Lessons
of the Past
By Albert B Kelly
It is said that those who do not learn from history are
doomed to repeat it and as we mark 100 years since the end of World War I- what
was called Armistice Day and today is Veterans Day- it seems only fitting to
glance back at the “war to end all wars” and see if there might be a lesson for
us today.
The first thing to note is the carnage. As for the United
States, who entered the war toward its end, the first battle casualty was Joseph
William Guyton killed on May 24, 1918 and the last soldier to die was Henry
Nicholas John Gunther killed at 10:59am on November 11, 1918, a minute before
the Armistice was to take effect at 11a.m. In between, America lost 116,708 of
its sons. All told, from 1914 to 1918, the war resulted in nearly 10 million
dead and roughly 21 million wounded.
What is striking when we read the history is that no one
really wanted war at the time. Historian A.J.P Taylor noted, “None of the statesmen
wanted war on a grand scale, but they wanted to threaten and they wanted to
win”. Maybe that’s the main lesson to take away from that period of history-
don’t issue idle threats because each threat demands a response and then a
counter response and things escalate accordingly.
In 1914, my guess is that threats and responses moved at a much
slower pace given the limits of telegraph technology in the early 1900’s. Back
then, communication was point to point from one sender to one receiver and it
allowed time to consider and reflect and while a slower pace and more time
didn’t prevent the slide into war, time and space were present in a way they’re
not today. In 2018, we have Twitter which is instant and global. Instead of a
one-on-one communication, a Tweet potentially has an audience of hundreds of
millions and this changes the calculus greatly.
Today there’s no time to think and there’s an instant
audience of hundreds of millions not to mention a worldwide press wanting to
know how a leader is going to respond. There’s instant analysis with comments
and judgements about who is up and who is down- about who is winning and who is
losing. No one, let alone a leader, wants to be seen as backing down or
“punking out” whether in the halls of a middle school, out on the street, or in
geopolitics. I’m not at all certain we’ve learned the lesson about issuing
threats a hundred years removed from World War I.
As far as war and conflict, there’s always that one spark we
like to point at as setting things ablaze. In 1914, it was the assassination of
Austrian Archduke Ferdinand during a visit to Bosnia by a guy named Gavrilo
Princip. But things are never that simple and it wasn’t just a lone nut that
set the course for World War I, but an atmosphere and a mindset that dominated
nations. In 1914, that mindset had the look and feel of patriotism, but much of
it was simple prejudice and bigotry, whether ethnic or religious.
There was also a simple-minded view of war which is
understandable because prior to World War I, wars were fought on horseback- no
planes, tanks, bombs, mustard gas, or machine guns that killed dozens in a
matter of seconds. The generation that fought World War I had no frame of
reference for the carnage and destruction that would follow and it was easy to
believe that a war could be won quickly.
Today, we know better and we have a century’s worth of
perspective from two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and Afghanistan
to remind us of the cost. Yet today, we might be wholly unprepared for a
cyberwar that knocks out our electrical grid, financial system, communications
and transportation systems because our frame of reference is the last war not
the next one.
Who knows, I could be wrong about all of this but as we
consider Veterans Day in 2018 and as we mark 100 years since Armistice Day, we
owe our veterans not only our appreciation, but a promise that we won’t blunder
into a war or expend the lives of another generation of our sons and daughters
because we failed to learn or heed the lessons of the past.