that were very partisan. Dinner parties of Democrats became ugly and though I was strongly against Bush I started fearing the angry talk that took place on both sides against the other.
I turned off the regular news stations and started watching the “real” fake news guy; Jon Stewart . Jon Stewart’s satire was balm to my soul. When you crash everything and make fun of everything (ok he was more left) , turn it upside down, it will help stop the ideas that are embedding in our brains. To challenge our bias’.
The ultimate challenge is 45, like a spinning disc he sends both parties off into opposing directions. Confirmation bias and fear become the ‘facts’.
There are times when I read Mr Brooks that I feel he is waxing over serious issues but I agree the way out is to challenge our thinking and not fall prey to our bias’
2
Brooks' colleague, Maureen Dowd, reminded us earlier this week of the cynical and pampered elite in the 2nd Bush -- Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al. Who accelerated the chaos in today's Middle East with their paranoid, and cavalier use of fear to prompt us into the invasion of Iraq. This has been a milestone on the trajectory of mistrust and fear we face today.
9
Thank you for forging this connection to this movie today...a little tenderness dissolves a lot of anguish for awhile. I would appreciate a column in a similar style about shifted responsibilities.
Speaking of the popular will vs. those who profit from war: why are US troops in Europe, when the Europeans make so little realistic effort to provide for their own defense, which they could do without our presence? Why is our fleet challenging China for dominance of what appropriately is called the South China Sea? Why are our forces in the Muslim Middle East where they clearly are not welcome? Why do US generals who rule the South Korean army outdo the South Koreans in their hostility to North Korea? Ah, but ro ask is to brand oneself a foolish idealist.
1
Beats talking about how Trump is destroying our democracy.
3
So glad the German woman could supply tenderness for her captors and abusers. I can't imagine that she felt that tenderness, only terror that her abuse would resume. Brooks' commentary doesn't recognize that for many - African Americans, women, LGBTQ folk - the war is ongoing. To urge moderation is to side with. the oppressors.
2
"Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War, but there is the same loss of faith in progress, the reality of endless political trench warfare, the paranoid melodrama, the specter that we are all being dehumanized amid the fight"
Not ALL -Just the foul old white men and women who have attached themseves to "Trumpism"
The nadir of what was once honorable conservatism now embodied in an artless soulless narcissistic sociopath.
2
David Brooks has earned his reputation for smugness, superficiality, and insincerity. In this column, he reduces Kubrick's movie to platitudes, seems to have briefly skimmed one of the most penetrating studies of post-WWI literature about the war itself, oh and cites Orwell and Isherwood for the damage WWI did to leftist ideals.
David, how about the signal horror--shocking that there could be one--to emerge from among the ruins of the Great War: a German corporal, infused not with despair but with messianic fervor. It's the right wing ascendant again now, all over Europe, and the Americas. The right wing are my enemy. They are the enemy of all the weary progress made over the course of my lifetime. And, David, though you may not know it, they are your enemy. Moderation in opposing them is no virtue.
5
Nothing is more grim than watching a wavering conservative fall prey to the sentimental appeal of fictions, but that’s Brooks’s life-world: romantic fiction about an imagined past.
8
@Andrew
There is a saying that fiction resembles fact.
There is much truth to that.
Just look at political arguments today frequently what is stated as fact is a misrepresentation of reality.
The problem with that is it seems folk have lost or never learned critical thinking or how to check out what is the reality of a statement.
That's shameful.
Soldiers have epiphanies about how wrong it is to torture a helpless woman, because she sings a song of their youth?
Was there anyone to protect her? Should there have been? Did anyone need to be serious? And throw down?
Pacifism has real meaning to me. Cultivating it requires discipline, integrity, honesty. You can't have excuses, in the violence of your speech, your stealing ways, your lazy put downs, not even in your gossip. You also need to help everyone. It isn't a passive act.
You don't wait for it. You need, for example, to share your nice things, and today.
Peace isn't something that you get in a movie, but in the trenches of the every day. You have to know right from wrong, and to do something about it.
When truth is degraded on a mass scale, violence fed, the very notion of kindness defiled, what is the meaning of your life?
Those who protested the assault of Iraq were vilified by the talking heads of today.
So what about a suggestion, from the lectern, about urgent reality?
How will you stop the abomination of sending weapons to Saudi Arabia?
2 millions in Yemen soon dead.
Or the 2.5 millions in our ugly prisons, their orphaned kids.
The rest of the etceteras of suffering.
What do we do with our tenderness for them?
4
Ah yes, right on schedule:
"Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War, but there is the same loss of faith in progress, the reality of endless political trench warfare, the paranoid melodrama, the specter that we are all being dehumanized amid the fight."
Sub-text:
"And that soul debilitating trench warfare is brought to us by both political parties."
Note the reference to George Orwell's criticism of the left in the 1930s, you know, that left which went to the barricades against those high-minded patriots in Germany and Italy at the time.
Anyway, compare this trivel with what Paul Krugman says in his column today:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/truth-virtue-trump-loyalty.html
using as his factual base what is going on with Republicans denouncing standard electoral process in Florida and Arizona as an attempt to mask non-existent voter fraud, because it might come up with a democratically determined outcome unfavorable to them.
Says Krugman:
"If you say something along the lines of “truth and virtue are now defined by partisanship,” you’re actually enabling the bad guys, because only one party thinks that way."
That's exactly what Brooks is saying. And he's been saying it to a fare thee well since he showed up at the Times:
"Alas and alack, both parties are equally responsible for poisoning the well. If we could only return to the idyllic days of ... of ... of ...."
5
Brooks has passively and actively assisted the rise of politics indifferent to basic material needs under a rhetoric of privilege and has yet to excavate his complicity. Spare me, indeed.
9
I've always loved this movie about the First World War which was really the seminal event of the 20th Century. Unfortunately, atrocities of various sorts are inseparable from war. In WW 2 during the Normandy campaign British and American troops often shot German prisoners. Snipers were particularly unpopular. They happened in Iraq, an American military adventure Brooks was very enthusiastic about. And they're taking place now in Yemen and Afghanistan under US auspices. War is dehumanizing experience.
Last night I watched an incredible BBC production where using digital and colorization technique they had essentially transferred into the modern idiom all those old jerky movies of stick men in the trenches. The effect was amazing and after about 45 minutes it became hard to watch because nothing was held back. Sniper victims in the trenches, dismembered bodies on barbed wire, hoards of rats crawling out of dead bodies, the effects of shelling. You have to wonder how men (and women who as nurses dealt with all the grisly business of the wounded) stood it without losing all humanity and yet they did.
4
Gen. Eisenhower said it best, “Follow the money!” Since we Americans decided to spend $900 billion in the coming year for wars, and the people and machinery related to wars, WHY are we so surprised that our politics lack civility? Are they not a mirror for our misplaced priorities?
19
So reassuring to read a voice of calm and hope instead of the shrill attacks against anyone who disagrees even slightly with the party line of whatever party. When I suggest to my liberal friends that we try to understand why Trump supporters believe in him, I get rants about deplorables but we need to listen if we are going to move the country forward.
4
@Mary
I have had similar experiences when talking to my conservative friends.
It's annoying that so few feel the need to listen to each other I grieve for what has happened to my country.
We have always ( in the past ) found a way to compromise and make sense. Today feels like both sides are under the control of Mr McCarthy.
And that's sad.
3
@Mary
I totally agree with the need to understand Trump supporters. They can't all be "bad".
The Democratic Party will not make progress until the reason why Trump has so many supporters is thoroughly analysed and countered -- there is something he offers beyond hatred that the population wants. Look at the election maps, blue on major cities only, red all across the country, far more than the "fly-by" States.
1
Testament of Youth by Vera Britain poignantly tells the effects of WWI on her generation and the false idealism about war. As Brooks observes, the elites' euphemisms about war were used to roust men to glory. A timely essay to remind all of us not to be duped by leaders.
6
War is a massive enterprise, especially in the modern era. There is the armaments industry that requires billions of dollars to produce the deadly and sophisticated weaponry needed to kill and destroy the enemy, real or imagined.
There are hundreds of thousands of soldiers involved in non-lethal aspects of war, such as engineering, transportation, outfitting, strategic planning and support. They do their jobs without ever seeing, much less touching the enemy or the collateral damage done to civilians and infrastructure.
Then there are the foot soldiers and their leaders who do the killing and see the blood and guts of their comrades in arms. It is they who need to be dehumanized in order to carry out the task of war, which Colin Powell so precisely described at the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, to find and kill the enemy and destroy his will to fight. There is no humanity in the fight, there never was.
It is difficult if not impossible to undo the damage dehumanization does. We take young men, boys really, and change them for life in order to pursue a military solution to a problem. Only time will disclose whether it was worth the sacrifice.
5
@Marvin Raps I think time has already disclosed the answer.
I find WWI served to strip the public psyche of that worn out romanticism left over from the Napoleonic Era. Western Europe had scarcely seen war since Waterloo. Technically speaking, France was a nation at war only with itself until the Franco-Prussian war. England in particular had not faced an existential threat to their homeland in over a century. British nationalism, for what its worth, was still draped in the Battle of the Nile and Trafalgar. The troubles of Eastern Europe were a faint echo. The impact of rapid industrialization was a much more immediate concern to the average citizen.
The average citizen however hadn't been paying attention to what happened during the American Civil War. Americans, the South in particular, are equally guilty of romanticizing the conflict. We were drawing on allusions to the Revolution instead of Napoleon but the difference is nearly indistinguishable. In some ways, this analogy was appropriate. The Civil War began more similar to traditional conflicts between Western powers. By the end of the war though, we see a foreshadowing of what would become WWI.
Military planners knew what was coming. If not the Civil War, they had the Russo-Japanese War as recent history. Prior to the technology and tactics developed in the 19th century, most combatants were expected to die from disease rather than a bullet. All that changed before WWI. No one bothered to inform the public though. Not surprisingly, the news came as a bit of a shock.
3
It is worth noting today that one of the stars of this film, Adolphe Menjou, testified in front of the infamous House on Unamerican Activities, naming names. By contrast, Kirk Douglas supported the famous screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who had been blacklisted in Hollywood, making sure that he was publicly credited for his work on the film, “Spartacus.”
I would maintain that we do indeed face great danger from the forces on the far right. We must be aware of it.
11
@Bevan Davies
Just as we need to guard against the forces of the far left.
Extremists beliefs from anywhere are dangerous.
I lead heavily liberal but I understand there has to be a balance in government no one has all the answers.
Also recommended: Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford. The five-hour 2013 HBO mini-series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and written by Tom Stoppard is incredible, and incredibly inexpensive on DVD.
2
Thanks, David.
Yeah, war (and politics) does that. I appreciate your (Kubrick's) analogy. "War" is our hyperbolic expression of daily life. Competition for jobs, homes, inheritances, resources, all present us with similar choices. Do we focus solely on achieving more for ourselves or do we make ourselves vulnerable to our neighbors by allowing reasoned discourse? Setting larger political questions aside for a moment, our choices, personal choices, define and redefine us every day.
5
"Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War, ..."
And why is that? It isn't for lack of trying. It is because we no longer draft young men to send them off to fight. We now use technology to impose the horror on others without having to experience it ourselves. This allows us to prolong the senseless violence.
Instead of taking a tour of the center of the United States and visiting the mid-west to explore the political divide, David should take a tour of the center of Asia (Afghanistan) and the mid-east (Yemen) and see if there are horrors equal to the Great War being experienced.
8
The last scene of "Paths of Glory" -- referred to here by David - is indeed well worth watching.
Here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJH8hO7VlWE
The actress who played the singer was credited as Susanne Christian, but her real name was Christiane Harlan. Kubrick had seen her on German television before he started shooting the film. Kubrick and Harlan married in 1958 and they lived together until his death in 1999.
7
Lamenting the passing of an era, whatever the analogies made, in such a way is sadly humorous. I remember a column from five or so years ago in which Mr. Brooks made the Darwinian argument that a society does not owe its citizens healthcare. His "old school" Republican elitism shines through in his talk of moderation, as though one ought to be moderate in defending against daily assaults on the space we inhabit. Of course he would not see the ways in which he and his ilk have paved the way for the current partisan divide. They recoil in horror, not in this case from the living nightmare of life for many in 21st century America, but from the perceived lack of gentility displayed. Institutions are being eroded at breakneck speed, communities at the periphery of our continent are beginning to disappear, and the rot at the center of much of this decline is self-dealing with greater and greater shamelessness. If a mea culpa is too much to ask, could you just step down from your soapbox?
6
@Suzanne Amen, sister!
1
It’s a mistake to let those who will not do the suffering be the sole arbiters of going to war or make most any serious decision at all.
7
A perusal of the original novel by Humphrey Cobb might prove edifying. in his rendition, the universe of World War 1 had no such humanely virtues. In fact the character of Dax while not malevolent, was indifferent to the Machinery that grinds up the three innocent soldiers. It is a bleak vision unfaithfully reproduced in the movie. The film's last scene in particular can be viewed as smarmy and a Band-Aid placed on a gaping wound.
1
"Before 1914, there was an assumed faith in progress, a general trust in the institutions and certainties of Western civilization. People, especially in the educated classes, approached life with a gentlemanly, sporting spirit."
Once again, an historical narrative that seems to be chronicling events on another planet emerges from Mr. Brooks' pen. In fact, Kubrick himself makes clear that the rosy picture of pre-World War I history above is completely mythological in one of his later films, "Barry Lyndon." Had Brooks gotten even a slightly more leftist view of history than one appears to get at his alma mater, the University of Chicago, he would have been exposed to the vast literature on workers' movements prior to the outbreak of that war that shows them vowing not to participate as cannon fodder for the old European empires. Of course, as was almost inevitable, the workers in one European nation after another caved in to the pressure to defend the homeland. Nor was the U.S. an exception.
"Paths of Glory" is perhaps the greatest anti-war film ever made, even when placed alongside Stanley Kubrick's other masterpieces such as "Barry Lyndon," "Dr. Strangelove" and "Full Metal Jacket." With regard to whether of not "Paths of Glory" is shown at our military academies, we might take a cue from the inclusion of Gillo Pontecorvo's "Battle of Algiers" which the Times reported being shown to U.S. officers in the opening days of the war in Iraq.
3
I must admit I struggle with the point of this column. Is it that art is the key to staying human amidst brutality? That things were better when educated people used the word slumber while the working class died in Triangle fires and suffered horrific working conditions? The world IS fighting a war...a war against ignorance (no global warming; isolationism; a working class that slumbers with the help of opiates) as not all wars require trench warfare and chemical weapons to destroy humanity.
4
And then a mere 20 years later, WWII. Again cynicism and finally after the war and the 50 million+ deaths the world seemed to have enough. The cause of these wars and deaths was essentially Nationalism, the opposite of Globalism. Ah, how soon we forget. The powerful and the rich industrialists did not die in those wars; it was the impressionable young men and innocent civilians and minority, hated populations. Just a few years ago we were in an era of "Pax Americana". Now we have a new "Nationalism" and new threats. Time to bring out "Eternal Vigilance".
6
Fussell suggests that WWI was so horrific that it could only be thought of ironically - a distancing mechanism.
Maybe the history of horrors since then and the proliferation of media have only exacerbated it so that irony or distance from feeling is a gauze covering all of life, rendering authenticity suspiciously unreal.
Reality tv is anything but reality, and the President of the United States can say and do anything without compunction because he acts like character in a reality tv show, not a real person wrestling with right and wrong and how best to take responsibility for others.
But reality has consequences that don’t go away when you change the channel.
2
Brooks isn't the least bit interested in WWI, or the brilliant movie "Paths of Glory." He exploits them to weave his never ending narrative about how a current loss of faith and a toxic adversarial mentality are caused by everyone and everything but the real culprits, namely his GOP and Trump. He blatantly misrepresents what George Orwell wrote so as to pretend a current crisis of Truth is caused by a "Great War mentality lingering even in the 1930s in...left-wing circles-the same desire to sniff out those who departed from party orthodoxy, the same retelling of mostly false atrocity stories, the same war hysteria." After everything Trump and the GOP have done to destroy Truth and damage American democracy, Brooks dares to exploit Veterans Day and the Armistice 100th Anniversary to protect them.
Everyone reading this should watch the just released Times Video: "Operation InfeKtion. Russian Disinformation: From Cold War To Kanye." (Putin and Trump play very prominent roles).
It's preposterous to pretend that what's happened to America is because 100 years ago friends of George Orwell were disillusioned after WWI. As stated in "Operation InfeKtion": "Russia's meddling in the United States’ elections is not a hoax. It’s the culmination of Moscow’s decades-long campaign to tear the West apart. 'Operation InfeKtion' reveals the ways in which one of the Soviets’ central tactics-the promulgation of lies about America-continues today, from Pizzagate to George Soros conspiracies."
4
I cannot help but wonder who are the “we” in “Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War.” WW I was an international war so clearly he can’t be limiting his definition of who “we” are to Americans. But clearly the peoples of Afghanistan Syria Lydia and Yemen to name a few would beg to differ with the assessment. Not to mention many African countries in recent history and today, and a Central America in tatters of an entirely different sort. The list goes on.
4
World War I definitely fueled cynicism. But if it didn't fuel anarchism, that can only be because of the irrationality of our species. There was little to its causes but mindless political rivalries between governments. Indeed, governments could kill everyone - they may do it yet - and still count on support for the concept.
The Great war that ended the 11/11/1918 @the 11th hour did end war as Western societies knew it. It is estimated 11 million people died during the first world war, mainly soldiers. In the second world war 60 to 70 million people died, maybe more and mainly civilians. Wars have never been the same since 1918. The wars after 1918 changed from thousands of soldiers in suicidal charges at machine guns to individual civilians blowing themselves up, suicidal bombers, to murder other civilians and soldiers. Civilians have now become the the object of damage or the collateral damage of modern wars. Some Experts say the WW l did not end in 1918; but only in 1945 or so. Another 30 years war in Europe. The first world war was a power struggle of colonial powers that spawned WW ll. The end of WW ll brought the end of the colonial empires with the loss of 10s of millions of lives uncountable to this day. If trying to stay Human in war is difficult for the individual soldier or general, if we have a world war three, I doubt there will be a humanity left to worry about. Wars have evolved from 1914 with large civilian collateral damage. If humans survive WW lll, I suspect at best we will be back to the post Roman Empire Dark ages.
2
America is ironically a society that proudly embraces a war stance as a part of our national ethos. We accept that violence is a part of a "free" society. Defense is a strong offense. We embrace it a home with a murder rate, a violence rate and a gun ownership rate second to no other first world nation. We accept it beyond our borders with the US having more troops not on home country soil than any other country in the world. The impact is that we have become inured to the effects of violence. We use flag, patriotism, and medals to lay a national salve on our wounds. We arm ourselves in our homes to feel safe. We send troops to our borders to prevent the invasion of migrants, we demonize our enemies. There has to be a better way.
2
The number one lesson of WWI was that just folks couldn't stop the madness of slaughter and stalemate that went on for years and years as wave after wave of sacrificial victims were condemned to the trenches, a rotting pit foreshadowing the putrefaction that multitudes of unknowns were relegated to as their rotting corpses sank into the mud, they having died very much in vain.
I'm clinging to my humanity, thank you very much, in this current maelstrom of tweets, bad faith and invective. But my disillusionment quotient is sky high. When I go a-wandering in America, I see the homeless and the crumbling bridges and the empty strip malls and houses literally and figuratively under water or burned to the ground. If I turn on the radio I hear a hapless and self-absorbed president who blames all the ills of the world on Democrats while he courts murderous tyrants and boasts about achievements that are not only unaccomplished but also out of reach. Seventeen years in Afghanistan and counting make the stalemate of WWI seem like a skirmish.
I still have my human heart but it's broken.
4
I remember watching this movie on a sleepover when I was a kid. As a child of the 1950s, war was seen as a heroic enterprise, and we thought this movie would be a glorification of patriotic Americans. My friend and I were both sickened by the story, even though a lot of it went over our heads.....
Just re-watched "Wish Me Luck" a British miniseries on WWII, about spies working with the French resistance. The shattered faith in the chain of self-aggrandizing chain of command leadership was highlighted. Lives sacrificed on the alter of political posturing. The worthiest causes deserve worthy team players organizing them. Side note: Nice change in Brooks' next book title :)
1
I recall the days after 9-11 and President Bush’s call to war. Very few had the courage to resist those relentless drums of war. It was as if an inner force had been released. And so we began a disastrous, pointless war in Iraq, and the heartbreaking, never-ending war in Afghanistan which once the objective to remove the Taliban-controlled government as a refuge for Al Qaida was accomplished we turned to the sort of nation-building that was always,and is still in that sad land, a fools errand. In the end, war becomes less diplomacy by other means than a pact among warriors to each other to survive until the war has exhausted itself and ends.
1
We, the democrats, the liberals, the thinking - are NOT disillusioned Mr. Brooks. We realize that 2016 was an aberration, 2018 has reinvigorated us. We clearly hear the call to march to that shining city, we clearly see the dawn breaking and casting aside the gloom, we clearly see the return of reason, decency and truth. We clearly see HOPE and we say again "Yes, we can" with our inalienable right to vote.
4
Interesting essay. WWi changed the world. It was the end to powerful European dynasties in Germany, Russia, Turkey and Austria-Hungary that had ruled for generations. Was their demise a result of cultural changes or did they bring about these changes by overreaching? Have our differences driven us to a similar psychic moment in history? Forget the politicians, they will always act out of self interest. What is striking is that so many citizens have given up on the American dream. They are happy to tear down American laws, ideals and traditions to achieve something that they find safer. whiter, and more god-fearing. Don't know where it will all end. It's hard to imagine any kind of resolution without some kind of crises.
4
@edv961,
When asked about our current state of affairs, I reply 'we don't know what is happening', late in realizing that this was a safe refrain taking place in Germany during WWII.
The 'Make America White Again' is a possibility, but Jerusalem has just responded with keep up the resistance.
One resolution is to sit back in the comfort of one's arm chair; another is to look for a new president. The controversial one can spend time watching 'The Case of Sergeant Grischa', while keeping his shoes dry.
There certainly is a "tribal" element to human behavior, but it is fanned by those who accrue profit and power through division.
Minority rule demands division of the majority.
To understand how the stage was set for the GOP, and a demagogue like Trump, to take advantage of the power of fear and hate, we must answer the question : What would the highest individual and corporate tax rate be if religious, race, guns, and social issue conflict were not diverting and enraging the "tribes".
5
The movies have, over time, shown too often how lives have been wasted and how generals have made wrong decisions for wrong reasons.
Paths of Glory, Gallipoli, Platoon (the very ending with the character's final words puts Vietnam in perspective IMO)
all are worthy of watching and then considering just how useful our present day wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were and still are.
6
Once more, David shows an ability to express the decency inherent in every human being, but sometimes overwhelmed by noise. Thanks again.
6
Paul Fussell indeed accurately portrayed "the struggle to stay human amid the fight" in his book, "The Great War and Modern Memory." The Remembrance Ceremony at the beginning of the Manchester Derby included these stanzas from Laurence Binyon's poem written 7 weeks after the start of WW I. "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor years condemn. … As the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them." Throughout the stadium were signs which read "Manchester Remembers" and for years Great Britain called their Veterans' Day, Remembrance Day. Also on this day brass bands play one theme from Elgar's "Theme and Variation" which has its own moniker, "Nimrod". Poetry. music, and commemorative ceremony are ways we can "stay human in the fight with the adversarial mentality".
1
A beautiful article about the kind of forever deepness that can turn a soul to water, and let it flow again. Thank you, David. Love, Love.
4
The unseen bloodless conflict at the core of our political struggle is the under-checked accumulation wealth and power among the few. Conservatives still believe in trickle down, all else is "sentimentality and idealism".
25
Paul Fussell, my former English professor at Penn, once discussed technology with Nicholas Negropronte, the head of MIT’s media lab. Negroponte marveled at all the possibilities. Fussell worried that something is lost when there aren’t things to unite people, there aren’t common bonds. It’s so easy with technology to live in an isolated world. It helps explain the rural-heartland, suburban-city divide. There’s something lost today when people don’t read the same newspapers, when newspaper op-ed pages only talk about politics, when people don’t watch the same shows, listen to the same music, even watch the same sports on public TV…All these choices are wonderful, but the common bonds, the things that make people human, don’t tie like they used to. Time for leaders who can see those common bonds.
41
@JoeG
I think the common bonds now are those that unite people in human rights. The struggle continues so that all are indeed created equal, but there are quite a few remaining that want to keep the ''old ways'' of knowing and staying in your place.
They are the ones becoming more isolated...
9
@FunkyIrishman I think Fussell's focus would be on the things that make everyone human - love, laughter, art, literature, a curiosity about the world, science...
@JoeG
The bonds are ours to make in a free society. Our leaders can only remind us of them.
What a beautiful piece to read first thing in the morning.
We are so tired of the fighting words. Please, stop them. Please.
25
@Dan
Indeed. Those that are born, or even wish to be different should be left alone to live their lives in peace with the same rights and opportunities as anyone else.
Stop attacking them and trying to take away what you feel threatened by. We are all Americans. We are all global citizens. We are all human beings.
However, attack and we will defend.
5
"Paths of Glory" is a powerful narrative, one that brings war down to a human level. I used to show it regularly to my high school classes. I live in a rural area, where patriotism is right up there with Christianity, and I would ask the students to examine what they thought would be a "just" or "moral" cause for a war -- a pretty complex leap for the teenage mind grounded in shooter video games. But, they seemed to take it in, and realize some of the hypocrisy, especially the execution of the randomly selected soldiers.
Unfortunately, we are still content to fight wars over imagined Weapons of Mass Destruction and destabilize the world in the process, to further our political and economic aims. What has been learned in the last 100 years?
29
@Richard Beard Fine words and thoughts. We need more educators like you. It seems you stopped showing the movie to your students. Why?
Every year on November 11 we should all order pizza and sit down to watch Ken Burn's documentary on Viet Nam...or Paths of Glory for those with less time. We would be a better nation. How quickly we forget those powerful men far from the battle scoring political points with the lives, bodies and mental health of another generation.
32
The war, the real, eternal war, is to create a society that holds high the principle of the rule of law, and that no one, absolutely no one, is above the law.
If we had that internationally, if we had a genuine international court system that held all nations' leaders to account, war would be ended in a generation, after of course, men like W, or Netanyahu, or those who insist on wars of aggression were locked up.
I am not Doctor Who, so I cannot travel to the future and see if we win this war, but I do hold the cherished hope that one day we end war, and with it, poverty and the cruelty of cutthroat capitalism that lets a bandit like Trump lie and defraud his way to the top.
Hugh Massengill, Eugene Oregon
31
I wholeheartedly recommend the documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, although it is most definitely not for the squeamish.
Peter Jackson used archival footage from the Imperial War Museum and took out the jerkiness one sees in old film and added color to the black and white footage. Letters from WWI soliers who participanted in the trench warfare were read military veterans.
On the whole it is by far and away the best anti-war film one can possibly imagine. You'll ever think of war the same way again.
It has been shown in theatres in the UK, distributed to schools and on Nov. 11, shown on BBC2. I hope it makes it to the US.
14
The U.S. should reinstate the draft.
Only then will the public hold Congress responsible for the military, as they should.
Until then, its "out of sight, out of mind", which is just the way the senior military leadership and the corporate military supplier like it.
19
@BadgerDad
The slaughter of the Great War was made possible only by conscription. It is, as much as high explosives, the foundation of the great slaughter pens of the 20th century.
In the US Congress considered while in refuge in Philadelphia as the enemy burned Washington. Even then it was rejected. Daniel Webster speaking against it declared there to be no provision for it the constitution, and that any nation unable to defend itself with volunteers was not worth defending. Too bad that opinion didn’t continue to rule.
Conscription was first implemented in the Civil War. Many Confederate volunteers deserted in response, saying that kind of government wasn’t what they were fighting for. Georgia refused to enforce it. Too bad that spirit didn’t live on in America.
It was next used to force our men into the meat grinder in Europe in the Great War—a foreign war of choice by the US widely opposed with opposition suppressed by jailings, censorship, and police.
Congress no longer takes its constitutional responsibility for declaring war. But they do have to fund it. They are only in the discussion meaningfully when they have to fund huge benefits and bonuses to keep an army in a war that no one wants to fight.
No. I have to most adamantly disagree with you. Conscription is an abomination that should be rightfully be considered unconstitutional and is unfit for a free people, making the people the property of the government.
4
@BadgerDad
I will go further and say that principles of Liberty that originally underlie our Republic but are themselves enduring truths remembered or not, provide a sound foundation for a loyal patriotic America to resist conscription in the name of freedom. He might chose to do otherwise deeming the end
Yes he is sent to fight against the greater threat to Liberty. Certainly I would encourage any peacetime conscript to destroy equipment, forment mutiny, and otherwise make his slavery as costly for his slavemasters as possible.
Pundits are ripping Trump for not showing up at a cemetery in France over the weekend or honoring our fallen soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery yesterday. He has earned the criticism. But his newly demonstrated lack of respect for our military men and women who gave their lives to defend our democracy may be the best news we've had since Trump took office.
Has Benedict Donald just thrown a hissy fit because he has finally come to the realization that our armed forces will not back up his attempt to overthrow our government? Trump's desire to stage a military parade on Veterans Day would have provided the perfect opportunity to declare martial law. He was rebuffed by Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, whom Trump recently described as "kind of a Democrat."
The walls are closing in. Has Trump just learned that our armed forces won't help him push back? Our democracy is still in a precarious state. Trump may very well call on his millions of well armed supporters to march on Washington to oppose the "deep state's" attempt to steal his presidency. Americans should prepare for the worst because it's still to come.
Even so, freedom loving Americans can take heart at Trump's multiple snubs over the past few days. The good guys are winning.
20
"Paths of Glory" was arguably the best war (anti war) movie ever made. Does anyone think they ever show that film at West Point ?
As a nation we have glorified war just as much as any European country, maybe even more.
20
I do not know whether it is shown at West Point, but we do show it here at the US Army War College as part of our film program.
3
@USMC1954: It's civilians who've never served that have turned the military into a fetish in our country, IMO, *not* most of us that have worn a uniform.
USMC 1983-90
USA 2000-present
I don't always agree with Brooks' more polemical arguments, but this is beautiful, and reflects his real strengths as a thinker with a powerful emotional sensibility.
36
@Bbwalker
History now shows that Nixon, who claimed that he had a "secret plan" to end the Vietnam war, had interfered with peace talks that would have ended it in 1968. Thousands of American troops and countless Vietnamese unnecessarily died.
Where is the movie castigating Nixon? What are the positions of the American Legion, VFW and others on Nixon? What is Brooks' position?
2
Your comment is a great example how the “versus habit” is still very much alive.
"Before 1914, there was an assumed faith in progress, a general trust in the institutions and certainties of Western civilization. People, especially in the educated classes, approached life with a gentlemanly, sporting spirit."
This statement can really only be made about educated types like Woodrow Wilson. Rural people still struggled with the tyranny of large corporations, minorities fought horrible racism, and women still didn't have the right to vote.
27
@Anthony
Major Frank Fox's 1915 book "The Agony of Belgium: The invasion of Belgium WWi;August-December 1914 provides the details of the people being terrorized by the Germans and their Zeppelins. The peasants fleeing their thatched homes, small merchants trapped in their home store cellars. It was a very different world.
Actually, most people felt patriotic despite any struggles against injustice in which they had previously participated.
@Casual Observer So patriotic were they that the US government had to institute conscription for the first time since the Civil War and jail citizens who spoke out against the war or the draft under the Espionage Act..
The U.S. romanticizes war because, except for the Civil War, it never suffered the mass civilian and military casualties experienced by Europe, Russia and China. We cynically call our veterans "heroes" while we deprive them of basic human needs.
It is a pity that the antiwar movement of the 1960s did not last. We permit our current leaders to act like the generals that Dax encountered.
81
@RebeccaTouger
The anti-war movement was about upper middle-class college students who did not want to serve in Vietnam. The movement did not begin until student deferments were curtailed. As soon as the draft ended, the "anti-war" movement ended as well. Were it in fact an anti-war movement, it would have continued, but those boomer elites were fine with other people dying, just not themselves. Boomers see those times through rose colored glasses.
4
@Tom — There was an element of Ivy League elitism involved in the anti-war movement; but your comment is still way out of line. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a big part of the movement. The public outrage over the war also resulted from real time (or nearly so) television coverage of the day to day brutality of the conflict - something that had not been part of any prior war in which the U.S. had been involved. And the war coincided with the massive push to end segregation and restore civil rights for African-Americans.
There’s no doubt that once the war was over - after over a decade of pointless slaughter - much of the baby boom generation slid into complacency. Elimination of the draft made it too easy to wage war on the backs of lower middle class kids who joined the military because they didn’t have a lot of other options.
Unfortunately, we presently suffer under a regime led by Cadet Bone Spur, a saber rattling coward like Colonel Tetley in “The Oxbow Incident,” a man who pretends to be a heroic patriot who “knows more than the generals” about war; who faints at the sight of blood and won’t go out in the rain for fear he will muss up his hair. As far as I am aware, not one member of the Trump family has ever served in the military, much less seen the horrors of war close up.
Trump glorifies and romanticizes war like a little boy playing with toy soldiers and with the world as though all of us are merely toys here for his amusement and glorification.
8
@Tom
Clearly you weren't there, or if you were, you were not paying attention. The war protests of the 1960s protested the war because of the DRAFT, which scooped up the sons of everyone indiscriminately.
2
It was the period from 1776-1815 that is the real culprit for the adversarial mentality but of course it was to blame for the Reformation and the Thirty Years War as well.
Still, this was a good column David, and I can’t remember the last time I liked your column and I’m going back 15 years. Thanks for writing this one.
12
While the names, dates, places and causes always change, war remains the same, regardless of how 'sophisticated' its strategies,
weaponry and goals have become.
10
One of my favorite films, with messages still fresh and relevant.
Thank you for this essay.
18
An excellent essay, Mr. Brooks. We romanticize The Great War. We see noble men, Snoopy, eloquent prose.
We forget that this began with four rattled empires and a nut with nothing to lose.
This is 2018. We are eerily close to the circular.
34
@Mixilplix,
Perhaps we are in need of some levity, and lest 'we forget that this began with four rattled empires and a nut with nothing to lose', we might enjoy a bipartisan viewing of 'The Mouse Who Roared', with Peter Sellers.
1
@Mixilplix: There was more than one nut with nothing to loose. There were about a half a dozen on all sides that contributed to that "war to end all wars".
The leaders of England, France, Austria, Russia and Germany all played a role, and their people all suffered for it.
1
I like the observations in this piece, particularly how the genteel world of the gilded era collapsed into social distrust of the 20th century. But, arguably the greatest global institutions were born out of the post -war era, so there was certainly a lot of trust in building institutions for the common good. Perhaps looking at world through the lens of the current depravity of the Trump administration distorts our interpretation of the past. In reality, most of us have lived through the greatest integrated global prosperity and peace era among the major economies of the world.
20
You keep your humanity during times of tumult by knowing that if your principles survive the tumult, you will still have your principles plus the confidence to stand by them. For instance "If they go low, we go high", was practiced by most of the Democratic candidates, and those who won have the greater victory than the few who scummed to 'kicking them'. Staying human in the face of tumult is being willing to lose a power struggle in order to keep your humanity.
26
@Richard Mclaughlin
I'm sorry the Democratic candidates were not standing for their principles, they were standing in cowardly silence to keep their wealthy donor money coming in. The only confidence in their conviction is the confidence that their cowardice will be rewarded with a cozy lobbying job, once a real progressive Democrat beats them in a primary. Staying human in the face of tumult is noble, but staying silent when the President praises white nationalists, and puts kids in concentration camps is cowardice. Maybe Democratic voters should learn the difference before primary season starts next year.
Is this the same David Brooks who said in 2003 with as much smugness as the pampered French generals he mentions: "the situation has clarified, and history will allow clear judgments about which leaders and which institutions were up to the challenge posed by Saddam and which were not”?
The disillusionment and loss of faith Brooks refers to are indeed a challenge for our age. I hope he finds his inner Dax and his inner Hemingway and that his judgement improves before the next moment of truth arrives. I suspect he is on the path.
67
@Mark
I am sorry,but i don`t agree,that Mr Brooks is on the path.Watching his discussions with Mark Shields I see arrogance and too much sympathy with corrupt Republicans and a President with no moral.These are the people,who don`t learn.
You are right in every other aspect.
9
@dorit Yes, I can barely watch him with Shields. The Human Shrug, I call him, as I watch him shrug away the horrors of this presidency and its accomplices.
2
Sadly the First World War was a fiasco of globe proportion. Nothing was gained by anyone and it lead directly to World War II. The damage done on so many levels, human loss of life, damage to homes and livelihood of people, and destruction of public paid for infrastructure was monumental, blood and treasure lost and gone, etc.,etc.. That we honor those who paid the ultimate price and gave their full measure, is both admirable and sad.
16
Any struggle to stay human amid the fight is also best remembered with the story of the 369th Infantry Regiment; better known as the Harlem Hellfighters, who despite the odds managed to gain the right to fight in World War I and II, at a time when the military was still segregated.
And as a Regiment consisting mainly of African-American fighters, they prevailed only to be largely been forgotten, not only for their valiant sacrifice in combat, but for the often violent fates and lynchings awaiting them upon their return to the U.S.
Sadly the same kind of "adversarial mentality" they faced then is still very much alive alive today.
There is no visitation of tenderness, only the fight to find humanity.
28
@N. Smith - The Harlem Hellfighters were assigned to the French Army, as the US soldiers did not want to fight with Black troops. On 13 December 1918, one month after Armistice day, the French government awarded the Croix de Guerre to 170 individual members of the 369th, and a unit citation was awarded to the entire regiment. The outfit was 191 days under fire, never lost a foot of ground or had a man taken prisoner; on two occasions men were captured, but were recovered. Only once did it fail to take its objective and that was due largely to bungling by French artillery support.
The soldiers of the 369th did not receive American medals until decades later.
2
World Wars I and II are reminders of how wholesale death is the method of war. The country rejoiced in victory both times and grew stronger. A commonality from sea to shining sea was born in a way never felt before.
That commonality is gone.
It wasn't destroyed by our enemies. It was destroyed by the Republican Party.
We remember the revulsion of the Republican candidates against one of their own. We remember how any talk of tenderness was a focus of hatred by their nominee. Hatred, cynicism, vileness of a way never seen in our lifetimes. That is the legacy of the incumbent of the Oval Office.
Like Dax we will continue to fight, regardless of our leadership. We will focus on our belief in one country indivisible by defeating the divider in chief.
We long to be what we once were. A nation of the people, by the people, for the people. If we do not succeed, we will perish from the face of the earth.
If we do succeed, we will welcome our sisters and brothers with the tenderness you seek.
51
@Bob Woods
Spot on. I was both amazed and reassured that we in Oregon managed to run the table earlier this month, from the governor's office to both houses of the state legislature to four out of five US House districts.
Yet you look at a map, and you see the massive District 2, occupying the sparsely populated solid red two thirds of the eastern part of the state, where Greg Walden (R) remains firmly entrenched. This is home to those who declare, not with shame but with pride, "I vote Republican!" They are not focused on the depravity of those defining the current character of their party. No, their driving motivation is their visceral hatred of "liberals". Stay overnight in John Day sometime, and walk around town, observing their lawn signs and fence placards. I have. It makes one wonder, "At whom is this venom directed? Visitors? Surely not at one another, since the mindset in that inbred community appears to be unanimous!" I rode into town on a motorcycle, so my sentiments were not outwardly noticeable, but I did feel a definite chill. "What is this place?" I wondered to myself, "It's not the Oregon I know!"
District 2 is a seat considered to be so safe, Walden has been recruited into the House Republican leadership. You see him lurking behind Paul Ryan and his cabal at press conferences. The voters of his district, in John Day and elsewhere, will keep sending Walden to Washington, no matter what. And when Walden finally retires, they will hop on another Republican.
2
@Bob Woods
That commonality was destroyed by opposition to conscription into Vietnam.
Where have you been the last 45 years?
If the spirit of commonality and forced conscription must go hand-in-hand, I would kick the spirit of commonality to the curb. Anti-war movements come and go but never endure. War endures. The greatest forces against war are these: parents live for their own children and the spirit of individualism that insists in ones own right to choose whether or not he shall take up a fight.
But what you call “spirit of commonality” is false and forced . WW1 was marked by jailings of those who spoke against the war, violence and even lynchings of conscientious objectors, and other forms of repression. Opposition and resentment about the war was wide spread but actively repressed by government. You can take that spirit of commonality somewhere else. I oppose it here.
1
@KBronson
It seems to me you are being unnecessarily harsh. By "commonality" I take @Bob Woods to mean that mobilization for war on a national scale in WW I & WW 2 created a sense of connectedness across this land, in which Americans recognized and focused more on what they had in common, from Oregon to New York to Louisiana, than how they were different from and indifferent to one another.
One can argue with that perspective, but it doesn't deserve to be mocked. I speak as a veteran of Vietnam who put on a uniform under the duress of the draft. I have blood on my hands from keeping attack planes flying off the deck of an aircraft carrier during Nixon's infamous bombing campaign against North Vietnam throughout 1972. Of the six carriers rotating in and out of theater at the time, ours received the Navy Unit Commendation for most ordnance delivered, a dubious distinction, one I am not proud of.
That said, I do not disagree with your general observations about war, and the dehumanizing dynamics that are unleashed in nations preparing for war.
1
What Christopher Isherwood said back then certainly applies to Trump. Having never served, Trump makes a big show of his love for all things military (until this weekend, that is ) and takes a very combative posture in politics.
His aggressive posturing is really a sign of fear (of Robert Mueller in particular) and incompetence. His lack of humanity a sign of defensiveness.
48
@cl Sorry, but his lack of humanity is a sign of a character defect. He does not care for anyone except possibly those inside his family....possibly, although he probably just regards them as extensions of himself. The man lacks humanity, period. He is defensive as well and fearful. Look just at the ways he has treated his wives...without humanity. Was he defensive then and fearful. No, just a bully. Now he has met people who are his match in power and he is fearful.
3
Much of the beauty of the woman's rendition of the song comes from her singing being in German, a language her audience did not understand.
10
This column has a tone of almost lamenting the days when men didn't question officers, students didn't question professors, and intellectuals could muse, untroubled, about the nature of atrocity while others had to live through it.
16
When you write the following, Mr. Brooks:
"Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War, but there is the same loss of faith in progress, the reality of endless political trench warfare, the paranoid melodrama, the specter that we are all being dehumanized amid the fight," I write in response to this from Los Angeles, where our city and our state is on fire.
I have friends who had to evacuate, who had their houses burnt to the ground without warning.
When I saw a nurse interviewed this morning on tv from Paradise, CA, she described how she was trapped in her car, and called her husband to say goodbye. He told her she wasn't going to die, and that she had to get out of her car and run. When she did that, her sneakers started melting, the pavement was melting, she couldn't breathe, burning ashes were flying into her eyes.
She survived, but you could see the trauma in her. It was palpable.
And then Jerry Brown held a press conference and told us this was the new abnormal.
November is supposed to be the start of our rainy season in California, but now we have fires, which now start earlier. The ferocity of nature in our storms, in our floods, our heat waves - we had record-setting temperatures this year, in our fires is unlike anything we've seen before. These are once-in-a-lifetime occurrences, happening every year now.
We are at war with nature and the planet is at war with us. Rome is literally burning while you and your fellow Republicans fiddle, Mr. Brooks.
275
@V
Thank you for that clearly expressed and strongly felt sentiment. I doubt very much that it will reach David Brooks, whose convictions, that there is a reasonable center, that it is equidistant from both sides, and that its spokesperson is David Brooks, appear to be indestructible.
As you rightly point out, while David Brooks chides for their incivility people who get angry about climate change, the world burns. It's a dark irony worthy of treatment by a Stanley Kubrick.
6
A better look at WWI is Le Grande Illusion by Jean Renoir. Highly recommended for its analysis of the changing social structures across Europe.
10
@PatriciaM
Yes! -- La Grande Illusion. Brilliant film. And Erich von Stroheim in the end scene with his beloved Geranium is heart-wrenching...A Masterpiece!
10
@PatriciaM The title is actually La Grande Illusion. And yes, it is a great movie, but hardly one that shows the overall suffering of the little people in the trenches and being use as cannon fodder.
1
@Sarah
I disagree. The film shows the intense yearning to escape the overall suffering in the trenches through the eyes of people lived through it.
Please see the film again.
3
Two thoughts about a good discussion of a great film. 1. The tendency of the "us versus them" dynamic to devolve into an "us versus us" dynamic is perfectly illustrated in "Paths of Glory" when, in an attempt to "motivate" troops understandably reluctant to carry out a suicidal assault on the fittingly named "Ant Hill," a French general orders his artillery to fire on his own soldiers. 2. Eliot's "dissociation of sensibility" refers not to shell-shock or other forms of PTSD, and not simply to "thoughts of tenderness and care," but to a distinction he drew between the Metaphysical poets of the early 17th century and poets, most prominently Milton, who wrote a bit later. Eliot, like his buddy Pound, didn't care for Milton, but not because the author of "Paradise Lost" was lacking empathy.
6
Your story gives us hope that down deep we'll all "cry" when sweetness and goodness arrive to remind us that we're quite human and decent after all.
6
I am 70 years old. My parents’ war was WWII. I watched many, many war movies growing up with my parents and brother. I came of age during Vietnam, my generation’s war. I remember being horrified at the iconic newspaper photos - the little girl running engulfed in flames, the soldier wincing waiting for the bullet that would blow away his skull and brains. I remember learning about the My Lai massacre. I remember LBJ’s decision not to seek re-election and revelations about the ridiculous prolongation of a war the US could not win. I was horrified that lives were sold so cheaply. I was young. Now I’m old. Am I surprised or horrified about the events of the Gulf Wars, the tortures of prisoners by our troops, the sickening murder of a fine man and journalist by the Saudis, the deliberate starvation of human beings in Yemen? Surprised - no. Horrified, yes still, thank God. But mostly just deeply, deeply sad and discouraged.
265
"Moderation is taken for cowardice. Aggression is regarded as courage. No conciliatory word is permitted when a fighting word will do."
Words lifted from Thucydides' depiction of the civil war in Corcyra.
39
The first World War I was a very bad surprise. Every initial participant expected a short conflict where the adversaries would take the field against each other and one side or the other would be forced to surrender, followed by negotiations and an terms that would resolve the conflicts. Everyone countered everyone's moves, it became stalemate and four years spent trying to find a decisive victory to end it. In the end the world that was in August 1914 was no more. Even the victors were effectively defeated and their empires doomed to break up in four decades after a second great war.
The cultural consequences and political consequences were two decades of confusion and trying to adjust to all that was changed. They just could not do it. The second world war destroyed Europe, left it in totally ruins and no means to restore anything. In 1945, they had give up the past and to go forward and had the support of the U.S. to do so.
The men who fought the first war reacted according to who they were as individuals whose former societies were in near chaos and not finding adjustments so easy. Intellectually, the belief in Western culture being the apex of human progress was no longer a reason for optimism. Some had absorbed an indifference for life and just wanted to get what they could. They would bring the next war, and their ruin as well. There were men who appreciated what people working together could do but wanted no more war, too.
3
@Casual Observer
World War I was in no way a surprise. All the great powers in Europe had been saber rattling for some time, formed pacts with other like minded ones and/or their relatives on other country's thrones.
The assassination of Austria's Archduke Ferdinand was the lightening rod in the powder barrel.
6
The war was not expected to become what it did. A giant stalemate with millions of men being sent head on into machine guns and artillery to die without ever reaching their enemies. That and the ruin of empires were big surprises.
1
@Sarah
He is referring to the duration and scale of the carnage.
I am sure the Kubrick film was good. What I saw this weekend in the Commemoration of the 100 anniversary of WWI was a president of the United States isolated from much of the world gathering in France.
He didn’t have the decency to go out to the cemetery on Saturday where hundreds of Marines fell on the battlefield of Belleau Wood.
Today he didn’t show up as other presidents have done on Veterans Day to go the short distance for Ceremonies at Arlington.
Trump is isolated from our allies, openly nationalistic; one of the main causes of WWI and ignoring his responsibility as Commander in Chief to honor sacrifices of the fallen and all veterans during important observances.
236
@JT FLORIDA
If there were a national Confederacy Memorial Day, Trump would most certainly laud their martyrdom of dying to keep the Confederacy rassenrein.
15
The English Premier League has a tradition in which a moment of long silence is taken at the beginning of matches that are played on or near November 11th to honor all those who sacrificed and were sacrificed in World War I. It is poignant, it is sad, it is necessary. Some things should never be forgotten. Some things should always be honored.
We in the United States would do well to not forget what the millions who died on both sides in World War I, and World War II, were fighting for. Maybe this will remind us that what was at stake was freedom and, especially with respect to World War II, preservation of humanity. Maybe this will remind us that freedom and our sense of humanity currently is under siege. Maybe this will remind us what things are really worth fighting for.
23
@John D
The vast majority of the millions on all sides who died did so for no determinative reason other than that their governments compelled them to do so by law.
3
@John D Anatole France saw it differently,
"You think you are dying for your country; you die for the industrialists."
1
@KBronson
I beg to differ. Millions went willingly and believed in what they were fighting for. Callously portraying their sacrifice as fulfilling a legal obligation is cynical and demeaning.
Most of the wars in the last five centuries have originated in Western Civilization's flawed ideas to dominate others. Once other humans, civilizations and countries are accepted as equals and this desire to dominate and win at all costs is given up the world will have a more peaceful future.
13
A more peaceful future requires a superior common goal.
Mankind cannot even agree that climate change is going to be more devastating than all the wars of history combined.
@Albanywala
The first act of domination making large scale war possible is governments act of domination of its own people seizing their property and their sons by force. The way to minimize war is to minimize government, shrink its taxation power, and embue a spirit of individual liberty in the people that makes even a suggestion of conscription a trigger to massive rebellion.
1
@Kara Ben Nemsi
The superior goal above all others is that of leaving others alone to lead their own lives by their own values as long as they too, leave there fellow human alone. Freedom is the highest value that requires no justification other than itself, or rather a free sentient mind capable of being aware of and exercising it. The problem with common goals is that free minds will choose differently. A common goal requires either the cultural destruction of individuality or forced compliance.
1
"All the young men who were ashamed of never having fought in the war brought warlike simplicities to political life." Exactly so, and our last two Republican presidents would have made fitting subjects for the great Stanley Kubrick. I agree that "Paths of Glory" is one of the all-time great war films (though I'd be tempted to place the recent "Dunkirk" right up there with it). Kubrick went on to make other films that decried the catastrophic insanity of war: "Dr. Strangelove," "Barry Lyndon" and "Full Metal Jacket." And his reteaming with Kirk Douglas on "Spartacus" resulted in another (albeit less successful) paean to human dignity amidst the horrors of war and the institution of slavery. His body of work is less abundant than other masters like Ford, Bergman or Kurosawa but his legacy is just as broad.
16
@stu freeman
Great points Stu, I totally agree!
On an unrelated note, it seems like Richard L has disappeared from commenting; I often looked for your dueling comments since I appreciate your perspective!
@Anne Gannon: Thanks, Anne. I, too, was wondering about poor Richard. He must be licking his wounds from last week's election results and shivering over the prospect of a renewed "frozen government."
1
As usual, Brooks misses the point; Paths of Glory, one of the great motion pictures of all time, does not center on the beliefs of one man, does not focus on Dax's efforts to maintain his integrity as its main theme. What this movie exposes and is its central theme, is the class nature of the military, built on the class nature of the society it serves, the exploitation of the masses for individual profit and gain.
Brooks should lament this facet of human existence, which affects and distorts the lives of us all, not merely the conscience of the individual, a small matter in view of the great catastrophe that our selfish society has inflicted on us all
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@JFP
It is an adaptation of the American novel. It was based on an actual event. The French generals were no strangers to useless butchery. The prime example being Mangin. Also the French army was in mutiny in 1916 because of it.
6
@JFP
Yes, totally agree. You see Brooks, Dax, was a metaphor for the underclass, the cannon fodder of the day. He’s kind of a Bernie Sanders character, the French generals, are the Republicans. He was trying to express the obvious. Do we have the money for free healthcare and free tuition? Of course! Are hundreds of billions completely wasted on the military? Of course! The underclass here, keep marching forward, taking the stupid orders, so we can all watch jets fly over football stadiums. Every new military inductee should have to watch, Paths of Glory, prior to signing up. The truth is painful to watch.
10
@JFP As was the Vietnam was. If they could people bought their way out. Only poor folks got drafted.
4
Leonid Andreyev anticipated Hemingway and "Paths of Glory" with "The Red Laugh", a ghastly, almost hallucinogenic story set in the Russo-Japanese war. But such stories are not that rare (consider all the books, fiction and non, about Viet Nam). Sadly, we humans don't seem to learn from them.
4
Thank you, Mr. Brooks. When friends in Jerusalem wrote 'above all, keep your wits about you', this reminder is growing stronger by the day and trying to stay awake.
Some of us are attempting, or pretending to go about our daily business in conformity with our nature, while adding here to your list of great authors and poets, witnesses of the casualties of war and their testimonies engraved in stone, also known as the graveyards of the Past, where angels fear to tread.
Versailles, now at an elderly age, having risen from the rubble left in the aftermath of WWII, told this American earlier that nearly every French family lost a relation or friend to The War to end All Wars.
The little-known 'Hero' by Somerset Maugham about the selfishness of kind well meaning people is daunting.
A staunch conservative friend, courageous as she is, does not have war on her mind but recently widowed, feels that all is not right in the times we are living.
There is a moment of tenderness in the German movie 'Das Boot', where the soldiers on the submarine quietly sing 'It's a Long Way to Tipperary'.
But on the bleakest of grey and false dawns, it is the novella by Saki (H. H. Munro) that surfaces in "When William Came" before he died on the battlefield in WWI. He writes on an aside 'this story has no moral. If it points out an evil it suggests no remedy'.
We remember, but sometimes it takes a little jog to the Past in the Now, a place to be revisited, with compassion and faith.
5
The atrocity stories were mostly true, as has been verified by subsequent research. The Germans murdered French and Belgian hostages by the hundreds.
Richthofen, who was in the cavalry before he became a pilot, confesses to this in his diary, published after his death and translated into English.
The story in the movie about French soldiers capturing a German woman is not possible: the French never entered German territory (unless you consider Alsace-Lorraine to be German, but the people there considered themselves French and the French military considered them liberated French).
Soldiers, who may not have seen a woman for months, will stare lustfully at any young woman. That's human nature. Even in the movie, they didn't touch her. The story about the song is a pacifist fantasy.
5
The woman in the film is not kidnapped. She sings the song in a French cafe to the soldiers, introduced by the French cafe owner. There are some catcalls & whistles before she starts singing, but soon everyone tears up. The point is that she is singing in the German language of the enemy which the young soldiers can't understand but are moved by anyway.
Director Stanley Kubrick married the actress, Susanne Christian.
PATHS OF GLORY was not permitted to be shown at US military bases and was banned all together in France for many years.
17
Sorry, but you are incorrect. We show Paths of Glory regularly at the US Army War College as part of our film program. It is a myth that it is banned by the US military.
1
@Red Allover
Watch the scene again. Kubrick shows the French soldiers as a mix of old and young which is probably to show that the Army had to scrape the bottom of the barrel being a conscript force.
As for the ban, I understand it. How sad that Pétain was the general most credited with stopping the mutinies in 1916 by showing humanity in meeting the demands of the troops. The film essentially trashes the French High Command. It does not mention that mutiny in 1916 nearly destroyed the Allied chances. I’m not defending the butchery of certain French generals especially Mangin. However the war was about attrition and therefore it was unavoidable that men’s lives would be wasted.
One is struck how this incident in the film parallels the techniques of Bolshevik and Stalinist Russia in placing gunners at the backs of the troops with orders to kill “cowards.”
I'm surprised Mr. Brooks didn't also reference Grand Illusion. WWI didn't just divide men by country, but also by class. The relationship between the German Capt. von Raffenstein and his captive the French Capt. de Boeldieu is far closer than either of those men have to their countrymen. Military men blindly sent mento their deaths in part because they didn't value their lives quite so much.
17
@Denis L
Even in comments on a piece such as this there are some who insist on promoting one individual nation's merits above others. I have no knowledge of the truth of these assertions but they are, literally, misplaced here.
1
@Michael Liss
Which is why perhaps the Canadian Corp was so successful through out the war. Their commanding officer Major General Sir Arthur Currie, was himself a common man and a citizen soldier, having advanced to his command from a failed career in real estate and a citizen militia back ground in Victoria, British Columbia- in contrast to the professional officer corp of the British and French armies..
He valued- and fought for the tools to both prosecute the war on the Germans and at the same time protect the men that served under him as best as possible. He planned his campaigns so that they killed Germans but did not needlessly throw away his own soldiers lives. At least as was as much possible.
In doing so he revolutionized warfare as they knew it at the time. He laid the groundwork for how armies fought in WW2 and later. The Germans took his tactics and "invented" the blitzkrieg. But in WW1 the Canadian Corp were the Storm Troopers of their time and arguably the most successful force in the war. In the last 100 days as they advanced across Belgium and France, overt a 1/4 of the German army was running before them- away .
57
@Denis L Thanks for this terrific comment. Can you recommend any readings?
1
Paths of Glory is a masterpiece... Yes Dax attempts to retain his humanity in the face of crude cynicism but the absolute corrupt class and privelege system that allows the cynical Generals to lord over the soldier masses in Palatial spendor remains and is further entrenched today. That is the indictment underlying the film. Today, the poor and people of color, with no viable options fight the wars to sustain corporate rule over the earth.
21
@JL: And the most appropriate monument to their heroism is the tomb of the unknown soldier. Why, after all, should our leaders have to be bothered to learn their names?
9
@stu freeman. Read Patrick K. O’Donnell’s recent book on “The Unknown Soldier”. It’s excellect.
2
@JL: the vast majority of soldiers who fight today in those useless endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan....are red staters.
You know -- "the deplorables".
Brooks willfully forgets that it was Republican Newt Gingrich who brought total-war methods to politics and degraded it to the mess we see now in the punditocracy, TEA partiers, conservative think tanks, dark money PACs, voter-suppression operatives, ALEC, professional grifting, and rightwing noise machine. It was all design, not default.
182
@Theo D
Yes, and "bothsidesism" is no less a tactic than the baldest of lies, just more insidious in its faux veneer of "centrism". One need only see how it is used by *one* side (and NOT the other) to justify its evils.
That humans can lie at all is to our eternal disgrace. That humans use lies as weapons is damnation itself.
6
@Theo D; you mean....like "the resistance"?
@Concerned Citizen No, not at all. My understanding of the Dems' resistance is that it is actually a response to GOP badness and a page out of Mitch McConnell's playbook (derived from the awful Tenets of Gingrich) in which organized politics stops legislative movement. Do note the differences in what is being stopped—Merrick Garland's qualified and moderate judicial POV vs Trump's worst excesses of corruption and know-nothingism.
1
"Cynicism breeds a kind of nihilism, a disbelief in all values, an assumption that others’ motives are bad. It makes it hard to see the good that remains."
Mr. Brooks, how does this not describe the Republican Party?
105
@Red Sox, '04, '07, '13, '18
I usually don't read Lord Brooks pieces, I just check out the comments to get an idea of what he is peddling.
I am a Mets fan and I hope you are listing SOX championships just to rub it in every Yankees fan face.
Congrats.
1
And the Democrats in the trenches on the other side.
David Brooks, the best column I’ve ever read by you, and the many others aren’t that shabby. Thank you.
11
This was frankly an odd column that doesn't really work as history, a movie review, or as a political point.
It was telling, however, as an indication of the mental distress experiencing by the ruling liberal elite due to their constant state of fear and loathing against Trump.
Apparently, this has induced a type of PTSD or "Shell Shock" akin to serving in the killing fields of the Somme. But instead of artillery or poison gas, their disillusionment and alienation are caused by Trump's incoming tweets and the trauma of seeing Jim Acosta make the ultimate sacrifice (his press pass).
Struggle on, brave journalists and pundits.
1
@Wiener Dog ( appropriate rubric): Please inform us as to how an unethical businessman with an inherited fortune does NOT qualify as a member of the elite, especially when he refers to people who pay their taxes as "losers" and whose refusal to pay his own makes it necessary for the rest of us to contribute more than our fair share. Why not visit him at Mar-a-Lago and question him about that? I'm sure they'd invite you right in.
53
@Wiener Dog . Actually, many of us not among the "ruling liberal elite" . are experiencing "mental distress" at being represented by a man not of honor or intellect, but one who, entrusted with the highest position in the land, uses it to further his personal grievances, to ridicule and shame, to
set us against each other, foster corruption, He has deepened the war for the the spirit and soul of the US, that most of still hold dear.
5
Uh, you do know that Brooks is a conservative Republican, don't you?
'Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War, but there is the same loss of faith in progress, the reality of endless political trench warfare, the paranoid melodrama, the specter that we are all being dehumanized amid the fight.'
Sounds like the effects of many years of right wing hate radio (Limbaugh, Hannity et al) and Fox news TV, doesn't it? Why do you remain a Republican, Mr. Brooks, when your party is mostly to blame for the mess we find ourselves in?
39
I’m unsure whether we face no horrors equal to those of WWI. Perhaps no wars of that scale are raging now. But, since 1945, we have lived in the shadow of the possibility of the ultimate horror of nuclear war. That shadow has colored much of my life, and, I believe, those of my contemporaries, who remember drills where we cowered under our desks in school in a laughable attempt to prepare for nuclear holocaust. We must spare no effort to fight against that ultimate horror.
5
Why illustrate with a picture of an actor? There are plenty of real pictures of trench warfare, and it is never so pretty and clean as the picture shown.
5
@Jonathan Katz: The story references the actor and the movie. Why would the editors not use a still from the film?
6
Although 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, 'Tis better not to have fought in a war at all than to have a fought in a war and remained human.
3
We are in a different kind of war at present. The war on truth (science, facts, reason, thoughtfulness) being waged by Trump and the Republicans. Fewer deaths but also so much at stake. Why doesn't Mr. Brooks name the instigators, perpetuators, and amoral opportunists who have led us into battle. A failure of nerve or something else?
65
Mr. Brooks describes the deep cynicism that follows experience of the dehumanization that is an inevitable part of war. While WWI is particularly numbing, with the senseless slaughter of trench warfare, we need to resist becoming numb now, to the images of starving Yemenis, civilian families slaughtered in drone bombings, and acts of domestic terror.
If, in "Paths Of Glory," the soldiers found a path back to re-humanization, we need reverse the process. We need to resist the numbing which begets the cynicism that allows the dehumanization, that precedes the acceptance of evil, be it the extra-judicial killings of journalists, or the cultural genocide of Uighur "re-education" camps, or the normalization of a president who offers a "vs." mentality, cynicism and venality as a gateway drug to god knows what.
3
David, did you realize that when you were describing the generals, you were describing today's GOP?
42
@Somewhere: No, he didn't realize that. His underlying point was, "Both sides are equally guilty." The usual false equivalence. Until Republicans like Brooks decide to be more honest, nothing will change for the better.
8
Kubrick presents the unfairness so starkly that anyone can relate to the experiences of the people portrayed. He layers multiple contexts within in that simple narrative so that the incongruent assertions of the apologists display how dishonesty from individuals covering their own selfish motives to hiding the failures of those much higher authorities we never see all contributing to the unjustified executions of three innocent men, and the prosecution of the war, too.
4
The other day at a picnic table in the dog park I began a small discussion about the midterm discussion results. Their response 'be careful what you say at this Republican table, and they proceeded to bash every Democrat under the sun. I just listened to their reasons which weren't so reasonable at least from my view point. I then informed them that that the town had just elected almost totally Democrats into counsel seats.
Silence all around, then one of the women muttered under her breath, 'Well, maybe now we'll get our roads fixed'. Small moments, perhaps miraculous, in a dog park.
145
@just Robert Impressive, Robert, you have cited more research from primary sources in your comment than was contained in David's column.
10
@just Robert: how people vote locally can be quite different than how they vote nationally -- though I have to wonder that a table full of locals had NO IDEA who had won their own City Council seats!
1
For an article attempting to critique crude us-vs-them thinking, it's a little disquieting that Brooks has no compunction about setting up exactly such a dynamic targeting cynical people. Apparently we "breed" nihilism, we don't believe anything, and we assume everyone is bad. We're blind to goodness. See how putting in actual person into those claims with a simple pronoun like "we" reveals their harshness?
This article reads like a ghastly case of projection. Brooks is still coming to terms with the republican party not being the party he knew. One interpretation, a more cynical interpretation, is that Brooks misjudged the GOP and its voters and Trump has revealed something core but hidden. The second interpretation, a more generous one, is that Trumpism is an anomaly, born of circumstance and something like institutional akrasia, but not reflecting a core part of their identity.
To read this column, you would think the debate is cynics saying they are ONLY bigoted chumps, and the charitable saying there is more to them than that. That framing is mental escapism. It creates a false debate where a charitable attitude wins, but then applies that victory to the real debate in a psychological trade on equivalency.
Cynics are not creating your dumb martyrdom complex. We know there are positive attributes about people. But the honest conclusion is that people do have negative attirbutes too, and this is just a lot of mental backflipping to avoid your own.
15
In retrospect I feel compelled to disclose personal flaws as a part of this critique. I do know there is such a thing as too much cynicism. I expected there to be more significant election tampering on the part of the republicans than there was. Not that there wasn't any: disenfranchising native americans in North Dakota, going along the texas-mexico border revoking people's citizenship, alleging fraud in democratic counties in Florida, and let's not even start on Georgia. But I was expecting a lot more than that. I was overly cynical. But cynics are more accurate in predicting the future than optimists. I expected Trump to win the primary and the election, and I haven't been surprised by the depth of corruption and race-baiting since. I think that we incorrectly look at optimism and pessimism and say optimists see the good and redeeming while pessimists expect bad stuff and cynics don't allow for good stuff to happen. That's not quite right. Optimists expect good, pessimists expect bad, and cynics expect the bad is more common than the good. We don't give a word to optimists that expect there to be more good than bad or expect the good to redeem the bad. But even on my worse days of being overly cynical, I don't even feel tempted to nihilism or those other accusations. I have flaws like not containing the harshness of my words or doubting redemption or expecting the worst, but nothing like the caricature of cynicism Brooks loves to attack.
@Danny P
"But cynics are more accurate in predicting the future than optimists."
Yes, and optimists are more effective in creating the future than cynics. That's why I work on being an optimist.
"There is the same loss of faith in progress, the reality of political trench warfare."
This is literally both-sides-ism. In November 2018, the best David Brooks can do is wring his hands about how degraded "we" have all become. He reads his own newspaper, I assume, just as I do. But he's living in another realm.
I struggle to imagine the unacknowledged sense of privilege that enables Brooks to imagine himself so far above the fray as to render this judgment. I find it morally appalling.
125
@TMSquared,
'I find it morally appalling' sounds a bit harsh to this reader's ear.
'Leo and my aunt were expecting a war, well ahead of world leaders. "Ah, it'll will come all right,", he would assure her, lowering a box of provisions from his shoulder to the kitchen table. And we'll be in it. Don't you worry, Mrs. Cope, we need a good old war to sort us out." "I'm afraid you are right, Leo. War brings out the best in men and nations, but we have to remember the fallen and the missing, and sometimes there is injustice too". (In a War - Mavis Gallant)
1
@
TMSqared
I am a liberal/ progressive, or was--now I am an independent. Where I live now there are a lot of Trump supporters. It sounds like your the other side of the same coin, I don't see a whole lot of difference, not really between you and them.
I mean I think you would both use your "morals" as an excuse to attack those you disagree with.
It's just an excuse you use.
4
@Miss Ley
if we are silent in the face of injustice/cruelty/destruction of our planet , we are complicit.
What is happening IS morally appalling and we have to speak out against it.
4
In the year after the Great War, Yeats told us that the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.
At the close of the Great War, just as the armistice he'd never live to see was coming to pass, Wilfred Owen observed that the sun that woke the clays of a cold star, could not wake the dead. "Was it for this the clay grew tall?"
Some people looked at the Great War, and understood that what we lost was lost for good. War was mustard gas, and pummeling of explosives. Not horses and gorgeous uniforms anymore. And some even understood only a few years later that the response - the rise of Communism, the rise of Fascism in response, was dangerous. Was it disillusionment or prescience?
The Great War sowed the seeds for the greatest mass murder in history. Would that more were disillusion, and more had understood what they needed to fight.
The Great War cost my husband's grandfather his life - a decade later - from TB picked up serving on a troop transport ship that carried TB, Spanish Flu and thousands of returning doughboys. It left a widow with 2 boys sinking in the heart of the Depression in 1932.
I don't advocate nihilism or even cynicism. But, by all that I have, if the fight is adversarial, perhaps it is because it needs to be. Look at history, note the parallels, learn the lessons. Otherwise, the centre cannot hold.
37
You didn't bring up "Chariots of Fire," that wonderful film of ca.1982 (I think if it as "Shorts of Fire") . It brought up the painful and exquisite pain of the post-WWI era and all those so-inconvenient disabled/dismembered veterans who were all too visible. We still go through this. All those "others" who served in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.
5
Ever since the middle of the 19th century, any reasonable person can see that war has caused more problems than it solves. The south started the civil war to defend its "right" to treat humans like animals. WWI was also fought for selfish reasons of national pride and patriotism, and it only left seeds for WWII. Before the civil war, wars may have been necessary to maintain a country's security and protection against invaders. And if any war ever was useful, it was the American revolution. But today with more talk of war, as countries increasingly try to isolate themselves from a changing world they do not understand, as people become more disillusioned about the future, how can anyone still believe that a war can be "won"?
21
@qiaohan
Tell that to the Germans and Austrians, who started both wars as unprovoked aggression.
'Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War, but there is the same loss of faith in progress, the reality of endless political trench warfare, the paranoid melodrama, the specter that we are all being dehumanized amid the fight.'
Mr. Brooks, this paragraph says it all. However, we can feel in the last week some real hope for future Gov. change, as a fresh breeze begins to blow through the TV with animated faces and new uplifting messages.
13
War is manmade hell.
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
- Voltaire
“All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal.”
- John Steinbeck
“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
- Howard Zinn
“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”
- Ernest Hemingway
“He who joyfully marches to music rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would surely suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”
- Albert Einstein
“Mankind must put an end to war - or war will put an end to mankind.
- John F. Kennedy
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
-John Kerry
“The most disadvantageous peace is better than the most just war.”
― Desiderius Erasmus
364
@Socrates
May I add Tolstoy to your list of wisdom?
War is murder. No matter how many people get together to commit murder or what they call themselves, murder is the worst sin of the world.
23
@Socrates
I’d like to add a Franklin Delano Roosevelt quotation to yours: “More than an end to war, we want an end the beginning of all wars.”
18
@Socrates
Conceivably, Erasmus had it wrong. Accept the "peace" which Hitler offered, with its extermination of Jews and other designated undesirables? Or the ideals of Nazism?
Rather, I believe Patrick Henry had it right: "Give me liberty, or give me death!" .
4
Did it ever occur to you that the adversarial cynics are be right? The available data would support that hypothesis.
How old am I? When I was growing up my next door nieghbor was a gassed WWI vet. My favorite professor in collage was a WWI vet. My dad was a WWII vet. I am a Viet Nam vet. Our memories share something that cannot be washed away. We were combat vets. We trusted those worthy of our trust. Combat will do that to you. My nieghbor, porfessor and dad felt honored by JFK and felt shamed by Nixon. I felt honored by Obama and shamed by Trump. Trust the ones who earn your trust.
522
@concord63 similar here and probably a similar age. My great uncles were both gassed in WWI and others served. Numerous family member served in WW II both European and Asian theaters. A brother during Korea, myself during the "Vietnam" era and a nephew most recently. Almost all saw death of comrades close up. I was serving where nuclear weapons were present when Nixon resigned and everyone held their breath for awhile. Neither Nixon, or GW Bush or Trump deserve the respect from veterans.
29
@concord63
Your contrasting of commanders-in-chief is such a deeply felt response, especially in this day and age of the middle school impulsive, insensitive bully, president Trump.
19
@concord63: I grew up knowing two uncles who had been in the trenches in WWI. One had an eye missing from the mustard gas. From WWII I had one beloved cousin killed in Italy and another badly wounded in Normandy. Two cousins who lived in England went through the blitz. I got drafted during the Korean War, but to my good fortune was sent as an occupation soldier to Germany, where the bomb ruins were still much in evidence and cripples abounded. It leaves one wondering if there might not be a better way to resolve differences.
18
Dear Mr. Brooks: thank you for this walk down memory lane. I would like to add to your recommendation of prescient films of history "Das Boot". It too shines a light on the heart wrenching pyrrhic results of war.
20
"The struggle is simply to remain a human being, ....in circumstances that are inhumane."
There is no such thing as "inhumane". The circumstances were created by humans. It is who we are.
17
@Jake News,
Alas, Mother Nature does not give a blip about our struggle to remain human and is proving to be immune to 'inhumanity' in the face of it all.
1
Brooks has taken one of the best movies of all time and used it to make some vague point about how WW1 made some people disillusioned with the structures of society that existed then. That is the born wealthy and the educated who spouted the virtues of patriotism and structure were cast aside falsely.
Dax knew that the generals who were generals only because of their class did not care a whit about the lower classes in the trenches. When he pointed out not only the folly of the attack but the incompetence of the artillery barrage he was dismissed as an idealist.
Dax was not that. He was a realist that saw the truth of what happened and the injustice. He defended his men in the court martial and lost. They were executed.
There is today no loss in faith of progress among the women and men who ran and won against the monster that is President nor among the citizens who voted for them.
There is disillusion in that the Republican Party stands for nothing but pandering to Trump. That is not cynicism but recognizing the truth as Dax did.
400
@Edward Blau
War springs from greed, as does most violence.
What motivates the corruption of our elections? The dismantling of truth and norms? Letting wildfires and hurricanes slide?
Why were some people willing to flay truth to the bone, in order to get a tax cut?
Why is there a school to jail pipeline? Famine? Homelessness? And back to war, where we started.
Greed. Grown-up children who think they should have more than anyone else.
There is enough wealth of every kind on this planet, for all of us to prosper, but for those who don't want to share.
I'd sure like Brooks to talk about greed, his party and his president.
Greed got us here, and it's primed and pumped with steroids, in this, our terrifying culture.
62
@Edward Blau
Thank you for saying everything that needed to be said.
13
@Edward Blau
Brooks is also twisting around one of the great books of all time, Paul Fussell's "The Great War and Modern Memory."
The trenches had some very literate soldiers--Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden. And commoners read poetry too, it was a more literate society than ours.
Fussell shows how all the WWI poets and memoirists struggled for a language to express the horror and absurdity they experienced.
Out of that, irony and modernism were born to the next generation of writers.
3
It's so very fantastic to be reassured that this is simply a matter of disillusionment. If I thought for one second that there was some strange link between Shakespeare, and Dante, and Ovid, I might just go completely mad.
Well, that certainly didn't take long. Also, Friedrich Nietzsche wasn't the bogeyman that he's widely portrayed as, and George Orwell made a living writing propaganda for the English.
'2+2=4', but how do you know that '1+1=2'? Apples and Oranges.
5
"Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War, but there is the same loss of faith in progress, the reality of endless political trench warfare, the paranoid melodrama, the specter that we are all being dehumanized amid the fight."
Both sides blundered into WWI and shared moral responsibility for the resulting slaughter. But do not let David Brooks insinuate that both sides share blame for our our problems today. Trump, the NRA, McConnell and their GOP camp followers have marched us down this road. "Make American Great Again" is code for eliminating the progress made in civil rights, women's rights, worker's rights and LGBTQ rights. Political trench warfare? It's Trump who calls his opponents "enemies" and says they should be imprisoned. "Paranoid melodrama" is an apt description of the entire history of the Trump administration. After GOP gerrymandering, Russian interference in our elections at Trump's behest, and voter suppression, it is a miracle that Democrats have NOT become paranoid. Dehumanized? It was Trump who separates children from parents, demonizes refugees seeking a better life, insults women, winks at racists and praises those who march with Nazis.
No, Mr. Brooks, our current political conflict is not comparable to WWI. WWII is more apt.
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@Victor James
Here,Here!!!
7
WWI was the result of attempts to "contain" Germany, a rising economic and scientific power, that threatened to overtake Britain, in commerce
To "contain" Germany, Britain settled century old conflicts with its traditional adversaries, France (from the war of hundred years, Joan of Arc and Napoleon) and Russia (The Great Game, Crimean War). Its policy was to surround Germany with a web treaties with allies that would kick in in the case of conflict. (The German voluntarily limited the size of their Navy to 2/3 of the British but that didn't stop it). Than it waited
The spark that set the alliance web going, occurred rough a decade later in conflict in a third ranked country, Serbia an ally of Russia, and hence , per treaty of the UK, and Austria, a second rank power, and an ally of Germany The treaty obligations rolled forward, and WW I resulted.
The situation is eerily similar to the US policy, under ALL US Presidents, to "contain" a rising China, that already passed the US economy measured in PPP (actual purchasing power of any currency)
As in 1900, the US constructed, or is constructing peace treaties with former enemies (Japan, Vietnam ) to "contain" a rising China.
As in the case of WW I, an incident in a 3rd rank country, or over some island in the South China Sea, may offset it.
It seems a classic case of the US not learning from history.
The US needs to recognize that China will pass it, and work constructively with it
13
And China doesn’t need to recognize anything, except power?
5
@Talesofgenji While being realistic about legitimate Chinese territorial concerns in the South China Sea, we need to work with our (increasingly alienated) allies to insure international law governs sea traffic. And the International Community needs to shine a steady light on the Cultural Genocide being committed with "re-education" camps for the Uighurs.
1
Some said Ian Long was bad even before his tour of duty when the story came out he sexually assaulted his running coach in high school. However, the war experience, call it shellshocked or call it PTSD, didn't help. Killings in war can do something to a person's psyche.
Sadly, wars may not be the only thing. A bit of a buzz tonight when a bunch of Baraboo high school students were giving a "Sig Heil" in a photo. And lo and behold, Baraboo is in Wisconsin, the home state of Scott Walker and Paul Ryan.
Back in the old days, maybe that was a funny thing to do a la Mel Brooks's movies - well, that is half of Megyn Kelly's argument anyway - but not after all the violence in Charlottesville and other places involving the neo Nazis and white supremacists. More importantly, Trump and crew are bringing out the worst of everyone. During the two world wars, and even Nam, America has tried to fix My Lai.
But what is happening now. Perhaps we should all read and meditate on Michelle Obama's Becoming. We need to teach the children well by setting an example
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Paul Fussell invoked Herbert Read in "Great War and Modern Memory," in a way that seems completely relevant today:
“Happy are those who can relieve suffering with prayer
Happy those who can rely on God to see them through.
They can wait patiently for the end.
But we who have put our faith in the goodness of man
and now see man’s image debas’d lower than the wolf
or the hog—"
Where can we turn for consolation?"
29
A great film like this makes one think just as much as a great book. And this masterpiece, as you call it, is only about 90 minutes long. I doubt if Mr. Trump has ever seen it. He probably has seen as many films as he has read books. Colonel Dax keeps his integrity in an impossible situation. Our president would have a hard time grasping the concept.
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But we do face horrors equal and even worse than the Great War. Nuclear and bio-chemical war on an even larger scale. And climate change to the entire planet. How much longer can we pretend that we won’t be affected by the horrors of a planet degraded by nuclear, biological and chemical pollution and climate change?
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@DJMCC
Add to that list global cyberwarfare, and autonomous killer-drones, weaponized AI fully realized.
2
"Which countries are most likely to fight wars?"
From the current edition of The Economist
"The Economist has analysed all international and civil wars since 1900, along with the belligerents’ wealth and degree of democratisation"
"The United States has been quite bellicose, and its advanced democracy did not prevent a civil war in 1861 that claimed more American lives than any conflict since."
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/11/08/which-countries-are-most-likely-to-fight-wars
Most Americans believe their country spreads peace. A quantitative analysis shows : It spreads war
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@Woof Yes, the US has fought many wars that I disagree with, too. However -- had the Economist chosen to draw its arbitrary historical line at, say, 1600 rather than 1900, it might have included the countless wars England fought in order to build its vast colonial empire. (Pretty bellicose behavior - no? ) And, this particular David Brooks column was about WWI -- a war Europe was spoiling to fight, a war that killed 16 or 17 million soldiers and civilians and provided a horrific rehearsal for WWII. About 120,000 Americans died too -- young guys who lacked the necessary smarts to realize that they were merely indulging their native American bellicosity by getting drafted, and then (how tasteless!) dying in the mud and blood of the Argonne. Thanks for setting us all straight on the true situation. Next, please fill us in on how US bellicosity caused Hitler to unleash the Holocaust and Stalin to purge
his own country of 20 million souls. Can't wait.
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@Woof
How did the USA cause Japan to bomb, Pearl Harbor?
Japan was a warrior culture. Their Samurai couldn't just sit around and watch their emperor do his gardening, while much of the world was fighting.
The USA was very late in joining WWI.
2
@Woof ... yes, spreads war and frees slaves, both here in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.
David, life is not a movie. The war to end all wars didn't. In the opinion of many historians WWII was a continuation of WWI. The Middle East is a cauldron of dangerous hatreds, religious warfare, resource struggles, etc. Africa has its own serious problems. Russia and China are trying to extend their reach. The only place there isn't a war is in space.
Wars kill people. People are maimed, countries are swallowed up by other countries, lifelong enemies are created, and in many cases after the peace, the war is still fought by other means. It never ends because there is always someone out there willing to start it up again. There is always someone out there willing to murder a Yitzhak Rabin, a Mahatma Gandhi, or someone they can use as a pretext to start a war.
I don't know the answers and neither do you. There is one that I do like however: Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.
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@hen3ry
Or a harmless Archduke and his wife.
But that's was only the excuse, not the cause of the War. The cause was imperialist German ambition, with some help from their Austrian sidekicks.
6
@hen3ry Including the American Civil War, which we are still fighting.
4
The same old Orthodox- Catholic- Muslim tripartite that went on for centuries. The only thing that seems new is scapegoating Jews -- a German invention signed on by all sides.
''Today we face no horrors equal to the Great War...'' - That is because the wars we fight now are no longer wars of conscription, but of class (it is usually the poor, with few prospects that enlist voluntarily) while it is out of sight and out of mind, for the most part.
We do ourselves an immense injustice to not talk about the ongoing wars (decades on in most of the Middle East, and even elsewhere) where so many have fallen for what ? - detente in the flowing and profits there from of oil ?
We can do better - not only for the ones still in the theater, but the ones that have fallen again, and again for masters far away from battlefields.
The 1st ''world war'' was the idea of modern warfare and technological advances clashing with old world values. The 2nd ''world war'' had many carry over proponents from the 1st. We are are now in an ongoing war on multiple fronts, multiple levels, and multiple stations.
The only thing that is different, is we don't have an armistice day for it, nor a place to go worship or even remember the fallen.
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@FunkyIrishman Yes more of a slow motion war with many fewer casualties due to advanced medical procedures.
1
It's one of my favorite movies and a great condemnation of war, its brutality, hypocrisy and mythification. WW! was a disaster of epic proportions and one that affects us even now. That four years of useless slaughter could be tolerated and condoned for a senseless idea of victory, stands as an eternal denunciation of human folly.
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@Frank Casa
It wasn't "for a senseless idea of victory". It was so that Belgium and France would not have to live under the German heel, and so that American merchant and passenger ships would not be torpedoed on the high seas.
6
@Jonathan Katz,
That's a superficial reading of what was an enormously complicated war that had even more complicated origins. The senselessness was spread around and was in evidence in the very way that the war was fought and where the initial calculus of the 20th century was made: nothing was so cheap as human life; nothing so disdained as human suffering.
9
It's a great solution to overpopulation though. Probably a self regulation mechanism in society at large, driven by technological progress.