Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [156]
I do not suppose I need to discuss the change represented by the labor movement—or rather labor establishment, for it is no longer a movement—of today. Labor has won the rights and the gains it was fighting for, and now virtually controls the employer instead of vice versa, but added comfort and welfare does not seem to have added to the wisdom or happiness of the human species. The illusion broke in 1914 when socialism fell a victim to nationalism and the working class went to war with no less enthusiasm than anyone else. Shortly afterward the longed-for goal, Revolution, was incredibly and actually achieved in one country. What excitement, what enthusiasm, what soaring hope! “I have seen the future and it works,” proclaimed Lincoln Steffens. But if that was the future, it only proved history’s most melancholy truth: that every revolution, as the French anarchist Sebastien Faure said, “ends in the reappearance of a new ruling class.” Or in the case of Russia, as gradually became clear, in a new tyranny.
Not unnaturally, cynicism took hold in the 1920s and ’30s. Compared to the pre-war period when the future seemed full of promise, these decades seemed a time when, in the phrase of Gertrude Stein, “there was no future any more.”
At the same time, on the political scene the best international efforts for collective security—the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Washington Treaties for Naval Limitation, the Kellogg-Briand Pact by which fifteen nations renounced war as an instrument of national policy—were proved hollow in the face of determined aggression. Japan swallowed Manchuria and moved in on China, Germany rearmed and reoccupied the Rhineland unopposed, Italy annexed Ethiopia and a feeble attempt at sanctions was called off, and in Spain, where resistance to fascism at last took shape, it was smothered in the name of non-intervention.
What allowed these events to happen, I believe, was the reverse of belligerent will, or rather a sharply divided will as between aggressors and appeasers. The victors of the last war, with no motive like Germany’s to resume battle, feared any disturbance in the status quo, especially the threat to property represented by communism. No one has so many fears as the property-owner; it is the householder who trembles, not the prowler outside. Greater than fear, the true enfeebler of the democracies was a kind of moral defeatism arising from the corpse of the last war. It sapped the will to resist aggression.
And so, barely twenty years after the most terrible experience mankind as a whole ever suffered, after the wounds and gangrene, the deaths, disease, destruction, the ravaged ground and leafless trees, the months and years in trenches, the mud and blood, shelling and gas, the smell of rotting corpses, the lice and typhus, the loss of homes, uprooting of populations, burning of villages, the starvation, misery, brutality, and suffering of all kinds—we went at it all over again.
How could it happen? Who would have imagined in 1919 that twenty years would be all the grace the world would allow itself? This is a terrible question and the most damaging testimony against man that the recording angel will have to bring—or at least it was until the 1960s, when the over-use of soil, air, and water is causing ruin of our environment that may earn a blacker mark.
Along with the Second World War occurred an episode of man’s inhumanity to man which for sheer size, deliberate intent, and organized pursuit, was unprecedented. Its historical significance is not yet, I believe, fully appreciated. The German nation’s attempt to exterminate the Jews and achieve what they neatly called a “final solution” was an act not easily reconcilable with our idea of human progress. The Germans, who