Recent comments in response to posts on Dangerous Intersection have led me to write this screed. Screed is to be the operative word for this, for it has been born out impatience and anger. The biggest danger we face in the long run is the basic ignorance people bring to the political discourse. If we lose our freedoms, it will not be to some tyrannical coup pulled off by a malicious politician, but because we ourselves collectively will no longer know what the hell we’re about.

Remembering my own school days, I cannot say that the situation presently is worse–we all have a tendency to misremember our youth, claim it to be better or worse, but the only thing we can say about it is that it was differently oriented–because most of my peers did not care a bit for history then. They plodded through their classes, primary interest focused on their own immediate desires and needs, and who cared what happened before they were born? What has changed is that as the world shrinks and becomes daily more pressing, the buffers that protected us in our ignorance no longer operate as efficiently or even in the same way. One of the things that makes modern foreign entanglements more significant for the individual is that the cause and effect loop is faster, more immediate, and more threatening. Therefore, when something begs for understanding and we look to the past for examples and counterexamples, it will not do to simply trust our leaders. Nor will it do to have merely a Hollywood understanding of the past.

I expect this will change nothing. But I am annoyed.

World War II is used often as a touchstone for military adventurism and the necessity of strong foreing policy. It is also used to excuse present-day actions, to make comparisons of situations then and now, and to validate decisions taken which seem to bear some resemblence to the past.

But the people who do this the most seem rarely to know what they’re talking about.

The world was in fact very different and America substantially so. Let me go down a list of why comparisons–specifically between the present Middle East conflict and WWII–are simply not supportable.

One: the entire globe was struggling to emerge from economic depression. We personalize the Great Depression here. An American calamity. It was bad here, very bad, but our hagiography about our nation’s past tends to blind us to the fact that entire planet was screwed up then. The world was in depression in the aftermath of the first world war. The emergence of the facsist states was directly related to this central fact. They were in many ways economic movements. They didn’t work, they depended on pillage, hence the expansionist aspect to all the fascist regimes with the exception of Spain, which was only partly facsist in the economic sense.

One thing this meant for America at the time is that we enjoyed no clear superiority economically to any other nation. We did, in fact, have more potential, and the fundamental vitality of our economic prior to 1929 softened–yes, softened–the onset of depression somewhat, but it hamstrung us in ways that make comparisons to the present-day situation absurd. Furthermore, no one was sure then that capitalism would survive. We really forget this one. The global depression put that in doubt in ways we can’t imagine now.

Two: Along with all the other problems, we had no significant military. Not even here. We forget today that one of the central tenets of America since the revolution was a profound distrust of standing armies of any kind. After WWI, we stood down. The fleet was aging, infantry were poorly trained an equipped, and numbers were low. WWI resulted in no occupation by us of anything significant.

Three: There was no CIA. Or anything even close to it. We had embassies and some embassies employed spies, usually locals, and there were a few spies employed by the government, but this was also antithetical to our vision of ourselves. Spying grew during WWI, but Calvin Coolidge shut it down. His secretary of state–I forget his name–closed down Room 14 with the famous saying “Gentlemen don’t read other people’s mail.” The branches of the military had small intelligence units, but there was NOTHING like today’s CIA, NIA, or other intelligence organizaitons. We did not have the information-gathering capacity in any way shape or form, and even if we did, there was little we could have done with any of it. The so-called “super powers” of the day were Britain, France, Russia to some extent (although they were rabidly isolationist modern myths to the contrary–the Soviet threat we came to know and love developed after WWII), and the U.S., but Britain pretty much dominated the international scene.

Four: The technology of the day was, with certain exceptions, 19th Century. Gasoline and diesel power had replaced coal in many ways (for shipping, that is) but by and large, WWII started out as a 19th Century war. It also started out as a war among relative equals.

I could go on, but just those fundamental differences should show that comparisons cannot be made but in the most careful ways, and generally not at all. WWII was a kind of war which we may never see again. Saddam Hussein was not Hitler. The closest thing we have to that kind of dictator today is in North Korea, and he is incapable of doing much more than rattle his chains, his much discussed nuclear program notwithstanding. The social and political and economic circumstances that to the emergence of Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan no longer pertain. It’s both simpler and more complex than that, but in any event it is different. An Osama Bin Laden could not have done then what he has done today, just as an emergent Hitler could not do today what he did then.

This is important, because we have a habit in this country of eulogizing and sacrilizing the past in such a way as to argue current policy points with the underlying assumption that what we did then cna apply now. Sometimes it can, but for the most part things have changed too much for valid comparisons. It leads us to presume before understanding, and that has led us into a horrid mess which bears virtually no comparison to anything we did in the past or had to face.

We need to get over that habit if we’re going to find viable solutions to future problems, and that means we better stop treating history–collectively–like a font of sacred text or that boring stuff about dead people.

End of screed.