With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Thomas Frank: A cheap cynicism has brought us to disaster. Let's try a little audacity.

Yesterday was the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I and the beginning of our own time.

The world remembers the Great War for the supreme pointlessness with which it slaughtered an entire generation of British, French, German and other combatants. We remember its static, unmoving Western Front, a stationary death-mill into which brave men were fed for years without making any appreciable difference. We remember the poison gas, the moonscape of shattered trees and churned-up earth, the incompetent leadership that could imagine no way of conducting the war other than repeated frontal attacks. Above all we remember the catastrophic battles -- in the attack on the Somme in 1916 the British army walked forward in broad daylight toward entrenched German machine guns and suffered nearly 60,000 casualties in one day.

In addition to this human slaughter, the war killed off the 19th century world, toppling several monarchies and weakening the British Empire. The peace was then bungled as badly as the war itself. Communists took over in Russia, fascists in Italy and Germany and, eventually, inevitably, a second war resumed on the battlefields of the first.

What has always fascinated me about World War I was the fundamental change that this titanic futility worked in the way English-speaking people thought. It exploded the moral certainties that had propped up the middle-class order. Leaders couldn't lead; oppositions didn't oppose; and patriotism itself seemed only to point to the yawning graveyards of Ypres and Verdun.

"It reversed the Idea of Progress," writes the literary historian Paul Fussell in "The Great War and Modern Memory," the single best account of the war's cultural impact. No longer could people understand history as a reliable flow of improvement upon improvement. No longer would authority -- civic, religious or familial -- enjoy unquestioned its place in the great chain of being.

The war also demolished the language's remaining chivalric euphemisms. In 1914, Mr. Fussell writes, "Everyone knew what Glory was, and what Honor meant." By 1920, on the other hand, Ezra Pound was able to pen his famous denunciation of the system that made the war possible: "There died a myriad, / And of the best, among them, / For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization."...

During World War I, suspicion fell on those on the bottom of society -- recent immigrants, socialists and radical labor unions. Today, though, it is the elites who are said to pose the greatest threat: the multicultural college professors and the goo-goo liberals who always seem to want to read terrorists their rights.

Cynicism of this kind is something you can get out of any comic book, and now it has brought us to disaster. Disillusionment is something very different, and potentially very productive. The nation today stands disillusioned with its own cynicism and ready to try a little audacity.
Read entire article at WSJ