1. Names. Reminder to keep thinking about projects. Those
doing service projects, your first journals are due on Feb. 7 as well. Platoon
Mon., Feb. 4 at 8:00, in room 109 right across the hall. If you can’t see it
then, see it on your own. Looking ahead, plan on Roger and Me the same
time the next week. Less reading those two weeks, a good time to work on your
projects and maybe start on Color Purple.
Web site now has link to first six days’ stuff—web links, journals, my notes.
2. For today: pick up a bit on gender questions from last time. Jamie’s journal on gender as social construction of identity and the ongoing struggle for equality. The tendency for those with power to dismiss the concerns of those without . . . from John Adams to Jamie’s guys, who get new uniforms and a perfectly groomed ball field while the girls have to play on the “middle school kickball field.” We will return to this issue
The first half of the 20th century, not such a big time frame, hmm? The century began with empires, colonialism, the White Man’s Burden, and a great confidence about the ability of white males of European descent to make the world run more or less the way they thought it should.
The U.S., still assimilating and settling its share of the continent, didn’t acquire an overseas empire to compare with Britain’s or France’s. But note the foreign adventures in Cuba and the Philippines. See Lisa’s web site for more.
Men like John Dewey and William James—disciples of pragmatism, believers in reason and progress and the ability of human beings to make the world better. Angel’s site has some of Dewey’s quotes, and Brad found James’ lecture “The Moral Equivalent of War.”
The Progressive Era, and Populist leaders like William Jennings Bryan; reform movements on labor, gender, and other issues—Prohibition and women’s suffrage by 1920. Bryan’s plan for international arbitration and cooling off periods, 183.
Humanities 2 spends considerable time on the European/world side of all this, but it’s relevant to our study as well. One little window: some excerpts from Matthew Stevenson’s “Roads to Sarajevo,” Harper’s Feb. 2002.
Contrast this decadent little world with the realities of WW I—endless trench warfare, suicidal frontal assaults on machine gun positions, mustard gas. The romantic view of war and the other one—two poems from English war poets, both killed in the trenches.
Rupert Brooke. 1887–1915
149. The Soldier
IF I should die, think only this of me;
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
Wilfred Owen
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots 5
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; 10
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, 15
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; 20
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest 25
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The eventual result of the war: not a controlled, contained little enterprise with some shuffling of boundaries and shifting of powers, but unprecedented destruction and loss of life. U. S. entry helped swing the tide against Germany and Austria. The failure of Wilson’s League of Nations, and the harsh terms of the treaty of Versailles. The war to end all wars merely set up an even greater and more destructive one, only twenty years later.
World War II as “the Good War.” Americans have made a major effort to remember it that way, surely, especially since Korea and Vietnam, conflicts with much murkier objectives and outcomes. Even many near-pacifists pause at this one, and say that Hitler had to be stopped. If the question is framed as “Should the world have taken up arms to fight Nazism, or just surrendered?” the answer seems pretty obvious. But of course that’s not the only question that might be asked.
I’m quite ready to grant that, given the alternatives after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. could hardly do otherwise than fight the war. I certainly recognize the bravery and sacrifice of those who fought, and I’m surely glad that our side won. But let’s think about some other aspects as well
The costs. About sixty million dead, mostly civilians. 25 million in the Soviet Union—about a tenth of the population—a figure that the U.S. might have done well to recall during the days of the Cold War, when we widely assumed that the Soviets would jump into another war at a moment’s notice if they saw the slightest chance of success. Six million in Poland, four million in Germany, two million in Japan, 1.5-2 million in Yugoslavia. From 5% civilian deaths in WW I to 66% in WW II, mostly because the fighting was no longer localized/restricted to narrow battlefields.
Transformations of U.S. society. Total mobilization, transformation (and revitalization) of industry. Toward a permanently militarized economy. Restrictions on civil liberties, and internment of Japanese Americans.
Strategic bombing. Deliberate attacks on civilians en masse, for the first time in U.S. history. Accounts of Japanese and German atrocities—which were real—and the quickly escalating brutality all around. German “Blitz” of London, and Allied bombing in response. Firestorms of Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo. And then of course the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
NOTE: when I searched for “Dresden firebomb,” I got this site, http://www.nidlink.com/~aryanvic/Dresden.html . It seems a pretty accurate description of the Allied bombing campaigns, but note the source: some kind of Aryan Nation group. Gulp.
And the atomic bombings. Even in 1994-95, too controversial to allow a Smithsonian exhibit that would have told some of the results, and recognized the possibility that the war might have ended without either nuclear bombs or an invasion of Japan. J/H put the outcome to “the demonic momentum of militarism on both sides” (209). What do you think? 200,000 Japanese lives. Everybody in Toledo, more or less.
What were the options? As I said earlier, there were few good ones by 1941, or even 1938. There was some resistance to Nazi rule, especially to the deportation of Jews and others to the death camps. But for all the Schindlers and Corrie Ten Booms, there were thousands of others who went along.
To come up with a plausible nonviolent answer, probably we need to think back further. Throughout the period from 1914-1945 (and beyond), the logic of warfare overwhelmed all else as a way of resolving disputes among the nations of Europe. When we look back at them, those disputes seem utterly out of proportion with the devastation that the wars caused. But for those who look at that period and conclude that therefore there’s no hope, consider Europe today. Germany and France and England , deadly adversaries in both wars, share the same currency. When you cross the border from Germany to France you don’t even have to slow down. The idea of one of those countries going to war against the other seems absurd.
How did that happen? Not because anybody conquered anybody else. But because trade and travel were established, and it became far more profitable for everybody involved to do business than to shoot at each other. In the Muenster cathedral there’s a plaque about a ceremony, an exchange with Coventry Cathedral in England. Both were destroyed during the war, but both have been rebuilt. Peace is possible.
This website gives
further accounts on the invention and dropping of the A-bombs: http://www.hist.unt.edu/w2-14abg.htm.
This website is
really short and is written by a student, but I thought that his viewpoints on
the prevention of WWII and alternatives to Hiroshima and Nagasaki were
interesting (not that I necessarily agree with them): http://library.thinkquest.org/25909/html/content/ww2_alts.html.
Jill Kerlin
My web page is http://2think.org/quotes.html
regarding John Dewey mentioned on page 180 in our book. [ . . . ]“It is not
truly realistic or scientific to take short views, to sacrifice the future to
immediate pressure, to ignore facts and forces that are disagreeable and to
magnify the enduring quality of whatever falls in with immediate desire. It is false that the evils of the situation
arise from absence of ideals; they spring from the wrong ideals.”
Angel Lombardo-Edwards
www.pearlharborattacked.com is my web address. It shows just how tragic any war could turn out right on the cover of the page.
Adam Drake
I found a web site at http://www.phil-am-war.org/ dedicated to the centennial of the [Philippine-American] war. It has a ton of information about the war.
Lisa Langood
One thing that the chapter talked about a little bit was an essay that was written by Henry James in 1910 called “The Moral Equivalent of War”. In this essay, he argued that peacemakers should not deny the human tendency to be violent at times, but instead find ways to channel this natural violence. He did not believe that warfare and service were contradictory with each other, but were both an expression of self-sacrifice. A copy of this essay, which was based on a speech given at Stanford University in 1906, is available here.
Here is a site that contains eyewitness accounts of Pearl Harbor, the London Blitz, Blitzkrieg, Hiroshima and even a Japanese account of Pearl Harbor. Also contains pictures of the destruction caused by these events.
Brad Immel
Since I found a word I have never seen before [Pragmatism] I used that in my search on the Internet. It talks about the present dilemma in philosophy and gives another definition. There are eight different lectures for people to look at and get a good idea about pragmatism the way it is used. William James is the name in this website but I figured I would give one that concentrates on the main word being used.
http://paradigm.soci.brocku.ca/~lward/James/James1_toc.html
Bill Fisher
http://www.pbs.org/itvs/thegoodwar/ww2pacifists.html
I found a website that talked about the “Good War” and its conscientious objectors. It mainly talks about how World War II was a bloody war and that the people who objected to killing were the outcasts.
Erika Keegan