Both BlackFive and Baldilocks have joined the Armed Liberal against Englishman and author Niall Ferguson. Ferguson wrote recently an article entitled "V-E Day: A Soiled Victory," which is subtitled "A look at the WWII Allies' moral shortcuts."
As BlackFive says warriors need to have a clear-eyed view of war. There are times to set it aside -- the anniversary of V-E Day being one of those times. There are times to wave the flag and play the fife and drum, and choose to believe for a little while that all uniforms are dress uniforms. The wise man has room in his mind for both myth and history, because he recognizes that he needs both myth and history. A man, a nation, a society needs its myths to stay healthy.
When that day of celebration is suitably past, however, we have to return to the clear-eyed view. We will set it aside again at the appropriate time in the future, but we should be able to consider it now. If Ferguson can't provide it -- if his piece seems "tainted," to use his own words -- perhaps others can. Yet who else is interested in doing so?
Consider this piece from the Boston Globe, by Englishman Geoffery Wheatcroft, entitled "How Good was the Good War?"
Some of these legends are more obvious than others. The French suffered a catastrophic defeat in 1940, and the compromises many Frenchmen made with their conquerors thereafter ranged from the pitiful to the wicked. More Frenchmen collaborated than resisted, and during the course of the war more Frenchmen bore arms on the Axis than on the Allied side. Against those grim truths, Charles de Gaulle consciously and brilliantly constructed a nourishing myth of Free France and Resistance that helped heal wounds and rebuild the country.We can see that this is true -- and I don't think we hold it against de Gaulle. This is what I meant when I said that a nation needs its myths to remain healthy. You can't build a nation on a recognition that yours is a society of collaborators. That is what de Gaulle would have had to have done, if he had not made myths. So, he made myths; and he was wise to do it.
One may ask why the English authors are so eager to unmake these myths, at this time. The answer is obvious: the rise of anti-war politics in Britian, which has split both their left and right political wings. The recent elections have only heightened the tensions, and so the business of scorning all wars -- even "the Good War" -- is on the minds of some.
The English are not alone. The Germans have an interest in it too. Here is a piece from Sign & Sight called "The Mongol Devastations":
The historic fires in San Francisco, Hamburg and London had nothing in common with the procedure whereby in only 17 minutes (Würzburg) or 21 minutes (Dresden), cities were showered with hundreds of thousands of incendiary bombs. These sparked thousands of fires, which within three hours became a flaming sea, several square kilometres wide. Large natural fires normally have a single source, and are driven for days by the wind. But war statistics showed that such winds played a minor role in fires caused by bombs. The real destructive power was not in the wind that drives the fire, but in the fire itself, which unleashes its own hurricane on the ground.The Germans have their reasons for wishing to teach this lesson as well. Much has been written about the experience of Nazism, and what it has done to the German conscience -- I have written on it before myself. But, as I wrote in an email to someone on the topic of the new Pope's wartime activities. My correspondant felt that the young Pope's resistance was not sufficient, and that he should have been part of the active resistance:
Neither buildings nor people can escape the logic of the elements of fire and air. A fire starts, it sets the air in motion, fire and air form a vortex extinguishing life and all that belongs to it: books, altars, hospitals, asylums, jails and jailers, the block warden and his child, the armourers, the people's court and all the people in it, the slave's barracks and the Jew's hideout, the strangler as well as the strangled. Hiroshima and Dresden, Tokyo and Kassel were transformed from cities into destructive systems.
The moral landscape of WWII Germany is not nearly as clear as it appears to Americans in retrospect. For a German citizen -- enduring both the experience of Nazism, but also the Dresden firebombings -- it would have been entirely reasonable to choose no side, but to withdraw and pray for the end. It would have taken real faith, not in God but in America, to believe that a nation that [could carry out the bombing of Dresden] was one you should aid by force of arms. We Americans naturally feel that faith, but I see no reason that a German should.We Americans do naturally feel it, and it is right that we should. America is our mother, and it is right and natural that you should love your mother even if she is a grizzly bear. Indeed, if your mother is a grizzly bear you have no better friend in the world. You can laugh and play when she overturns boulders and rips open beehives. Neither her claws nor her strength should frighten you.
Not so, the man who finds himself between her and her cub!
Not, that is, unless he is a berserker -- a "bear-shirt," who fears neither fire nor iron, because he is also a bear. Such men are myths, but they are not only myths. It is through living the myth that the road to health lies. I mean that literally. She's twenty-five feet away. The man who has convinced himself that he is living in a myth will find the strength of will to do what he must: to use his pepper spray, or his rifle, against the eight-hundred pound giant charging down on him at thirty miles an hour. Try that if you are concentrating on a "clear-eyed" view of what she's going to do to you when she gets here. There are times when "rational" and "wise" are not the same thing.
The mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba, spent part of last week waving around the blackened fingernail of an atomic bomb survivor -- the word is hibakusha in the Japanese. The Japanese say that theirs is the only nation of hibakusha. That prompted the Koreans to form an organization of "Korean hibakusha," who had been kidnapped by Japanese imperialists and forced to work in Hiroshima until the American bomb blew it away.
The Japanese are now allies, who still yet may not have an army or a navy because their own nationals will not vote for a change in their constitution. The Koreans rage against everyone, Chinese, Japanese or American; they build nuclear bombs, both North and South Korea having admitted to clandestine enrichment programs in the last year. The Germans are pacifists. The English rush to cast away the mantle of victors, and to assume the mantle of victims: shame-filled creatures, made so by their fathers, whose sins they feel they have inherited. The French -- well, we have seen much of them in the last few years. They sputter like madmen, unable to decide if they are anti-warriors or imperialists, morally against American "mercenaries" or morally eager to sell arms to China.
This is what comes of breaking myths. The English want to help us break ours, even as the Koreans wish to break those of the Japanese. Thank you for the kindness, but we should prefer our myths intact.
The human mind needs both myth and history to be healthy. I am aware of all these facts, and can use them at the appropriate time, in the appropriate way. That way is this: to understand the events of today, where they are rooted and why; and to find there reasons for compassion for and fellow-feeling with the Germans, the Koreans, the Japanese. I see their anguish, and I sympathize with it. I wish to soothe it. I want them to know health, and strength, again: to be men, and even myths.
America remains healthy. It does so not because it remains strong -- it remains strong because it is healthy. It is healthy because so very much of it still retains its myths, though we are great consumers of works of history: witness any bookstore.
Raise the flag, and play "The Star-Spangled Banner." See how many American men lack for tears in their eyes. There is myth, and joy, and pride.
Take your clear-eyed look at war, and take it boldly. But look also at those who have dwelt upon the abyss, and what it has done to their hearts. Myth and poetry are the gifts of gods who love us, to bear us up and soothe our souls. There is greater health in the Iliad than in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. The modern world needs both. The wise man neglects neither.
