(HOST) The philosopher George Santayana is credited with writing, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Commentator Willem Lange thinks it’s become one of the most quoted of all truisms, as well as one of the most ignored. He wonders when, if ever, we will learn the lessons of history.
(LANGE) Barbara Tuchman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Guns of August, published over forty years ago, details exhaustively the tiny decisions, prejudices, assumptions, and mistakes that led in 1914 to the envelopment of Europe in four years of devastation and unspeakable loss of life: The French army in the first month of the war alone lost about 300,000 men.
President Wilson, committed to neutrality so that with the end of the war the United States might act as a disinterested arbiter, was nevertheless drawn into it. It then became The War to End All Wars; yet its inconclusive end led to still another world war, only 20 years later. Watching politicians, military professionals, and diplomats stumble from one fatal error to another, you have to wonder whether our species is capable of ever learning to avoid the resort to force. As one poet said recently of modern warfare, “We’re still just tumbling rocks down onto each other’s heads.”
The characters in this drama seem eerily like our contemporaries. And character, Tuchman reminds us, is the key. The Russian tsar she describes as “a sovereign…who, lacking the intellect, energy, or training for the job, fell back on personal favorites…and other devices of the empty-headed autocrat…When a telegram was brought to him announcing the annihilation of the Russian fleet at Tsushima, he read it, stuffed it in his pocket, and went on playing tennis.” Kaiser Wilhelm felt underrated. He complained to Theodore Roosevelt, “…the Monarchs of Europe have paid no attention to what I have to say. Soon…they will be more respectful.” He was paranoid about encirclement by allied nations. From such personal characteristics flowed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
The nations’ leaders were not all numskulls; nor were they inexperienced. Most were veterans of the Franco-Prussian War; British senior officials (including Winston Churchill) were veterans of the Boer War. Yet all of them, having edged close to the vortex of war were sucked into it. Moltke, the German Chief of Staff, claimed that military preparations could not be reversed or halted. The assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne by Serbian nationalists provided both the spark and the excuse. Alliances were activated, the sides drawn.
Germany falsely claimed French attacks. The French massed behind their fortresses on the frontier; the British mobilized. The war would be over in weeks, a couple of months at most. German soldiers would be back in Berlin before the autumn leaves fell. Almost nobody could foresee the unspeakable butchery of the next four years, the near-annihilation of a generation of young men, and the waste of resources that could have transformed Europe in another way. And as far as I can see, almost nobody can to this day.
This is Willem Lange up in Orford, New Hampshire. I gotta get back to work.