The Untold War Story -- Then and Now
The Untold War Story -- Then and Now
Going Beyond the Tale of a Boy and His Horse
By Adam Hochschild
Source: TomDispatch.comMonday, February 27, 2012
http://www.zcommunications.org/the-untold-war-story-then-and-now-by-adam-hochschild
Well in advance of the 2014 centennial of the beginning of the war to end all wars, the First World War is suddenly everywhere in our lives. Stephen Spielbergs War Horse opened on 2,376 movie screens and has collected six Oscar nominations, while the hugely successful play its based on is still packing in the crowds in New York and a second production is being readied to tour the country.
In addition, the must-watch TV soap opera of the last two months, Downton Abbey, has just concluded its season on an unexpected kiss. In seven episodes, its upstairs-downstairs world of forbidden love and dynastic troubles took American viewers from mid-war, 1916, beyond the Armistice, with the venerable Abbey itself turned into a convalescent hospital for wounded troops. Other dramas about the 1914-1918 war are on the way, among them an HBO-BBC miniseries based on Ford Madox Fords Parades End quartet of novels, and a TV adaptation of Sebastian Faulkss novel Birdsong from an NBC-backed production company.
In truth, theres nothing new in this. Filmmakers and novelists have long been fascinated by the way the optimistic, sunlit, pre-1914 Europe of emperors in plumed helmets and hussars on parade so quickly turned into a mass slaughterhouse on an unprecedented scale. And there are good reasons to look at the First World War carefully and closely.
After all, it was responsible for the deaths of some nine million soldiers and an even larger number of civilians. It helped ignite the Armenian genocide and the Russian Revolution, left large swaths of Europe in smoldering ruins, and remade the world for the worse in almost every conceivable way -- above all, by laying the groundwork for a second and even more deadly, even more global war." .......
Why We Know More About War Than Peace
no_hypocrisy
(45,771 posts)professor of European Civilization shared: after some passage of time, historically the two World Wars will be viewed as parts one and two of the same war with a pause during the Twenties and some of the Thirties as the Versailles Treaty didn't adequately address and resolve economic and political issues that underwrote the original war.
MicaelS
(8,747 posts)A 41 year long Civil War with a 20 year Armistice.
zipplewrath
(16,646 posts)With in academia, that is definitely the case already. WW II was created by the manner in which WW I was concluded. Truth is, and you'll find alot of academic study on this position as well, each war basically "sets up" the next war. It is rare that wars "end" with no follow on wars.
The American revolution was heavily influenced by existing hostilities in Europe. It as preceeded by the "French and Indian Wars", which to some extent were the reason that England began trying to get some tangible taxes out of "the colonies". France's entrance into the revolution was a bit of "proxy war" on their part to harrass England. And it ended predominately because England didn't see the point and was exposing them to attack back home.
It was soon followed however by the War of 1812. This war was set up by the tepid conclusion of the American Revolution. England wasn't "over it" yet and found great pleasure in harrassing the former colonies. The US thought they could get chunks of Canada they always treasured.
Truth is, WWII sets up the conflicts associated with the cold war. Everything from the Berlin blockades all the way to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And our activity on the part of the resistence there has a thread leading directly to 9/11. Our invasion of Iraq was based heavily upon the basic impression of some that we had not "finished the job" the first time around.
One big beef I had with Obama's NPP speach, was his implication that war was an "answer" to anything. That there were "good wars". War generally is just a long thread that we continue to chop up into arbitrary divisions to give them names. War wasn't the answer to Hitler. Hitler was the response to the end of WW I. The American Revolution sewed the seeds of our Civil war less than 100 years later, not to mention the interveining conflicts with the western indigenous peoples. The war of the roses, the hundred years war, the crusades, all of these wars merely set up the players for the next wars. In both Kosovo and Croatia, decades and centuries old wars defined the battle lines and the allies in those conflicts.
War solves very little. War generally just spawns more war.