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                       Imprimis, On Line -- April 1992
         
         Imprimis, meaning "in the first place," is a free monthly
         publication of Hillsdale College (circulation 360,000
         worldwide). Hillsdale College is a liberal arts institution
         known for its defense of free market principles and Western
         culture and its nearly 150-year refusal to accept federal
         funds. Imprimis publishes lectures by such well-known
         figures as Ronald Reagan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tom Wolfe,
         Charlton Heston, and many more. Permission to reprint is
         hereby granted, provided credit is given to Hillsdale
         College. Copyright 1992. For more information on free print
         subscriptions or back issues, call 1-800-437-2268, or 1-517-
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              --------------------------------------------------
         
                   "Slouching Toward Catastrophe: 1914-1939"
              by George H. Nash, Author, Presidential Biographer
         
              --------------------------------------------------
         
                              Volume 21, Number 4
                 Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan 49242
                                  April 1992
         
                                ---------------
         
         Preview: The year 1992 marks the 50th anniversary of
         America's entry into World War II, the most titanic struggle
         in human history. Nearly every nation and every people were
         involved. When it was over, more than 50 million soldiers
         and civilians were dead, as were whole nations whose borders
         would be redrawn in the succeeding era. It came, ironically
         enough, on the heels of another war, the one that was to be
         "the war to end all wars." In reality, however, World War I
         was only a dress rehearsal for a far more cataclysmic event.
         Here, historian George Nash explains why. His remarks were
         delivered during the Center for Constructive Alternatives
         seminar, "America's Entry into World War II," in November
         1991.
         
                                ---------------
         
         Seventy-three years ago, the First World War ended in
         Europe. The armistice took effect at eleven o'clock in the
         morning -- the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the
         eleventh month: a symbolic acknowledgement that European
         civilization had come close to irreversible ruin.
         
             The Great War, as men and women then called it, had been
         a conflict like none other in history. It had begun in the
         summer of 1914, when 20,000,000 European men had put on
         their uniforms, boarded trains, and headed off to
         preassigned battle stations. At the time, the British
         foreign secretary had remarked, "The lamps are going out all
         over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our
         lifetime." The men who marched believed, as the German
         Kaiser and others promised, that they would be home "before
         the leaves fell." Instead, they fell, in dark, unimaginable
         encounters like the battle of Verdun, which lasted for ten
         months and took 850,000 French and German lives. They fell
         in battles like that of the Somme, on whose very first day
         (July 1, 1916) the British army suffered 60,000 casualties,
         including 20,000 dead. By the time "the war to end wars"
         ceased, 10,000,000 people had died. In its final months a
         great pandemic of Spanish influenza swept over much of an
         exhausted globe. By the time the scourge subsided,
         20,000,000 more people had died, including half a million in
         the United States.
         
             Less than a quarter of a century later, the Great War
         had its name changed. Now a numeral -- number I -- was
         affixed, as nations embarked upon a second and even more
         titanic struggle, rightly described as "the largest single
         event in human history." Fifty million people died before it
         ended; nearly half of them were civilians. In the United
         States alone, more than 12,000,000 men and women wore
         uniforms.
         
             In duration, scale of combat, the expanse of theaters of
         operations, the number of casualties, and physical damage,
         the Second World War clearly dwarfed the First. But the
         psychic wounds of the earlier war, it seems to me, went
         deeper, and it is this dimension that I wish to explore this
         afternoon. It is not my purpose today to chronicle the
         diplomatic maneuvering that culminated in the German assault
         on Poland in 1939 or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor two
         years later. Still less is it my purpose systematically to
         analyze the immediate origins, both great and small, of
         those events. I propose instead to examine some of the ways
         in which the experience of the First World War affected the
         coming of the Second. You may ask why I do so. Because, in
         the words of the British historian A.J.P. Taylor: "The first
         war explains the second and, in fact, caused it, in so far
         as one event causes another." We cannot fully understand the
         horrific conflagration of 1939-1945 unless we fathom some of
         the psychological and intellectual impulses that the earlier
         war released and that then shaped the consciousness of
         Europe and America for twenty years.
         
                                  The Trench
         
             Every war produces its distinctive engravings on our
         collective memory. Consider the recent Persian Gulf war, for
         example: Who among us will ever forget the television
         pictures of Patriot missiles intercepting SCUDs, or the clip
         of General Schwartzkopf scorning Saddam Hussein's
         pretensions to military greatness? Look back now to the
         Second World War; what images arise? Hitler shrieking before
         a Nazi Party rally; Churchill defiant against the enemy;
         bombs falling over London during the Blitz; the rubble of
         Stalingrad; the beaches of Normandy; Pearl Harbor;
         Hiroshima; Auschwitz. When we search for mental pictures of
         the First World War, however, I suspect that most of us will
         think of only one: a trench. This remains the dominant
         symbol of the Great War -- a fact that tells much about that
         war and about what came after it.
         
             From the autumn of 1914 until the autumn of 1918, the
         armies of the Allies and of Germany faced each other in a
         labyrinth of trenches stretching in parallel for more than
         four hundred miles from the English Channel, across Belgium
         and France, to the Swiss frontier. On each side the trenches
         were of three kinds: frontline trenches, theoretically six
         to eight feet deep (or more) and four to five feet wide, and
         sometimes only forty yards from the enemy; support trenches
         a few hundred yards back; and reserve trenches farther back
         still. Connecting these three rows were communication
         trenches that ran at right angles to them. In all, the
         belligerents constructed approximately 25,000 miles of
         trenches -- enough, if laid end to end, to encircle the
         globe. In these dismal, often wet, rat-infested, lice-packed
         tunnels, several million men spent the war. Between them lay
         a desolate shell-marked quagmire filled with barbed wire and
         known as No Man's Land.
         
             For nearly four years the competing armies tried to
         break out of the ghastly stalemate -- by going "over the
         top" and attempting to rout the enemy. Nothing worked.
         Millions died or were wounded without militarily significant
         results. The combatants tried shelling each other in order
         to destroy the barbed wire and force the evacuation of the
         opposing trenches. At the battle of the Somme the British
         fired 1,700,000 artillery shells before the charge began.
         The principal effect was to make it impossible for their
         infantry to advance quickly through the churned-up mud.
         Almost always it was the attackers who lost more men. Secure
         in his own redoubts, the enemy had only to wait until the
         opposing soldiers abandoned their shelters and tried to slog
         across No Man's Land. If the enemy's return bombardment did
         not mow them down, his machine guns did. The machine gun was
         the great defensive weapon of World War I.
         
             Herbert Hoover, at the time an American engineer who
         directed an unprecedented international relief program in
         German-occupied Belgium during the war, witnessed one of
         these battles from a vantage point behind German lines. He
         never forgot what he saw:
         
             "We motored for several hours to a point near a hilltop
         observation post in the forest, a distance back from the
         forward trenches and a mile or two away from the main roads.
         During the last few miles an occasional shell cracked nearby
         but the ingenious camouflage of the road -- to the extent of
         a false parallel -- seemed to give protection to our route.
         At the post the constant rumble of artillery seemed to
         pulverize the air. Seen through powerful glasses, in the
         distant view lay the unending blur of trenches, of volcanic
         explosions of dust which filled the air where over a length
         of sixty miles a million and a half men were fighting and
         dying. Once in a while, like ants, the lines of men seemed
         to show through the clouds of dust. Here under the thunder
         and belching volcanoes of 10,000 guns, over the months of
         this battle, the lives of Germans and Englishmen were thrown
         away. On the nearby road unending lines of Germans plodded
         along the right side to the front, not with drums and bands,
         but in the silence of sodden resignation. Down the left side
         came the unending lines of wounded men, the 'walking cases'
         staggering among cavalcades of ambulances. A quarter of a
         million men died and it was but one battle in that war.
         
             "The horror of it all did not in the least affect the
         German officers in the post. To them it was pure mechanics.
         Not one of the Germans showed the slightest anxiety. They
         said that the British were losing two to one -- butting
         their heads against a stone wall. And that was true. It was
         all a horrible, devastating reality, no romance, no glory."
         
             Hoover's reaction was representative. The experience of
         the trenches became for many the dominant memory of the war
         -- the abiding symbol of unutterable horror and waste. In
         the 1920s, after the euphoria of Armistice Day had long
         since passed away, a mood of disillusionment with the war
         took hold in many sectors of European and American life. It
         spread from the "lost generation" of European soldiers,
         unable to readjust to civilian occupations, on to poets,
         painters and novelists. It was reflected in artistic
         phenomena like the nihilistic Dada movement and surrealism
         (the very word surrealism was invented by a French poet and
         soldier in 1917). It was evident in the cultural despair
         that eventuated, among other things, in the French
         existentialism of the late 1930s. We can detect it, too, in
         the frenetic hedonism that Americans associate with the
         Roaring Twenties; in the early novels of Fitzgerald,
         Faulkner and Hemingway; in the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon
         and the early T. S. Eliot (whose poem The Wasteland became
         another symbol of the age); and in the febrile decadence of
         late Weimar Germany, so effectively conveyed in the movie
         Cabaret.
         
             Nowhere, perhaps, was the perceived futility of the war
         more shockingly depicted than in the novel   All Quiet on
         the Western Front, written by a German veteran, Erich Maria
         Remarque, and published in 1929. There is no glory or
         grandeur in this tale. It is a story of endless death
         without meaning. Visiting a hospital full of wounded
         soldiers, the narrator is driven to suggest that Western
         civilization has no worth:
         
             "How senseless is everything that can ever be written,
         done, or thought, when such things are possible. It must be
         all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand
         years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured
         out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands.
         A hospital alone shows what war is."
         
             Remarque's novel was intended to be the cri de coeur of
         the "lost generation." Critics hailed it as "the truth about
         the war." In just fifteen months it sold 3,500,000 copies in
         several languages -- a record without precedent in several
         centuries of book publishing.
         
                       Disillusionment Among the Victors
         
             All Quiet on the Western Front undoubtedly abetted a
         wave of pacifistic revulsion that peaked in the early 1930s
         in the principal countries that won the war. This sentiment
         had some curious manifestations. In the Kellogg-Briand Pact
         of 1928, for instance, sixty-two nations, including the
         United States, the Soviet Union, and Germany, solemnly
         renounced war "as an instrument of national policy in their
         relations with one another," and pledged instead to settle
         all their disputes only by "pacific means." To some
         enthusiasts it appeared that the signatories had "outlawed
         war." The treaty contained no provision for enforcement; it
         was hoped that public opinion would deter violations. In
         1933 the Oxford Union -- a prestigious undergraduate
         debating society comprising the future political leaders of
         Great Britain -- resolved "That this House refuses in any
         circumstances to fight for King and Country." The vote
         precipitated a national uproar and may have encouraged Adolf
         Hitler to believe that the British would not resist his
         expansionism. In the United States in 1934, a sensational
         investigation led by Senator Gerald Nye purported to
         discover that leading American bankers and arms dealers --
         the so-called "merchants of death" -- had maneuvered Woodrow
         Wilson into entering World War I in order to save their ill-
         gotten profits and loans to the Allied governments. The Nye
         Committee hearings helped to persuade many Americans that
         they should never have fought in the Great War at all and
         that they should now withdraw from entanglements with an
         incorrigible Europe. One result was Congressional passage of
         neutrality laws designed to keep America out of the Old
         World's quarrels.
         
             By portraying the war as a pointless exercise in
         brutality, All Quiet on the Western Front also may have
         strengthened the growing appeal of historical revisionists,
         who argued that Germany was not solely responsible for the
         terrible conflict. But if this were true -- if the war in
         fact had no decisive moral content -- then were not all the
         combatant nations morally equivalent? And if that were so,
         how could the winners object to Germany's campaign in the
         1930s to subvert and ultimately repudiate the Treaty of
         Versailles? The pacifist mood in the Allied nations helped
         to shift the burden of guilt (or at least of doubt) from the
         vanquished to the victors, thereby inhibiting willingness to
         rearm.
         
                          Revenge Among the Defeated
         
             And now we come to a sobering complication: not everyone
         who witnessed the carnage of World War I regarded it as the
         ultimate evil. If the war experience and its aftermath at
         Versailles induced disillusionment in the victorious Allies,
         the specific terms of the settlement evoked in the defeated
         Germans a profound resentment and thirst for revenge. Not
         only did the hated treaty oblige Germany to acknowledge her
         guilt for starting the war -- an admission that, however
         true, seemed manifestly unfair -- it also deprived Germany
         of all her colonies, nearly half of her iron production, 13
         percent of her prewar territory, and 12 percent of her
         population. It also reduced her army to a mere 100,000 men,
         forbade it to possess tanks or airplanes, and required the
         Germans to pay immense reparations to the Allies. And it
         divided the German state of Prussia by permitting the new
         country of Poland a so-called "corridor" to the Baltic Sea.
         
             Historians still debate whether the Treaty of Versailles
         was too harsh. What strikes this historian is the tremendous
         gap that ordinary Germans perceived between their
         circumstances on the battlefield at the time of the
         Armistice and the final provisions of the Treaty eight
         months later. In November 1918, when the fighting ceased,
         Germany was not a conquered nation. In fact, she had just
         won the war in the East and had compelled her enemy, Russia,
         to cede vast territories at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. On
         the western front, at the Armistice, the German army was in
         retreat, but it had not been destroyed as a fighting force.
         In fact, at the ceasefire on November 11 it still stood on
         foreign soil. The Kaiser's army had definitely lost the war
         in the West (hence the German request for an armistice). But
         except for certain generals and high government officials,
         the German people did not know that they had been beaten.
         Thus the ultimate terms of the Versailles treaty, when they
         were promulgated several months later, appeared to most
         Germans to be unbelievably punitive and incommensurate with
         the result of the contest of arms. This perception was
         false, but it permitted Adolf Hitler and many others,
         including German army leaders who knew better, to foment the
         insidious legend of "the stab in the back": that is, the
         claim that Germany had not been defeated on the battlefield
         but had instead been betrayed from within. By whom? By the
         "November criminals" who had demanded an armistice and then
         acquiesced in the draconian treaty. By the socialists, the
         Communists, the Jews, and all who supported the Weimar
         republic created out of the ashes of defeat. "Down with the
         perpetrators of the November crime," Hitler said in one of
         his early speeches. "We must not forget that between us and
         those betrayers of the people [the Weimar
         government]...there are two million dead." For Hitler and
         countless other Germans, the war itself had not been
         meaningless. Rather, an unjust and humiliating peace had
         deprived them of their land, freedom, property, and their
         place in the sun.
         
             So Hitler clamored untiringly for vengeance, for
         repudiation of Versailles and the noxious European order
         built upon it. Germany must rise again. He was not alone in
         his hate. The general sentiment was shared by most of his
         countrymen. In 1929 the German government declared June 28 -
         - the tenth anniversary of the treaty -- to be a day of
         national mourning.
         
             Thus were set in motion two conflicting streams of
         consciousness -- and a deep, almost fatal dissonance between
         Allied guilt and German revanchism. For many in the Allied
         nations, the peace that followed the First World War was not
         good enough to justify the sacrifices in the trenches. For
         all too many Germans, the peace seemed worse than the war.
         In 1933, only months after the "best and the brightest"
         Oxford students were pledging never to fight for king or
         country, the new Nazi government seized and destroyed copies
         of All Quiet on the Western Front. At the University of
         Berlin, it was tossed into a bonfire. As a Nazi student did
         so, he said, "Down with the literary betrayal of the
         soldiers of the world war! In the name of educating our
         people in the spirit of valor, I commit the writings of
         Erich Maria Remarque to the flames."
         
             The Great War did more than generate disillusionment,
         cultural pessimism, and pacifism among the victors, and
         kindle a desire for retaliation among the defeated Germans.
         It also encouraged military planners to devise new modes of
         warfare so that when the next war came there would be no
         wanton squandering of lives in a maze of impenetrable
         trenches. During the First World War, the British had
         actually invented such a weapon -- the tank -- but had used
         it hesitantly and ineffectively. In the next war, tanks
         would be infinitely more prominent. During the Twenties and
         Thirties military men, especially in Germany, developed air
         power -- another alternative to the trench -- to a point
         that many predicted the incineration of entire cities in the
         first hours of any new conflict. In this area, as in other
         realms of technology, the Nazis pioneered. Trench warfare,
         Hitler declared, was "degenerate"; air warfare, he said, was
         a Germanic way to fight.
         
             Thanks in part, then, to technological developments, and
         in part to rancid memories of the First World War, the
         second global conflict was to be much more mobile and
         mechanized. The word blitzkrieg would enter the vocabulary.
         In the second war, the search for what one historian has
         called "revolutionary weapons" would accelerate,
         culminating, of course, in the atomic bomb.
         
             Here I call your attention to a curious fact. In certain
         respects the last great battle of World War II -- the battle
         of Okinawa --  most resembled the grim encounters on the
         Western front in World War I. On this Pacific Ocean island,
         almost eighty miles long, invading American soldiers had to
         go "over the top" -- that is, from the exposed sandy beaches
         where they went ashore up into the rugged hills and
         mountains, where desperate Japanese had entrenched
         themselves in tunnels, caves and other well-guarded
         fortifications. The American army and marines had to advance
         upon ridge after ridge, defended by Japanese fighting with
         manic ferocity. In the end, 35 percent of the American army
         troops and marines who fought at Okinawa were killed or
         wounded. One hundred ten thousand Japanese soldiers died --
         many by suicide -- rather than suffer the humiliation of
         surrender. This enormous loss of life and the fanatical
         character of the Japanese resistance convinced American
         military leaders that the impending invasion of the Japanese
         home islands would cost the American army a million
         casualties. This was a principal reason for the decision to
         drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. For American soldiers
         there would be no repetition of the slaughter, twenty-seven
         years before, in northern France.
         
                              Clash of Ideologies
         
             Let me return to the experience of 1914-1918 and certain
         other of its consequences. The First World War began as a
         clash of empires. It ended amidst a clash of ideologies. One
         of these was liberal, democratic internationalism,
         propounded by its prophet, Woodrow Wilson. "The world must
         be made safe for democracy," he proclaimed in his address
         asking Congress to declare war. For many Americans the
         struggle became a transcendent contest, not between
         governments, but between principles: between democracy and
         autocracy, democracy and Prussianism, the principle of self-
         determination and the notion that "might makes right." "What
         we demand in this war," said Wilson in January 1918,
         
             "...is nothing peculiar to ourselves. It is that the
         world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that
         it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like
         our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own
         institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the
         other peoples of the world as against force and selfish
         aggression."
         
             After listing fourteen components of a just settlement
         (his soon-to-be famous "Fourteen Points"), the President
         concluded that a single transcendent principle undergirded
         them: "It is the principle of justice to all peoples and
         nationalities, and their right to live on equal terms of
         liberty and safety with one another, whether they be strong
         or weak. Unless this principle be made its foundation no
         part of the structure of international justice can stand."
         The current war, he declared, was "the culminating and final
         war for human liberty." Americans, he said, were ready to
         give everything to vindicate the principle for which they
         fought.
         
             In the words of Woodrow Wilson's preeminent biographer,
         the Fourteen Points address was "the single great manifesto
         of World War I." Here was a vision that seemed to redeem the
         frightful slaughter and beckon mankind to a truly better
         world. Not everyone was carried away by Wilson's eloquence,
         however. The crusty old French premier Clemenceau -- of whom
         it was said that he had one illusion (France) and one
         disillusion (mankind) -- was one. Of the Fourteen Points, he
         remarked, "The good Lord had only ten." Clemenceau and other
         Allied statesmen had their own, less lofty conceptions of
         what the postwar international order should become.
         Nevertheless, for a brief moment in late 1918 and 1919,
         Wilson was ac-claimed in much of Europe as a veritable
         secular savior of the world.
         
             Of course, we all know what happened next: Wilson failed
         to implement his vision. His compromises at the Versailles
         peace conference disillusioned much of the American Left.
         His abstract professorial universalism disturbed the
         American Right. Nevertheless, Wilson's fundamental principle
         of the self-determination of peoples remained potent. It
         became one of the enduring revolutionary legacies of World
         War I -- indeed, one of the catalytic doctrines of the
         twentieth century. (Just a few months ago it provided part
         of the rationale for the American liberation of Kuwait.)
         
             Unfortunately, not all the ideologies that emerged from
         the cauldron of the Great War were so altruistic in their
         intentions. Two of them, alas, were demonic. They were, in
         fact, ideologies not of peacemaking but of struggle.
         
             The first of these -- revolutionary Marx-ism -- was not
         new; it had been around for more than half a century. But in
         the hands of V.I. Lenin it now became more than a coffee
         house theory. Lenin had never been in the trenches. He had
         spent much of the war in exile in Switzerland plotting -- at
         the time it seemed futilely -- against the Czar. While he
         condemned the Great War as an imperialistic adventure and
         exploited weariness with it to the hilt, he had no aversion
         to violence per se. He merely sought a different kind of
         violence -- an international working class uprising against
         the bourgeoisie. Then, he believed, global harmony would
         come. Woodrow Wilson wanted the First World War to end war;
         Lenin wanted an even greater war first.
         
             Once he seized power, the Bolshevik leader implemented
         his conception of politics-as-war with all-encompassing
         ruthlessness. Long before he became master of Russia, he had
         said: "In principle we have never renounced terror and
         cannot renounce it." For Lenin only one question mattered:
         "We'll ask the man, where do you stand on the question of
         the revolution? Are you for it or against it? If he's
         against it, we'll stand him up against a wall." Let no one
         ever tell you that the Gulag Archipelago originated with
         Josef Stalin. Within months of the Bolshevik coup in
         November 1917, Lenin himself and his willing cohorts had
         created a secret police, had established embryonic
         concentration camps, and had instituted an unending wave of
         political executions. In January 1918 he personally ordered
         the departments of his government to "purge the Russian land
         of all kinds of harmful insects." This was not hyperbole; he
         meant it. By the time of his death in 1924, Lenin had
         willfully and remorselessly created an unparalleled system
         of internal warfare against his own people. And thus, out of
         the maw of the "the war to end wars," there arose a hideous
         new form of warfare: perpetual institutionalized terror
         against one's own citizens, even to the point of
         exterminating them. We now call it totalitarianism.
         
             In this connection, I will never forget a conversation
         that I had in graduate school with some fellow students, one
         of them a Marxist who resolutely defended the Soviet Union.
         Finally, an exasperated friend of mine asked: what about
         Stalin's liquidation of the kulaks, the enterprising
         peasants who were killed by the millions in the early 1930s?
         The Marxist replied simply: "They never should have existed
         as a class."
         
             Leninism was a beneficiary, though not a direct product,
         of the war in the trenches. To a significant degree, the
         other ideological demon unleashed by the war was. I refer,
         of course, to the phenomenon of Nazism. If for the Allies
         and the United States the ultimate lesson of the trench
         experience was "No more war," and if for Lenin and the
         Bolsheviks the lesson was "One more war," for Adolf Hitler
         the fundamental meaning of 1914-1918 was different. Unlike
         Lenin, Hitler had been a denizen of the trenches. For about
         four years he fought on the Western front and found the
         experience to be the most gratifying of his life. What was
         not satisfying to him was its ending.
         
             Historians have noted many similarities between
         Bolshevism and Nazism, and between their respective founding
         fathers. Like Lenin, Hitler was a revolutionary and a self-
         proclaimed socialist, although his variant was called
         "national socialism" rather than international. Like Lenin,
         Hitler was anti-Christian and totally without moral
         scruples. Like Lenin, he conceived of politics in military
         terms and instituted an apparatus of state violence never
         before seen on earth. But whereas for Leninists the meaning
         of existence was class struggle, for Nazis the engine of
         history was racial struggle. In short, and, again, as other
         historians have observed, Hitler's world view was a form of
         Social Darwinism -- the notion, put crudely, of "the
         survival of the fittest." For Hitler and his followers, the
         essence of social evolution was not economic but ethnic.
         
             We need not linger over the odious contents of Nazi
         ideology: the idea that Germans or "Aryans" were the "master
         race" who should dominate the world; that Slavs were
         inferior and must become slaves; that the German Volk needed
         lebensraum in the East, all the way to Iran; that the Jews
         (in Hitler's word) were "vermin" who must be destroyed. Nor
         need we do more than take note of the fact that for millions
         of German war veterans and others, Nazi symbolism -- the
         uniforms, the parades, the salutes, the flags, the
         regimented rallies at night -- recreated what was called
         "the community of the trenches." In a sense, Hitler wanted
         to renew World War I. But what deceived many in the West was
         the belief that all he wanted was to reverse the inequities
         of Versailles and to restore the German nation to prominence
         in Europe. Transfixed by the trench experience, many could
         not imagine that Hitler desired all that -- and much more.
         
             I do not wish to imply that the racism inherent in
         Hitler's brand of socialism was somehow peculiar to central
         Europe in the two decades between the world wars. Racial
         stereotyping was not new, nor was it confined to the Old
         World. Many Americans, for example, despised and
         discriminated against Japanese immigrants. Many Japanese
         boasted of their racial "purity," asserted their "divine
         mission" to rule over Asia, referred to the Chinese as
         "chinks," and yearned for the day when, as one of their
         admirals put it, they "could return Admiral Perry's visit."
         No, ethnic chauvinism was neither new nor localized. What
         was different after 1918 was that in a number of so-called
         "have-not" countries, attitudes of racial superiority become
         transmogrified into "armed doctrines" -- rationales for
         genocide and war without pity.
         
             The First World War, then, gave birth to the Ideological
         Age. Perhaps this outcome was inevitable in the aftermath of
         perceived civilizational collapse. Most political
         ideologies, after all, aim in some way to remake the world.
         What else but a "purified" world could erase the memory of
         the bloodletting of the Great War?
         
             In the movie Cabaret there is a chilling scene in which
         a fair-haired German youth sings to a crowd at an outdoor
         restaurant in the waning days of Weimar. As the camera
         turns, we see that he is wearing a Nazi uniform and swastika
         on his armband. He is cheerful. He is confident. His song
         ends with the words: "Tomorrow belongs to me." This, too,
         was part of the allure of the two evil ideologies that laid
         siege to Europe's soul after the Armistice. Yesterday, the
         war; today, corruption and shame; but "tomorrow belongs to
         me." This is the false promise of all totalitarians: that
         the future will atone for the crimes committed in its name.
         
                                  Conclusion
         
             This has been, of necessity, a somber lecture, and it
         has not been possible to consider all the intellectual and
         spiritual consequences of World War I. Other important
         phenomena of the period come to mind, such as the influence
         of wartime collectivism on the response of the United States
         and other countries to the Great Depression. Instead, my
         focus has been on the direct antecedents of World War II --
         specifically, the great currents of thought and sentiment
         that arose, at least in part, in reaction to the sense of
         futility and loss symbolized by trench warfare and the
         Versailles treaty: disillusionment, cultural despair, and
         pacifism among the war's winners; a "lost generation" and
         dreams of reprisal among the losers; a quest by military
         minds for alternatives to battlefield paralysis. And, in
         addition, three competing ideologies that attempted to
         interpret and transcend the war experience: liberal,
         democratic internationalism; Communism; and Nazism.
         
             In the Second World War these three would clash, and the
         guardians of two of them would join to defeat the third. But
         that is a story for others to tell. For now, let me close
         with a line from William Butler Yeats. In his poem, "The
         Second Coming," published just a few years after the
         Armistice, he asked:
         
             "And what rough beast, its hour come round at
         last/Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"
         
             The First World War produced more than its share of
         "rough beasts." It has taken the rest of this century to
         subdue them.
         
                           ------------------------
         
         Historian George Nash's study of conservatism prior to the
         Reagan years, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in
         America Since 1945 (Basic Books, 1976, reissued in paperback
         by Harper & Row, 1979), has since become a standard
         reference for students, scholars and policymakers. While a
         research fellow at Harvard in 1973-74, he was co-editor of
         Province in Rebellion, a four-volume history of the coming
         of the American Revolution in Massachusetts, and in 1975 he
         was commissioned by the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library
         Association to prepare a definitive, multivolume biography
         of the former president. The Life of Herbert Hoover: The
         Engineer, 1874-1914 (W. W. Norton & Co.) was published in
         1983, and The Life of Herbert Hoover: The Humanitarian,
         1914-1917 (W. W. Norton & Co.) appeared in 1988. He is
         currently at work on a third volume. Dr. Nash's articles and
         reviews have appeared in such publications as the Wall
         Street Journal, National Review, the Journal of American
         History, Modern Age, the American Spectator, Continuity, the
         Catholic Historical Review, and Policy Review.
         
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