Wednesday.....Culture.....Intellectuals And War

Thomas Sowell's articles can be found at www.townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell . The fundamental difference in the Intellectual's view of war, according to Sowell in his chapter Intellectuals and War is that they eschew the value of military strength for international negotiations/or disarmaments to avoid wars. Sometimes they are for a particular war, he writes, this varies due to the conditions of the times and Woodrow Wilson, and others were for forced intervention in various areas of the globe. Prior to the First World War many believed that the world, after a long lull of major war on the continent, had left war behind, as a thing of the past. This lack of concern and preparation led to totalitarianism...spawned in the chaotic aftermath of that war. Wilson, according to Sowell, saw the autocratic nature of the German government as the culprit and viewed the Czar's overthrow in Russia this way; heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia. Sowell writes of Wilson, Wilson depicted actions taken without material motives to be somehow on a higher moral plane than actions taken to advance economic interests of individuals or the territorial interests of nations. Sowell points to the ease that Hitler had in picking off the smaller states that resulted from the demise of the Habsburg Empire and says that Wilson undermined the Kerensky regime that followed the czars which in turn led to the takeover by the Bolsheviks. Pacifism was worn as a badge of honor after the devastation of World War I. Sowell relays a bit of repartee at a British Labor Party election. One candidate proclaimed that Britain ought to disarm as an example to the others. Roy Harrod, an economist questioned this in you think our example will cause Hitler and Mussolini to disarm, to which he was met with Oh Roy...have you lost all your idealism? War had become the enemy rather than any prospective nations. Aldous Huxley called a battleship repulsive...squating there on the water, all its poinsonous armory enlarged into instruments of destruction. They were not seen as deterrents but as malign influences. The teachers unions in France led the way objecting to postwar textbooks favorably depicting the French soldiers who had defended their country against German invaders. This was moral disarmament and Hitler later remarked that France was no longer the same France that had fought doggedly through four years of the First World War. Ignorance was viewed as the cause of war, and not wickedness. The European politicians knew of Hitler's illegal rearming but that did not matter, only the next election did. Sound familiar? According to the author, neither the press nor the politicians wanted to tell the French pubic what they did not want to hear. Many in Britain considered Hitler a clown and The Times called him a moderate. When World War II started, Britain did not see its first victory untill the battle of El Alamein, the United States until Midway. Sowell concludes this chapter with neglect of history has allowed us today to forget how narrowly the Western democracies as a whole escaped the ultimate catastrophe of a victory by Hitler and his allies.