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Here\u2019s an initial comment:\u00a0 the more I blog, the less I know.\u00a0 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\u2019s well-informed and persuasive.\u00a0 Yes, sometimes I write for an entirely different reason \u2014 to vent about things that make me angry \u2014 and I try to identify when that\u2019s what I\u2019m doing.\u00a0 And I know that readers who disagree with me will think that I\u2019ve failed in attempting to be persuasive, but so be it.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Here\u2019s what I mean:<\/p>\n
Some time ago, I read about France prior to World War II.\u00a0 Yes, I\u2019d love to reference the particular book, but I don\u2019t 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.\u00a0 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\u2019t recall) to build up their defenses because the population was, in general, pacifist and they believed the same was true of the Germans.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately for them, they didn\u2019t comprehend that the Germans had learned an entirely different lesson.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t want to give any credence to their complaints of a \u201cstab in the back\u201d but it\u2019s not wholly unreasonable for someone without much understanding of Germany\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Could Germany\u2019s leaders at the time have avoided this outcome if they had themselves handled things better?\u00a0 Given that they had other things to worry about, given that it almost doesn\u2019t even feel right to use a bland phrase such as \u201cGermany\u2019s leaders\u201d 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\u2019s repetition of \u201clook, folks, the situation was hopeless, and everyone made the best decision available to them\u201d could have made a difference.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 But unfortunately, we learned the wrong lesson, and brought that \u201cwrong lesson\u201d 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.<\/p>\n