By Michael F. Duggan
I have not… cried aloud
In worship of an echo; in the crowd
They could not deem me one of such—I stood
Among them, but not of them—In a shroud
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts…
-Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto the Third, no. CXIII (1816).
During the summer of 1914, a wave of war euphoria swept the cities of Europe.1
We have all seen the pictures of young men gleefully or grimly lining up to enlist, and the flickering newsreels of women handing flowers to marching soldiers in English khaki, French blue, and German grey, sometimes stealing a kiss. One of the most haunting images of the 20th century is of a crowd of confident young men in front of the Central London Recruiting Depot. One is left wondering how many in this image died at Loos, the Somme, Passchendaele, or on some unnamed French or Flanders field. Some, no doubt, lie in unmarked graves
Rather than try to understand the many causes of the war, most of the people of that time were mobilized to action by cries of “Poor Little Belgium!” and the direct appeal of recruitment posters. By the time the war ended more than four years later, about 20 million people had died, and all that had been accomplished was to set up the conditions for a far more destructive war 20 years later.
Following its entry into the war in April 1917, a similar wave of enthusiasm swept the United States with an intensity bordering on the fascistic and characterized by lockstep conformity enforced by all manner of social coercion. Much of it was the handiwork of George Creel and a government agency called the Committee on Public Information (CPI).2 American towns with German names were changed and the music or Bach and Beethoven was banned in music halls. In late 1941 and 1942, another wave of patriotism mobilized the nation for another war, but this time it was grim with righteous anger and a desire for vengeance. Today, the nation—or at least its mainstream media—is in the grip of another wave of war fever, even though Americans are not officially combatants and most Americans do not want their nation directly involved in the fighting.
Still, to even question the official narrative or to attempt to discuss the context and prehistory of the Russian invasion these days is to invite suspicion. Although I cannot prove it, my posting of articles on Facebook about the generation-long causes of the war, such as the expansion of NATO deep into the traditional Russian sphere of influence, and more recent ones, like the non-compliance with provisions of the Minsk II agreements, appears to have gotten me into a kind of quiet trouble with some of my friends.
Again, I can’t prove it, and I am not accusing anybody of anything. And I know all too well that Facebook is a poor medium for communicating subtlety and nuance, for ideas generally. I never play for “Likes” or to the crowd (symptoms of the addiction and conformity that social media encourage and welcome), so it is hard to tell. But at this point, no matter what I post, I get few replies and no more than one or two “Likes” on even the most benign of topics. Anything I post on the Ukraine war gets no reaction at all.
As far as I know, I have not been “Unfriended” by anyone, and I would be surprised if there was a messaging campaign encouraging others not to respond to my posts on Ukraine—I am not alleging what George Seldes called a “non-conspiracy of silence.” Rather, when I post something, nothing happens, nothing at all but the awkward e-silence of the great Facebook echo chamber. I certainly cannot blame them, given how the war has been pitched by the American corporate media, and their instincts to want to help suffering Ukrainian civilians is noble and sound. In fact, I have no one to blame but myself for trying to buck the chamber with a minority viewpoint, albeit a moderate one based on history.
What is curious is that these are not censorious people. Quite the opposite, on balance they are good, educated, liberal-minded people—the best. It is the medium and its ability to consolidate the instinct of the moral herd. There is a kind of conformity (I will not call it illiberality) that emerges from misinformed etiquette and ossifies unnoticed into groupthink and a tendency toward unspoken coercion.
But what do they believe? That a major war has no historical past, no geopolitical context, no lineage of error and misjudgment on both sides? A narrative of a rogue nation acting without motive other than intrinsic malice trampling on the freedom of a blameless neighbor? A fairy tale that Putin wishes to reconstitute the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact (if the Russian army couldn’t even make it to Kyiv, what chance does it have of making it to Warsaw, Berlin, or Paris?)? Have they considered that even if the invasion is morally unjustifiable, that it might be historically understandable beyond simplistic categories of freedom versus despotism? Could it be that some modern Americans have fallen prey to the same uncritical, atavistic impulses experienced by people during outbreak of the First World War? What is the saying—the more things change, the less things change?
So, what are Americans cheering for this time, if not the direct commitment of U.S. forces? Supplying one side with tens billions of dollars of weapons and actionable intelligence without a greater and more direct involvement (does participation in a great powers war really permit that?)? An open-ended war with no possibility of peace in sight? A new cold war to benefit the arms industries? The escalation of a horribly destructive great powers proxy war that could easily turn into a broader regional or global conflict with a nuclear ending?
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists just moved the time on the Doomsday Clock to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to Armageddon. For context, it was set at seven minutes—420 seconds—to midnight during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Keep on cheering, folks. Just do a little history homework beyond the headlines and clichés in order to know what you are cheering for and why.
Note
- The late British historian, Michael Howard, observes that although war fever swept through the cities of Europe, “this urban excitement was not necessarily typical of public opinion as a whole.” The First World War, 32. In his 2012 history on the outbreak of the Great War, The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark downplays the popular idea of the war hysteria during the summer of 1914. 553-54.
- Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War One, 1917-1921 (New York: Harper && Row, Publishers, 1985), 202-203.