https://amgreatness.com/2021/04/10/the-fatuousness-of-guilt-as-an-instrument-of-policy/
When the world no longer speaks meaningfully to us, we shout into the void and pretend the echoes come from on high.
In Europe’s Last Summer, his brilliant book about the origins of World War I, the historian David Fromkin dilates on the seductive beauties of the summer of 1914. It was, he notes, the most gorgeous in living memory. That serene balminess seemed an objective correlative of the rock-solid political and social stability that Europe had enjoyed for decades. Percipient observers might have discerned troubling clouds on the horizon. But there were plenty of soothing voices to point out that the world’s increasing economic interdependence rendered any serious conflict impossible. There had been no war among the Great Powers for nearly half a century, ergo the status quo would persist for decades, maybe forever. There would always be honey then for tea.
When war did finally break out, it was greeted in many quarters as a lark, a holiday, a deliverance from the tedious routines of everyday life. Yes, there were some cautionary voices. In August 1914, for example, Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, mournfully predicted, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our time.” But at that moment, Grey’s was a minority perspective. “We’ll just pop over to France next week and be home by Christmas.” That was the popular refrain.
In Germany, the mood was triumphalist. Thomas Mann, for example, cheered “the collapse of the hated world of peace, stinking of the corruption of bourgeois-mercantile ‘Civilization’ with its enmity to heroism and genius.”
Then in September came the first battle of the Marne. Its unprecedented slaughter exacted half a million casualties in a week. It is accounted a great victory for the Allies. But although it halted the German advance, it also paved the way for four years of that butchery by attrition that is trench warfare in the age of total war.
Cultural Consequences?
The Great War had enormous economic and political consequences, of course. It also had enormous consequences in the realm of cultural endeavor, in the visual arts and literature. It is often said that the primary existential or spiritual effect of the war was disillusionment. Barbara Tuchman, for example, notes in one of her classic studies of the Great War that the war had many results but that the dominant one was “disillusion.” She quotes D. H. Lawrence, who observed, “All the great words were cancelled out for that generation.” Honor, nobility, valor, patriotism, sacrifice, beauty: who could still take such abstractions seriously after the wholesale slaughter of the war?
