The Fight Next Door
Over a rye or two, a French friend told me how she visited home recently, and said that she was glad to be back. France is much more sexist, she said, and added that Europe still has a smell of fascism.
She had been talking about the degree of France's collaboration during the War, a fact often hidden behind the heroism of the resistance. This lead to her asking me why American men are so fascinated by WWII.
It is worth asking. Old wars have an aesthetic, even hypnotic appeal that can become very dangerous, turning from compelling and settled history into to an acceptance of war as normal and expected, something worth remembering, celebrating; this offers a narrow leap to militarism.
I told her I thought that it was the last time that the national purpose and what is good- and what an individual could do- seemed clear. But the appeal of shooting and bombing a bunch of the worst people in the world and this being noble, just and good because it is a righteous cause is frighteningly strong. That period was America at its best, at its most noble, constructive and idealistic. I think this is true; it is also true that we were at our most terrifyingly violent, lethal and destructive.
WWII still gives Americans a flush of pride; I feel it too. It is right in many ways. We really did defeat militaristic genocidal fascism. It was UK and Russia (the latter losing 20 million people)- and all the conquered- that carried the bulk of the horror, but without the United States, you can imagine the blackest blank of subsequent history.
But my friend had a dark metaphor for why the U.S. entered the war in Europe. It echoes more widely.
"Next door, a man is beating a woman. It is brutal; you hear the screams, and it goes on and on. You know he is evil, but you also know she is not innocent. If it continues, you know he's going to kill her. Eventually, you go over and stop the fight- not out of nobility or morality, but because you can no longer sleep at night. "
posted by JAB at 10:35 AM
2 Comments:
Very thought provoking (in that it provoked me think about it). The case for sending US troops to Europe was much less clear than fighting the war with Japan in the Pacific. By the time we invaded Europe, it was clear that Germany could not win. Did we invade to stop the Soviets from conquering all of Europe? Did we suspect Stalin would make a(nother) deal with Hitler to split Europe?
This got me thinking of France, too. The UK is a multinational state. The US is a non-national state. But France is still a nation state, and the glue that holds together such a state is national identity, which is also a building block of fascism. Of all the states of the first world, none protects its national identity more ferociously than France. So, yeah, that can feel kinda fascist-y.
This is why France no longer rules the world.
It went down this way: TWO couples were fighting on either side of our apartment, and we were locked in our place trying to get some sleep (e.g., the Neutrality Acts) when one of the husbands kicked in our door and shot our dog while the other husband cheered him on and shouted that he was going to kick our ass when he was done with his wife.
The royal beatdown they got was not because they were mean, not because of the need for geopolitical stability, but because they stupidly fucked with us beyond any imaginable point of forebearance.
To this day I cannot imagine what the Germans were thinking when, six months into the war with Russia, they declared was on the U.S. In the next four years our decadent society produced 273,882 racially miscegenated aircraft, which proved more than a match for Germany's 68,537 pure Aryan specimens.
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