After the Guns Fell Silent

The First World War ended a hundred years ago today.

November 11^th is commemorated each year in our country as Veterans Day.  Most of us treat it as just another welcome day off from work or school.  In spite of our cultural fetishization of veterans and the military, however, the origins of the holiday don’t receive much scrutiny.

In Europe, the legacy of the Great War looms large.  I visited London in the summer of 2014 during the commemoration of the war’s centenary and you couldn’t avoid it.  At home, it received sparse notice from a historically oblivious public.

The war and its aftermath have irrevocably changed the course of events in ways which reverberate into the present.  It doesn’t seem to matter much to us, though.  The President traveled all the way to France for the commemoration yet declined to attend a wreath-laying at the Aisne-Marne cemetery at the last minute due to rain.  He also decided not to attend the scheduled Peace Forum summit.  The optics of this in Europe and elsewhere will be undoubtedly negative.

Then again, Mr. Trump’s opt-out is understandable considering how the people back home view that war and the value they place on peace.  World War I took the lives of 53,000 Americans in combat deaths alone not to mention another 63,000 dead from illness but since it rates only a brief mention in the high school history lessons we slept through, it might as well have never happened.

It is not accurate to say that November 11, 1918 marked the end of the fighting.  That was just on the Western Front.  It dragged on for several more years in various theaters in Europe and the Middle East.  The Greeks and Turks and Arabs and Armenians and British and French and Italians all contended for the forlorn remains of the Ottoman Empire.  Russia was wracked by civil war.  Hungary and Bavaria endured first Red, then White Terror.  The Spartacist Uprising was brutally suppressed; Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were among the victims.  Marauding Freikorps threatened the nascent Weimar Republic.

Even at home things were far from calm.  The 1919 Red Scare, unlike most other periods of national hysteria over exaggerated threats, had some justification.  It also provoked the usual disproportionate official and public response.  The Palmer Raids (instigated after attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer’s house was bombed by unknown assailants) were one manifestation.  The mob killing of Wobbly and recently discharged soldier Wesley Everest was another, as were the mass deportations of socialists and anarchists (Emma Goldman being one of them). 

Unsurprisingly, there was an uptick in racial violence as well during 1919’s “Red Summer” in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Omaha, Knoxville, Charleston, South Carolina, Longview, Texas, and Phillips County, Arkansas.  The Red Scare’s repercussions were felt into the next decade, culminating with the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, and it would raise its head once more in the 1940s.

So, the end of the First World War was more preface than conclusion.  The unnecessarily punitive conditions placed on Germany fueled popular resentment, while the shortcomings of parliamentary democracy led to the rise of fascism there and elsewhere in Europe. Lurking in the background was the specter of nationalism.

Depending on your political proclivities, nationalism is either a fine thing or it’s deplorable.  The President is a self-proclaimed nationalist.  Many Americans are, though they misappropriate the word “patriot” to describe their nationalism instead.  Right or left, we’re partial to anything which makes a social statement while requiring a minimal investment of time and money.  Thus, wearing a flag lapel pin or slapping a yellow ribbon sticker on a car qualifies one as a patriot. 

The nationalism I am describing is the move toward ethnolinguistic identity which began in the Enlightenment’s aftermath and would challenge the authority of those dynasties ruling multiethnic states.  Such ideas do animate white supremacist and alt-right activism in this country, but probably doesn’t register as strongly with the rest of the American electorate.  It remains very strong in parts of Europe, particularly Central and Eastern Europe. 

This fact became manifest after the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.  I personally witnessed the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s and am still struck by the scope of destruction to both lives and property they brought.  Those conflicts were something of an anomaly, however.  The Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian peoples share a common tongue and racial heritage.  Their national identities are instead rooted in their respective historical religious faiths.  That was enough to plunge them into a war that took roughly 140,000 lives and displaced millions.

That conflict was itself informed by the mass population transfers following the Second World War in Eastern Europe.  A beaten Germany was shrunk to two-thirds of its 1914 territory and split into two mutually hostile states.  Eastern Germans were expelled from their homeland after it was annexed by Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the Soviet Union.  Poles were expelled from their homes in the east after their lands in turn were annexed to the Soviet Union (Poland was actually shifted westward from its 1939 footprint).  Italians were driven from Istria by the Yugoslavs.  The Soviets pushed the Finns out of Karelia.  And so forth.  We can chart the border changes and count the numbers of people involved.  The scale of the human suffering caused cannot be measured.

This is the legacy of the “forgotten” World War.  Few Americans know about it, or care.  This does not negate the profound value of the lesson the twentieth century nightmare can teach us, however.  We ignore it at our peril.

Enjoy your day off, everyone.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar