(snip from the link –its not pro or anti war –it’s anti-willful stupidity)
Once was not enough
What happened to General Nogi, to his troops, and to the valiant Russian defenders of Port Arthur, was a tragedy. But when tragedy repeats itself, the second time it’s as comedy. And the clowns on the second occasion, the Great War, would neither be held to account nor would they hold themselves to account like Nogi had done. It’s in this macabre farce, worthy of Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder and Jaroslav Hašek’s Good Soldier Švejk, that Europe’s first suicide was enveloped.
The trauma of mechanized slaughter of millions of cannon fodder conscripts, orchestrated by operetta generals in World War 1 was so great, that almost all the social pathologies of the 20th century may be traced to it. Communism, Fascism, Nazism, “democratic” socialism, pacifism, militant feminism, nouveau liberalism, false egalitarianism, aggressive Third-Worldism – all blossomed from the wreckage of this war.
George Orwell could thus write of an England ruled by “people whose chief asset was their stupidity,” and a generation of post-War writers, from PG Wodehouse to Evelyn Waugh, seconded him in this opinion. Orwell wrote of the British generalship: “The higher commanders, drawn from the aristocracy, could never prepare for modern war, because in order to do so they would have had to admit that the world was changing. They have always clung to obsolete methods and weapons, because they inevitably saw each war as a repetition of the last.” (11) Let it be said, however, that Orwell was advocating socialism as a panacea, even as an Austrian refugee in London was writing a treatise showing that socialism was the road to serfdom .
The Western system of values, its standards of merit and beauty, were destroyed too. An artistic movement called Dada, a urinal on a pedestal in a museum, would have been unthinkable prior to the Great War. The devaluation of manly valor, of honor, integrity, stoicism, fidelity, loyalty, patriotism, began when Europeans realized that millions of their kin had just been sent to automated abattoirs in foreign mud fields by inept, mustachioed martinets in cavalry breeches, spouting patriotic slogans in an unnecessary war.
People who had experienced the horrors of the Great War came to believe that nothing was worth fighting for. Even as Hitler arose amidst them, they would do nothing until it was nearly too late. Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun, would mutate into the coward of Vichy. Neville Chamberlain would sue for peace before a shot had been fired. Western intellectuals were marching as one to the drumbeat of a psycho Georgian killer running Mother Russia the way Ivan the Terrible once had.
The Spanish writer, Sebastián Vivar Rodríguez, wrote that Europe died in Auschwitz. But Europe had already died in Somme, Verdun, Ypres and Passchendaele, twenty five years earlier, by its own hand. What incinerated in 1939 -1945 was just the new shoots that had sprouted from the stump of a felled tree.
