November 11, 2003

ARMISTICE AND REMEMBRANCE

by Srdja Trifkovic

They will not grow old, as we who are left grow old.
Age shall not weary them or the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we shall remember them.

But shall we? In this morning’s New York Times I could not find any reminder of the fact that today is the day when the Great War ended, when the guns fell silent on the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918. The link between today’s Veterans Day and the Armistice Day of yore has been severed. If remembrance is what makes us what we are, we are no longer we.

The Great War, to most Americans, is as little known and therefore as irrelevant as their very own War Between the States. Even those who think they know are likely to see the Armistice through the prism of post-Christian liberal-democratic optimism: the war helped rid the world of the bane of colonialism and Europocentric arrogance. In this same vein dialectic materialism passed itself for "philosophy."

In reality the Great War was the most important event in the past two thousand years and arguably the most tragic event in all of history. It marked the end of an often unjust but on the whole decent world, and opened the floodgates of hell: Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Tito, and countless lesser demons were all its heirs and beneficiaries.

To have a hint of its human cost it is necessary to walk through some of the cemeteries dotting the gently rolling hills of Picardy and to visit the ossuary at Douaumont with the remains of 130.000 unknown French and German soldiers who fell on the battlefields of Verdun. The ossuary is some 500 feet long and inside it there are 18 alcoves, each containing a pair of tombs covering a vault with six hundred and thirty cubic feet of bones.

To understand its cultural cost it is only necessary to look around us. As an Islamic deluge threatens to replace rapidly dying Europeans within a century, as America continues its futile quest for global dominance and its cultural suicide at home, it seems incredible that a mere century ago, the European, Christian world dominated the planet. The suicide of 1914 was a catastrophe rooted in an imperial hubris of neoconservative proportions.

It was not an unintended accident, however: its direct cause was the crisis between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. The shots fired in Sarajevo were seen in Vienna as an opportunity to settle the scores with a small but tough and increasingly assertive adversary while there was still time to do so. With a blank check hastily granted from Berlin, the Monarchy presented Serbia with an ultimatum that contained extravagant demands, and that was not meant to be accepted: Austria-Hungary willed the war, and rushed into it, fuelled by a heady brew of crude Serbophobia that was renewed with gusto in the 1990s. The Monarchy activated the system of alliances and ignited the continent.

Even before Sarajevo Vienna had sought German support for a "preventive" war against Serbia and it presented the forthcoming conflict as a test of strength with a wider continental significance. The popular Viennese jingle of August 1914, Alle Serben mussen sterben, indicated that the Central Powers’ agenda was dictated for once from Vienna—something that Bismarck would never have countenanced.

President Wilson’s Fourteen Points—the device that was allegedly meant to end the war in early 1918—espoused the principle of self-determination. It threw a revolutionary doctrine at an already exhausted Europe, a doctrine almost on par with Bolshevism in its destabilizing effect. It unleashed competing aspirations among the smaller nations of Central Europe and the Balkans that not only hastened the collapse of transnational empires, but also gave rise to a host of intractable ethnic conflicts and territorial disputes that remain unresolved to this day. But being a good liberal, Wilson did not allow realities on the ground to get in the way of his creativity. His concepts of an "enlarging democracy" and "collective security" signaled the birth of a view of America’s role in world affairs which has created—and is still creating—endless problems for both America and the world. It is Wilson speaking through President George W. Bush who declared, only a week ago, that America not only "created the conditions in which new democracies could flourish" but "also provided inspiration for oppressed peoples."

Two decades after Wilson, burdened by Clemenceau’s untenable revenge of Versailles, Europe staggered into a belated Round Two of self-destruction. Before 1939 it was badly wounded; after 1945 mortally so. The result is a civilization that is aborting and birth-controlling itself to death, that is morally bankrupt, culturally spent, and spiritually comatose. We are living—if life it is—the consequences of what had ended on that November morning at Compiegne.

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