The Unipolar Moment and the Cult of World War II: Some Reflections

It is characteristic of American politics, and the exceedingly narrow and highly conservative tenor of its mainstream, that the resurgence of the American "cult" of World War II in the late 1990s (as presented by Ambrose, Brokaw, Spielberg) commanded deference rather than prompting reflection--and so far as I can tell this has not changed in the quarter of a century since, as the associated outlook seems to still stand as the popular understanding of the Second World War.

Still, there seems plenty of reason to ask just why it was that, in a period in which even the youngest Americans who participated in the war as combatants or even as adults on the home front were septuagenarians, a very great deal of water had passed under the proverbial bridge, and Americans seemed to be growing even less historically-minded than ever before, it suddenly seemed as if remembrance and indeed veneration of the Second World War was everywhere.

Admittedly some of the reasons can seem innocuous--like the 20-year nostalgia cycle that could seem likely to make the pop cultural echo of World War II seen in the '70s re-echo in the '70s-obsessed '90s. However, even a little consideration of the matter easily yields more consequential explanations, extending even beyond the edge of intergenerational warfare evident in the coinage of the rather invidious (and exceedingly right-wing) term "the greatest generation." There is, for instance, the way that the cult of World War II affirmed the neoconservatives' claims about the existence of an unipolar order that, the more robust for the assumption of permanent tech boom, could be expected to endure for a long time, perhaps until the evolution of civilization had made concern for unipolarity as against bipolarity, multipolarity or anything else moot, the "evitable conflict" simply transcended—by its treatment of anything like World War II as long in the past, never to return, that "last great war" really the "last great war." There is this view's fitting in with what was supposed to have made the world unipolar, triumph over a foreign enemy with a demonized ideology that they treated as also a triumph of the American social system, which triumph could indeed be construed as having been part of a larger struggle--the Cold War not the unhappy outcome of the compromises that World War II forced, and still less any ill will or misjudgments on America's part (as in the "revisionist" view of the Cold War), but rather continuous with World War II. In this version of history that Second World War was not a struggle against "fascism" per se but part of a longer struggle by those who stood for "freedom" against "totalitarianism" (this, certainly, the framework in which the horseshoe theory-minded, Hitler-and-Stalin-equating "center" prefers to think), one supposed to have been won at this "end of history" in which the international liberal order had become truly worldwide, with the former Soviet bloc and China being increasingly integrated into an increasingly "turbo-capitalist" world economy. (Thus the celebration of World War II became part of the celebration of the more recent and, in important quarters, even more ecstatic Cold War victory, from which perspective the reading that the Western Allies had withheld the "Second Front" the Soviets asked for so long, and when they finally opened it did so more with an eye to saving Western Europe from falling to the Soviets than defeating the Nazis the Soviets had already given millions of lives to crush appears not the cynical realpolitik of competing empires but a canny marriage of idealism and realism.) The commemoration of World War II was a celebration, too, of the peaceable, "globalizing," world of the present for which that world war helped to pave the way, with, indeed, then-highly publicized pillars of the new order as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the place of the U.S. dollar in international trade (as well as, one might add, the United Nations) all established as part of the new economic order to follow the war even before the fighting had stopped.

Yet there was also something less than triumphant in the package, namely a sense--which one could only have if they were profoundly divorced from reality and deeply perverse, but all the same, it was commonly expressed in those days and virtually unchallenged--that in the '90s they deludedly imagined to be "good times for the common man," life was getting to be too peaceful and comfortable, that the People were preoccupied with trivialities, that the young folk in particular needed to be whipped into shape, and that war or something like it with all its hardship and "sacrifices" was a needed curative for what they thought ailed society. In it, I think, one can see that essentially backward and vicious and frankly demented mentality which in the years before the First World War lamented the peace that was then supposed to have prevailed (the unending bloodbath in the far-off colonies was not seen as inconsistent with the existence of peace), and greeted the guns of August with joy, often as they specifically looked forward to depriving the less privileged majority of the public of what little freedom or comfort they had as they spoke a good deal of drivel about the ennobling effect of wartime slaughter on the human personality.

By and large those who espoused such vile stupidities soon came to regret it--even if they are only too rarely remembered as the idiots and monsters they really were.

Alas, few have drawn any parallels between the obscenities of the twentieth century's start, and those that came at its end and after.