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Tuesday, 20 March 2007 15:45 |
 | | Mark West |
Things are different now.
Thatís always the battle cry of the wicked, the foolish, the shortsighted, the misguided.
In some way, the idea centers on a single word, zeitstil, ìthe style of the times.î The notion here is that things have never been like they are now, that history has no lessons to teach us because things are so different now, that the dependable rules of the past can and must be discarded because we need a new style of the times.
Because things are so different now.
And the one
thing of which we may be sure is that those who describe the present as
unlike any other time havenít read their history and will lead us into
violations of our own highest principles.
After Dec. 7,
1941, after Pearl Harbor, things were different and so our national
leaders felt empowered to construct concentration camps for U.S.
citizens of Japanese extraction. After the Revolutionary War, when
supporters of the crown were imagined to be hiding behind every tree,
the founders of our nation felt it right to introduce the Alien and
Sedition Acts, curtailing freedom of speech in the newborn state whose
creation was made possible by men who spoke their mind.
Ernst Junger was
one of the greatest authors of Germany in the 20th century, but he is
not read much anymore because of his support of the Nazi regime. And he
was seduced, like many before and after him, by the idea that his time
was different.
Junger visited
the Russian front in 1942, and was welcomed by German generals who were
pleased to welcome so distinguished a visitor. He heard about the
atrocities committed against Russian prisoners, but decided that the
prisoners were partisans (we might today call them terrorists), and
hence were unworthy of mercy.
History, of
course, has judged Junger harshly, as a recent article in Salon
magazine suggests. Things really arenít ever different, at least when
it comes to atrocities like torture, or secret camps, or spiriting away
prisoners during the night into gulags. History judges those who
contrive excuses for war harshly; nobody today celebrates the Gulf of
Tonkin resolution as a good thing.
Now we hear that
there is a special planning group devoted to identifying targets in
Iran. New Yorker reporter Seymour Hersh has recently reported that
advocates of the Saudi position have won in their arguments within the
White House that Iran is the greatest threat in the world today and the
Pentagon has consequently been planning for the use of the military.
And the administration has been pounding the same tattoo on the drums
they used in the prelude to the oh-so-successful war against Iraq; Iran
is providing terrorists with safe haven, Iran is manufacturing weapons
of mass destruction and the like.
But maybe this
situation in the United States has changed. The Democrats are, at long
last, finally in a position to do something about President Bush and
his seemingly unstoppable desire for war. The American public seems to
have awakened from its long national trance, having come to understand
that the only mission we have accomplished in Iraq is to further
destabilize a part of the world that was already unstable enough. And
the seemingly endless credulity of the American mass media seems to
have, at long last, abated.
For a while, the
zeitstil seemed to be that the American public would accept whatever
President Bush said without debate so long as it was prefaced with the
phrase ìafter 9/11.î But that seems to no longer be the case, and
democracy as we know it will surely benefit.
Who knows? Perhaps things really are different this time.
ï
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at UNC Asheville.
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