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June 07, 2006
Echoes of another war
David Gerlernter writes on the hypocrisy of the baby boomer generation toward the greatest generation, and suggests remediating this by teaching some history. For example:
Before Pearl Harbor but long after the character of Hitlerism was clear--after the Nuremberg laws, the Kristallnacht pogrom, the establishment of Dachau and the Gestapo--American intellectuals tended to be dead against the U.S. joining Britain's war on Hitler.Sounds familiar, doesn't it?Today's students learn (sometimes) about right-wing isolationists like Charles Lindbergh and the America Firsters. They are less likely to read documents like this, which appeared in Partisan Review (the U.S. intelligentsia's No. 1 favorite mag) in fall 1939, signed by John Dewey, William Carlos Williams, Meyer Schapiro and many more of the era's leading lights.
The last war showed only too clearly that we can have no faith in imperialist crusades to bring freedom to any people. Our entry into the war, under the slogan of 'Stop Hitler!' would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here. . . . The American masses can best help [the German people] by fighting at home to keep their own liberties.
RELATED: Nihilist in Golf Pants on the Top 11 Things That Anti-War Protesters Would Have Said At the Normandy Invasion on D-Day (Had There Been Anti-War Protesters At Normandy)
Judith | 06/07/06 at 12:55 PM | Categories: Competing narratives
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Comments
It's always interesting to see icons fall. John Dewey does here. He was so smart. Did the 'used and abused' German people, to use Josef Ratzinger's phrase, know more than he?
michael | June 8, 2006 12:15 AM
I have a couple dozen mass-market paperback WWII "histories" I scooped up cheap at a used book store a few years ago. Printed in the 1950s and 60s, they are page-turning, journalistic accounts (non-fiction, mostly) of key campaigns (liberating Italy; the Battle of the Bulge), or styles of combat (tanks; air squadrons).
Hope you're feeling better.
Jeremayakovka | June 8, 2006 02:25 PM
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