Amateur Megalomania

Growing up in the seventies and eighties, I couldn’t help but be aware of those old men showing up on my television from time to time – Premiers Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Foreign Ministers Gromyko and Shevardnadze. These rumpled men in their rumpled suits represented an alien force. They were unfathomable, capricious men of an alien system, armed with an arsenal that demanded to be used. As I grew and matured, these faces morphed from icons of simple, naive misunderstanding, to feared adversaries, and ending with symbols of decay and collapse.

You couldn’t grow up without feeling the nuclear sword overhead. Certainly, older generations lived through events that eclipsed my paranoia. But these experiences are unique to me, and I will never be able to forget the periodic testing of the Emergency Broadcast System, or the warning siren’s wail, signaling either a tornado or nuclear annihilation. It is an odd feeling, quietly praying for a tornado as the best possible outcome.

But all of that went away, and we were confronted with what many historians called ‘the end of history’. Western Capitalism had won out as the dominant eco-political system, and the rest of the story would be about cleaning up the shattered remains of the Long War of 1914-1990. Even then, I thought the view wasn’t quite correct, but I had no idea we would be entering a more dangerous era then that which we were leaving.

The Long War killed seventy million people. The Russian Civil war (taking Russia out of WW I) killed nine million. Stalin killed another twenty million during his reign.

Essentially, one hundred million people died, while the entire planet flirted with annihilation by the end of the conflict.

Of course any rational man would look at this and draw a rather simple conclusion – never again.

But I don’t think that was the correct lesson. And the stakes are even higher, despite the unimaginable horror of those one hundred million dead.

Rational people generally don’t start wars. Rational people understand the horrific costs or conflict, and self-interest directs us to more appropriate means of resolving conflict. We go to the UN (despite its relentless determination to do nothing). We engage in sanctions. Diplomacy. We treat other men as rational beings, and try to find common ground. We constantly look at the Long War and mutter “Never again.”

The lesson we missed – the vital lesson that shouts to be heard – is: the world teems with irrational people.

And at times, those irrational people seize the reigns of a state, or acquire the technology to do great harm on others. And these irrational people hear our mutters of ‘Never again’ and smile, because they don’t care. The charnel house of twentieth century Europe is merely another tool to be used against us.

Yet we continue to treat our conflicts as disagreements between rational men, while seeking any possible path to honor our promise of ‘Never again’.

Every generation looks back on the past with an insular sense of protection. The privations and suffering of our ancestors are surely a thing of the past. Our modern sensibilities and cleverness brings us new ways to avoid what could not be avoided even a few decades ago. Our worldview seems determined to ignore the one constant of human history – irrational people bent on imposing themselves on others through force.

And here we are, waiting on the nuclear shoe to drop. Here we stand, confronted by a foul ideology cloaked in religion, inoculated from confrontation by our own heartfelt beliefs of toleration and openness.

We will continue to cling to our incorrect lesson of the Long War, until some unimaginably violent act forces us to stir. Then, we will enter into a war – not against a mere nation state, but a conflict with a nuclear religion, stocked with one and a half billion followers, not bound to a region or an army.

And they draw strength from our chants of ‘Never again.’

It is difficult to imagine a century bloodier than the twentieth. Before long, the survivors won’t have to imagine it at all.

There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men. Edmund Burke

Filed under: Politics