[Peace-discuss] What Have We Learned, If Anything?

[Brussel Morton K.]

A bite sized portion of a longer, somewhat academically written,  
article  by historian  Tony Judt:  Published in the NY Review of  
Books. The essence of it is in this segment, although his discussion  
of torture is also compelling.

For the rest see http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/13/8249/

The United States avoided almost all of that. Americans, perhaps  
alone in the world, experienced the twentieth century in a far more  
positive light. The US was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers  
of citizens, or huge swathes of territory, as a result of occupation  
or dismemberment. Although humiliated in distant neocolonial wars (in  
Vietnam and now in Iraq), the US has never suffered the full  
consequences of defeat.[4] Despite their ambivalence toward its  
recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their  
country has fought were mostly “good wars.” The US was greatly  
enriched by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome, in  
which respect it has nothing in common with Britain, the only other  
major country to emerge unambiguously victorious from those struggles  
but at the cost of near bankruptcy and the loss of empire. And  
compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost  
relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian  
casualties.This contrast merits statistical emphasis. In World War I  
the US suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the  
UK, France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4  
million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about  
420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8  
million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7  
million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records  
the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting  
fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six  
weeks of fighting in May-June 1940. In the US Army’s costliest  
engagement of the century-the Ardennes offensive of December 1944- 
January 1945 (the “Battle of the Bulge”)-19,300 American soldiers  
were killed. In the first twenty-four hours of the Battle of the  
Somme (July 1, 1916), the British army lost more than 20,000 dead. At  
the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army lost 750,000 men and the  
Wehrmacht almost as many.With the exception of the generation of men  
who fought in World War II, the United States thus has no modern  
memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed  
forces of other countries. But it is civilian casualties that leave  
the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is  
piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000  
civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians.  
Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8  
million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4  
million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish  
dead. Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million.  
American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world  
wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead.As a consequence, the United  
States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures  
glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before  
1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround  
themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in  
2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage  
in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of  
war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the  
US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their  
dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the  
complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things  
Americans understand-in contrast to naive Europeans with their  
pacifistic fantasies -seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans  
(along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well.  
Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful  
ignorance of its true significance.That same contrast may account for  
the distinctive quality of much American writing on the cold war and  
its outcome. In European accounts of the fall of communism, from both  
sides of the former Iron Curtain, the dominant sentiment is one of  
relief at the closing of a long, unhappy chapter. Here in the US,  
however, the story is typically recorded in a triumphalist key.[5]  
And why not? For many American commentators and policymakers the  
message of the twentieth century is that war works. Hence the  
widespread enthusiasm for our war on Iraq in 2003 (despite strong  
opposition to it in most other countries). For Washington, war  
remains an option-on that occasion the first option. For the rest of  
the developed world it has become a last resort.[6]

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