Page 2 of 3 DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA Living through the age of denial
By Tom Engelhardt
the Eurasian continent, conquering lands and wreaking havoc, reaching the very
edge of Europe while, in 1258, sacking and burning Baghdad. (It wouldn't happen
again until 2003.)
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the British and French fought something
closer to a "world war", serial wars actually in and around Europe, in North
Africa, in their New World colonies and even as far away as India, as well as
at sea wherever their ships ran across one another.
Still, while war may have been globalizing, it remained, essentially, a locally
or regionally focused affair. And, of course, in the decades before World War
I, it was largely fought on the
global peripheries by European powers testing out, piecemeal, the rudimentary
industrial technology of mass slaughter - the machine gun, the airplane, poison
gas, the concentration camp - on no one more significant than benighted
"natives" in places like Iraq, the Sudan, or German Southwest Africa. Those
locals - and the means by which they died - were hardly worthy of notice until,
in 1914, Europeans suddenly, unbelievably, began killing other Europeans by
similar means and in staggering numbers, while bringing war into a new era of
destruction. It was indeed a global moment.
While the American Civil War had offered a preview of war, industrial-style,
including trench warfare and the use of massed firepower, World War I offered
the first full-scale demonstration of what industrial warfare meant in the
heartlands of advanced civilization. The machine gun, the airplane, and poison
gas arrived from their testing grounds in the colonies to decimate a generation
of European youth, while the tank, wheeled into action in 1916, signaled a new
world of rapid arms advances to come. Nonetheless, that war - even as it
touched the Middle East, Africa, and Asia - wasn't quite imagined as a "world
war" while still ongoing. At the time, it was known as the Great War.
Though parts of Tsarist Russia were devastated, the most essential, signature
style of destruction was anything but worldwide. It was focused - like a lens
on kindling - on a strip of land that stretched from the Swiss border to the
Atlantic Ocean, running largely through France, and most of the time not more
than a few miles wide. There, on "the Western front," for four unbelievable
years, opposing armies fought - to appropriate an American term from the
Vietnam War - a "meat grinder" of a war of a kind never seen before.
"Fighting," though, hardly covered the event. It was a paroxysm of death and
destruction.
That modest expanse of land was bombarded by many millions of shells, torn up,
and thoroughly devastated. Every thing built on, or growing upon it, was
leveled, and, in the process, millions of young men - many tens of thousands on
single days of "trench warfare" - were mercilessly slaughtered. After those
four unbearably long years, the Great War ended in 1918 with a whimper and in a
bitter peace in the West, while, in the East, amid civil war, the Bolsheviks
came to power. The semi-peace that followed turned out to be little more than a
two-decade armistice between bloodlettings.
We're talking here, of course, about "the war to end all wars." If only.
World War II (or the ever stronger suspicion that it would come)
retrospectively put that "I" on the Great War and turned it into the First
World War. Twenty years later, when "II" arrived, the world was industrially
and scientifically prepared for new levels of destruction. That war might, in a
sense, be imagined as the extended paroxysm of violence on the Western front
scientifically intensified - after all, air power had, by then, begun to come
into its own - so that the sort of scorched-earth destruction on that strip of
trench-land on the Western Front could now be imposed on whole countries
(Japan), whole continents (Europe), almost inconceivable expanses of space (all
of Russia from Moscow to the Polish border where, by 1945, next to nothing
would remain standing ). Where there had once been "civilization", after the
second global spasm of sustained violence little would be left but bodies,
rubble, and human scarecrows striving to survive in the wreckage. With the Nazi
organization of the Holocaust, even genocide would be industrialized and the
poison gas of the previous World War would be put to far more efficient use.
This was, of course, a form of "globalization", though its true nature is
seldom much considered when Americans highlight the experiences of that
greatest generation. And no wonder. Except for those soldiers fighting and
dying abroad, it simply wasn't experienced by Americans. It's hard to believe
now that, in 1945, the European civilization that had experienced a proud peace
from 1871-1914 while dominating two-thirds of the planet lay in utter ruins;
that it had become a site of genocide, its cities reduced to rubble, its fields
laid waste, its lands littered with civilian dead, its streets flooded by
refugees: a description that in recent times would be recognizable only of a
place like Chechnya or perhaps Sierra Leone.
Of course, it wasn't the First or Second, but the Third "World War" that took
up almost the first half-century of my own life, and that, early on, seemed to
be coming to culmination in the Cuban Missile Crisis. Had the logic of the
previous wars been followed, a mere two decades after the "global", but still
somewhat limited, devastation of World War II, war's destruction would have
been exponentially upped once again. In that brief span, the technology - in
the form of A- and H-bombs, and the air fleets to go with them, and of
nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles - was already in place to
transform the whole planet into a version of those few miles of the Western
front, 1914-1918. After a nuclear exchange between the superpowers, much of the
world could well have been burnt to a crisp, many hundreds of millions or even
billions of people destroyed, and - we now know - a global winter induced that
might conceivably have sent us in the direction of the dinosaurs.
The logic of war's developing machinery seemed to be leading inexorably in just
that direction. Otherwise, how do you explain the way the United States and the
Soviet Union, long after both superpowers had the ability to destroy all human
life on Planet Earth, simply could not stop upgrading and adding to their
nuclear arsenals until the US had about 30,000 weapons sometime in the
mid-1960s, and Soviets about 40,000 in the 1980s. It was as if the two powers
were preparing for the destruction of many planets. Such a war would have given
the fullest meaning to "world" and no ocean, no line of defenses, would have
left any continent, any place, out of the mix. This is what World War III,
whose name would have had to be given prospectively, might have meant (and, of
course, could still mean).
Or think of the development of "world war" over the 20th century another way.
It was but a generation, no more, from the first flight of the Wright brothers
at Kitty Hawk to the 1,000-bomber raid. In 1903, one fragile plane flies 120
feet. In 1911, an Italian lieutenant in another only slightly less fragile
plane, still seeming to defy some primordial law, drops a bomb on an oasis in
North Africa. In 1944 and 1945, those 1,000 plane air armadas take off to
devastate German and Japanese cities.
On August 6, 1945, all the power of those armadas was compacted into the belly
of a lone B-29, the Enola Gay, which dropped its single bomb on Hiroshima,
destroying the city and many of its inhabitants. All this, again, took place in
little more than a single generation. In fact, Paul Tibbets, who piloted the
Enola Gay, was born only 12 years after the first rudimentary plane took to the
air. And only seven years after Japan surrendered, the first H-bomb was tested,
a weapon whose raw destructive power made the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima
look like a mere bagatelle.
Admittedly, traces of humanity remained everywhere amid the carnage. After all,
the plane that carried that first bomb was named after Tibbets's mother, and
the bomb itself dubbed "Little Boy", as if this were a birthing experience. The
name of the second plane, Bockscar, was nothing but a joke based on similarity
of the name of its pilot, Frederick Bock, who didn't even fly it that day, and
a railroad "boxcar". But events seemed to be pushing humanity toward the
inhuman, toward transformation of the planet into a vast Death Camp, toward
developments which no words, not even "world war", seemed to capture.
Entering the age of denial
It was, of course, this world of war from which, in 1945, the United States
emerged triumphant. The Great Depression of the 1930s would, despite wartime
fears to the contrary, not reappear. On a planet many of whose great cities
were now largely rubble, a world of refugee camps and privation, a world
destroyed (to steal the title of a book on the dropping of the atomic bomb),
the US was untouched.
The world war had, in fact, leveled all its rivals and made the US a powerhouse
of economic expansion. That war and the atomic bomb had somehow ushered in a
golden age of abundance and consumerism. All the deferred dreams and desires of
depression and wartime America - the washing machine, the TV set, the toaster,
the automobile, the suburban house, you name it - were suddenly available to
significant numbers of Americans. The US military began to demobilize and the
former troops returned not to rubble, but to new tract homes and GI Bill
educations.
The taste of ashes may have been in global mouths, but the taste of nectar (or,
at least, Coca-Cola) was in American ones. And yet all of this was shadowed by
our own "victory weapon," by the dark train of thought that led quickly to
scenarios of our own destruction in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, in
movies, and on TV (think, "The Twilight Zone"), as well as in a spate of novels
that took readers beyond the end of the world and into landscapes involving
irradiated, hiroshimated futures filled with "mutants" and survivalists. The
young, with their own pocket money to spend just as they pleased for the first
time in history - teens on the verge of becoming "trend setters" - found
themselves plunged into a mordant, yet strangely thrilling world, as I've
written elsewhere, of "triumphalist despair".
At the economic and governmental level, the 24/7 world of sunny consumerism
increasingly merged with the 24/7 world of dark atomic alerts, of ever vigilant
armadas of nuclear-armed planes ready to take off on a moment's notice to
obliterate the Soviets. After all, the peaceable giants of consumer production
now doubled as the militarized giants of weapons production. A military
Keynesianism drove the US economy toward a form of consumerism in which desire
for the ever larger car and missile, electric range and tank, television
console and atomic submarine was wedded in single corporate entities. The
companies - General Electric, General Motors, and Westinghouse, among others -
producing the icons of the American home were also major contractors developing
the weapons systems ushering the Pentagon into its own age of abundance.
In the 1950s, then, it seemed perfectly natural for Charles Wilson, president
of General Motors, to become secretary of defense in the Eisenhower
administration, just as retiring generals and admirals found it natural to move
into the employ of corporations they had only recently employed on the
government's behalf. Washington, headquarters of global abundance, was also
transformed into a planetary military headquarters. By 1957, 200 generals and
admirals as well as 1,300 colonels or naval officers of similar rank, retired
or on leave, worked for civilian agencies, and military funding spilled over
into a Congress that redirected its largesse to districts nationwide.
Think of all this as the beginning not so much of the American (half) Century,
but of an American Age of Denial that lasted until ... well, I think we can
actually date it ... until September 11, 2001, the day that "changed
everything". Okay, perhaps not "everything," but, by now, it's far clearer just
what the attacks of that day, the collapse of those towers, the murder of
thousands,
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