Breeding Ground
The -isms of our lives.

By Victor Davis Hanson, author most recently of Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power.
January 22, 2002 8:25 a.m.

"War is a violent teacher"
Thucydides

he paradoxes of democratic warfare, now and in the past, are exasperating. Why must consensual societies kill, bomb, and destroy — only to end up friends with, and actually later give recompense to — their erstwhile enemies? In 1943 Italians were killing Americans and British. By 1945 they were helping them to kill Germans. We nearly leveled Germany; but then years later saved Berlin by airlifting food and rebuilding the country through the Marshall Plan.

Did the Germans after May 1945 suddenly change appearance, religion, or language? Did survivors of the war begin to speak English and play baseball? Why were we hoping German soldiers would freeze in Stalingrad in 1942 and yet four years later were counting on them to help us fight their conquerors?

In August 1945 we used atomic weapons against the Japanese. In November we were sending them tons of food to feed millions and lawyers to draw up an autonomous and liberal constitution. NATO countries in 1985 were prepared to use tactical nukes to keep Russians out of Germany; by 1994 they scrambled to send them billions in aid — even as our enemies in Eastern Europe became our staunchest friends, pleading with us to join an alliance a few years earlier they had sought to destroy. This September we saw images of Afghanis burning our abandoned embassy in Kabul; a few weeks later these former rioters were smiling and lining up for jobs as we moved back in.

The ironies of conflict are not merely to be attributed to the easy idea that war is intrinsically "bad," and senseless — as if we might all just get along with proper counseling, and so to our self-righteous delight declare war obsolete and unnecessary. Or at least war is not entirely explained away by such facile assumptions. We are increasingly learning that even states divided by religion, custom, history and tradition can in fact, get along — but usually only if they come to share some modicum of freedom, religious tolerance, consensual government, and the ability to criticize government. England and America liked Germans, but not German Nazis — in the same manner we liked Russians, but not Soviet Communists, and Afghanis, but not Taliban.

It is not just the fault of a tiny few for installing tyranny over an "innocent" and unsuspecting people. Citizens themselves are also culpable for the thugs they receive and tolerate. There is, after all, some reason that explains why the mullahs, not democrats, took over from the Shah; why Saddam Hussein still rules with an iron hand; why Hitler came to power — and why the Taliban bullied Afghanistan. And the answers are not, as usually alleged, the easy excuses that "they" (some foreign power like the United States, or the "Jews," or even the communists, or the fascists) foisted a dictator down the throats of a guiltless populace.

The breeding ground for autocracy is not only hunger and disease, but also national amnesia and ignorance. The culprit is, then, a state of mind in which millions lose their senses and in their hypnotic state allow liars and criminals to blame others for their own largely self-inflicted ills — or at least lack the courage to seek solutions from within. The Germans did not want Hitler (he, in fact, received a minority of the votes in 1932), but they did not want to face up either to their real military defeat in 1918, or to confront the fools and the bogus beliefs that had led them on the road to catastrophe in 1914.

Most Southerners did not own slaves, distrusted the plantationists, and knew the surrounding culture of latifundia was unsustainable. But most also went along with hotheads of secession, blaming their problems on abolitionists rather than on their own pyramidal society and a bankrupt system of chattel slavery. Many Muslims in the Middle East privately concede that high rates of illiteracy, tribalism, statism, autocracy, religious fundamentalism, lack of free speech and dissent, and gender apartheid better explain why people starve in Islamabad or Cairo. Yet most also know that it is far easier to publicly say Israel is the cause of their problems. The human propensity for self-delusion, fueled by the envy that arises out of a sense of inferiority, is the fuel of dictators and ultimately the breeding ground of war. A Saddam Hussein or bin Laden is usually symptomatic, rather than causal.

Unfortunately, most often the threat of force — or war itself — is the only answer that can end peoples' grand delusions and knock them back to their senses. We are friends with the Afghanis, because the Taliban are scattered; in the same manner we do not like the Iraqis as long as Saddam Hussein is in power. Should we bomb Baghdad and destroy his armed forces, it is likely that Iraqis will celebrate and protest that they hated him all along — but not enough to overthrow his murderous cabal until they got help from the hated Americans. Somalis cheered when American dead were dragged through their streets; now with U.S. warships off the coast, they point to the warlord next door and say, "He, not we, did it" — as their politicians talk grandly of freedom. Should those ships leave their waters, the thugs will be back in seconds, and an American's life won't be worth a used Kalishnikov. Mr. Musharraf is glad to be done with the Taliban he once promoted — not because he fell for the charm of Colin Powell, but rather because he that saw GPS-bombs were getting awfully close to his own borders.

So the -isms and -ologies of this present war that have infected millions can only be shown bankrupt by their complete repudiation, which tragically must come from either the threat of force or military defeat, humiliation and real loss. Only that way can both adherents and the innocent alike learn the real wages of allowing their country to be hijacked by agents of their delusion. The enemy is never a person per se, but the fanaticism that has taken hold of him — and war sometimes is the only exorcist strong enough to rid the zombie host of such deadly demons and let him be reborn. It is critical also that the necromancers who caused such destruction — a Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini, Mullah Omar, or bin Laden — be sent to the next world, never left to dabble as "reformed" or "moderates" in a subsequent government.

Georgians in 1861 had promised a century of war if need be; by 1865 such firebrands told Sherman to hurry over to the Carolinas and burn instead those "who started it all". When Patton crossed the Rhine, families took down pictures of Hitler and waved at Sherman tanks, in the manner that we see movie houses full and TVs dug up in Kabul. Yet we must remember that Sherman would have failed utterly (and did fail) to talk sense to recalcitrant Southerners in 1860; German would have laughed at a Yankee peacekeeping delegation to Berlin in 1940, and not a single American would have been safe offering free videos in Afghanistan in 1998.

In a perfect world, we would hope all that the liberal utopians — who deplore the air strikes, who lecture that we are bombing only soon to be rebuilding, and who pontificate that we "have nothing against the Iraqi people" — could be right and that human nature was not what it is. But alas they are wrong, quite deadly wrong. We war to disabuse our enemies of their murderous ideas, their cheap and easy preferences for untruths that feel good rather than the truth that hurts and won't go away. We war because the damage we do is not a good answer, but the only age-old answer to the false -isms of each age — fascism, communism, nazism, totalitarianism, militarism, and now fundamentalism — that so easily infect men's minds when they are weak and vulnerable.

We war not with religion, race, and custom, but with seductive authoritarian falsehoods that get innocents killed and tragically are not abandoned until they threaten to bring utter destruction down upon all those who either promulgate or even tolerate such counterfeit -isms. And so in both our ignorance and our innate humanity we destroy and rebuild, fight and befriend — until the spirit of man himself changes and he in his maturity seeks difficult solutions for the unhappiness in himself, rather than cheap solutions in others.

The Palestinians will have peace only when war or the threat of war demonstrates to them that a corrupt government that brooks no dissent and a press that is not free is as dangerous and self-defeating to their cause as all the settlers on their occupied land. The only alternative offered Sherman in Georgia was not really peace talks, but in fact more slavery and secession. B-17s and the Third Army were not humane, but far more humane than Dachau. Hiroshima was a nightmare, but a nightmare on par with Nanking and Okinawa — and far less murderous than another bloody decade of Japanese imperialism in China and the Pacific.

A year ago Afghani warlords would have dubbed Mr. Karazi a Western dandy — as they hung his riddled body from a noose in the public square. Now — thanks to daisy-cutters and the misery and defeat left behind by the Taliban — they begrudgingly are listening to his ideas about good government. They, not he, have changed — and that transformation was not brought about by the U.N., Mr. Clinton's post presidential speeches, or the wild sermons of a Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky. Again, we all wish that these bleak assessments of human nature were not true, but denial, not acceptance, of such a bitter reality gets blameless and defenseless people killed.

Of course, we of the affluent West must bring food, education, and training to the poor and downtrodden in the very breeding grounds of al Qaeda. But there are also times in history when people — whether mesmerized or cowered — under dictatorial regimes view such compassion as timidity, such largess as weakness, and so must instead first be defeated, next enlightened, and then at last helped — but only in that order. Let those who cheer on bin Laden and abet the terrorists learn from the Germans, Italians, and Japanese, who have been there, done that.