Armistice Day thoughts: learning the wrong lessons

Last updated on: November 11, 2018 at 12:59 pm by Jane the Actuary

Armistice Day thoughts: learning the wrong lessons 2018-11-11T12:59:53-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Here’s an initial comment: the more I blog, the less I know. That is, I find that blogging forces me to think carefully about issues, so as to attempt, to the best of my ability, to write something that’s well-informed and persuasive. Yes, sometimes I write for an entirely different reason — to vent about things that make me angry — and I try to identify when that’s what I’m doing. And I know that readers who disagree with me will think that I’ve failed in attempting to be persuasive, but so be it.

And it strikes me that, as much as warfare has been about conquest and gain, that there are plenty of examples of leaders and citizenry learning the wrong lessons from prior wars to mishandle the next ones. Here’s what I mean:

Some time ago, I read about France prior to World War II. Yes, I’d love to reference the particular book, but I don’t recall what it was any longer, and it seems to me that it was one chapter in a book which was primarily about something else. But what struck me was that during the whole period when Hitler came to power, remilitarized the Rhineland, helped himself to the Sudetenland, and so on, it took so incredibly long for the French (and perhaps also the British, but I don’t recall) to build up their defenses because the population was, in general, pacifist and they believed the same was true of the Germans. They had suffered so much in World War I that they simply could not believe that the Germans would not also share their belief that war is horrible and the death, destruction, and suffering of The Great War taught a lesson that war should be avoided at all costs.

Unfortunately for them, they didn’t comprehend that the Germans had learned an entirely different lesson.

I don’t want to give any credence to their complaints of a “stab in the back” but it’s not wholly unreasonable for someone without much understanding of Germany’s decision-making to feel that something had gone terribly wrong for their country to have surrendered even though no enemy soldiers had entered their territory. Could Germany’s leaders at the time have avoided this outcome if they had themselves handled things better? Given that they had other things to worry about, given that it almost doesn’t even feel right to use a bland phrase such as “Germany’s leaders” at a time when the Kaiser abdicated, a republic was proclaimed, right- and left-wing paramilitary forces fought in the streets, and coalitions fractured and new elections were called on a regular basis, it seems a bit foolhardy to imagine that a propaganda ministry’s repetition of “look, folks, the situation was hopeless, and everyone made the best decision available to them” could have made a difference.

But nonetheless the story we now tell ourselves is that the Allies were wrongly punitive after World War I, and they (and especially the U.S.) wisely learned the lesson to be merciful after World War II, so that, by means of providing generous aid for rebuilding, Germany and Japan became peaceful democracies. But unfortunately, we learned the wrong lesson, and brought that “wrong lesson” into Afghanistan and Iraq, where our misunderstanding of the outcome of World War II, that all it takes is some generosity on the part of the victor to create a peace-loving democracy in the vanquished country, has caused us no end of headache.

Why did Germany and Japan succeed as democracies after the war? In part, we continued to occupy them, even though we eventually transformed “occupation” into “conveniently happening to have military bases there.” It probably didn’t hurt that we had a new common enemy. Both countries were industrialized and educated. Germany had begun to develop democratic ideals in the Weimar Republic period; Japan (whose military occupation lasted longer, all the way to 1952), was not really a multiparty democracy in quite the same way as we think of it in the U.S., as a single party held power from 1955 to 1993. And both countries were so utterly vanquished as to make it impossible to cultivate any sort of “back-stab” myth.

In fact, I suspect that, in the immediate aftermath of World War II, no one particularly believed that treating vanquished foes with magnanimity would produce the desired democratic-state outcome, or at least no one considered it a “lesson learned” for the next war, as the U.S. was pretty much OK with South Korea being a fairly autocratic state, so long as it was allied with us and protected from the North Koreans/Soviets/Chinese. (Yes, the analogy isn’t exact because we weren’t occupying a vanquished enemy but it does suggest that we didn’t place a high priority on countries being democracies.) In fact, it makes me curious as to when we began telling ourselves that we “learned the lesson of generosity” after World War II, that all it takes is a generous helping hand for one’s foe to become a model democratic states.

Of course, we now think we’ve learned a new lesson from Afghanistan and Iraq, though I think there are different combinations of “we” who take away different lessons, whether it’s “never get involved in a land war in Asia” or “don’t think you’ve succeeded just because the regime has been eliminated.” My sense is that the predominant sense of what the “lesson learned” is, is a simple “it’s none of our business.” And I think this “lesson” will come back to bite us sooner or later.

Because all such “lessons” are stupid if we think we can generalize from past wars into future foreign policy problems and, indeed, future wars that are likely to confront us.

So those are my thoughts. What are yours?

Image: Dresden, Teilansicht des zerstörten Stadtzentrums über die Elbe nach der Neustadt. In der Bildmitte der Neumarkt und die Ruine der Frauenkirche. Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1994-041-07 / Unknown / CC-BY-SA 3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 de (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)], via Wikimedia Commons

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