Baker: Politicians constantly fondle a small, clean,
paperweight version of this war, as if it provides them with moral clarity. We
know that it was the most destructive five year period in history. It was
destructive of human lives, and also of shelter, sleep, warmth, gentleness,
mercy, political refuge, rational discussion, legal process, civil tradition,
and public truth. Millions of people were gassed, shot, starved, and worked to
death by a paranoid fanatic. The war's victims felt as if they'd come to the end
of civilization.
But then we also say that because it turned out so badly, it was the one
just, necessary war. We acknowledge that it was the worst catastrophe in the
history of humanity--and yet it was "the good war." The Greatest Generation
fought it, and a generation of people was wiped out.
If we don't try to understand this one war better--understand it not in the
sense of coming up with elaborate mechanistic theories of causation, but
understand it in the humbler sense of feeling our way through its enormity--then
cartoon versions of what happened will continue to distort debates about the
merits of all future wars.
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