Crawling from the Wreckage (30 page)

Yakup Satar, who joined the Turkish army in 1915 and fought in Iraq, died in April 2008. Delfino Borroni, the last Italian WWI veteran, died in October. Australia’s Jack Ross died last month, and Britain’s Henry Allingham, the grandest old man of all, died a week ago.

Henry Allingham was almost twenty in 1916 when he took part in the Battle of Jutland, the greatest clash of armoured steel battleships in history. (He saw the giant shells “skipping off the water.”) As a mechanic in the Royal Naval Air Service, he flew missions over the freezing North Sea in 1917 in seaplanes that he described as “motorised kites.” And he spent 1918 in France trying to recover British planes that came down in No Man’s Land.

“We were moving forward at night,” he recalled about the Western Front. “It was dark … I fell into a shell hole. It was full of arms, legs, ears, dead rats—a lot of dead, rotten flesh … I lay there in the dark, not daring to move, cold and with my uniform stinking. I was frightened.” Sixty million men had the same memories, but they are no longer with us.

Harry Patch was an apprentice plumber when he was conscripted in 1916, and nineteen years old when he arrived at the Western Front in 1917. He lasted four months before a German shell burst overhead, killing three close friends and wounding him in the groin. He was evacuated to England, and never saw the war again.

He married in 1918, had children, followed his trade of plumbing, and served as a volunteer fireman during the bombing raids on Bristol during the Second World War. He died on Saturday, at the age of 111. So what have Harry Patch of Somerset and his sixty million comrades (for it no longer matters which side they were on) left behind for us?

One thing they were very clear about: we can’t do this anymore. In the First World War, we crossed a threshold. All the advances in science and technology came together and created a kind of industrialized warfare that is simply unsustainable in human terms. It consumes soldiers, civilians, whole cities at a rate that endangers civilization itself. All the technological innovations that have been added since the First World War—armoured divisions, bomber fleets, nuclear weapons—only deepen the lesson, they don’t change it. Human beings have fought wars since we were all hunter-gatherers, and those who were good at it tended to prosper. Now, if you are really good at war, you will be destroyed.

Europe is where industrialized total war first appeared. We can still send expeditionary forces into the weaker parts of what we used to call the Third World and bash them to our heart’s content, but if we get into a serious fight with another fully industrialized country we will both be destroyed. (This is a lesson that emerging industrial countries like India, China and Brazil can learn cheaply from history, or very expensively from experience.)

What else did the sixty million leave us? Inscribed on the wall of the chapel at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where I taught War Studies as a much younger man, is the first line of Horace’s ode: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (How sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country).

Wilfred Owen was killed crossing the Sambre canal a week before the First World War ended. He never got any older than twenty-five, but he put the wisdom that the millions bought with their lives into his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est.” It’s about a poison gas attack, and the last lines run: “If you could hear … the blood / Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs … / My friend, you would not tell with
such high zest / To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est / Pro patria mori.”

It’s almost a century now since anybody but fascists and fools saw war as glorious. The government may tell us that our “glorious dead” have “fallen,” but we know that they were only teenagers, and that they died in agony and lost the rest of their lives. Sometimes we even worry that we sent them to kill people for us.

In 1917, during the Third Battle of Ypres, Harry Patch was manning his machine gun when a German got close enough that he looked like a real person—and suddenly Harry realized that he didn’t want to kill him. Shouldn’t kill him, in fact. He shot the German in the shoulder, which made him drop his rifle, but he kept coming.

So Harry shot him again, first above the knee and then in the ankle. God knows if the German survived all this, but at least Harry was trying. So are the rest of us. Most of the time.

The most interesting thing—the best thing—about being trained as an historian is that you end up inhabiting a much deeper chunk of time. What you get out of that is perspective: the present no longer seems so all-encompassing and all-important, but just another station along the line between the past and the future. What happens in this present
can
be important, but most of it isn’t
.

I write all the time about events that I know will be utterly forgotten in five years’ time and that don’t really matter that much even now. Still, they are interesting to me and, besides, writing about them is my job. But I also try to figure out which trends and developments are really important: what will the high-school students of 2060 have to write essays about? Fortunately, I have lots of time to work on this problem, as change happens a lot slower than people think
.

William Gibson invented the word “cyberspace” (in his debut novel
Neuromancer
in 1984), and this gives him the right to pontificate about the future. He has been right about bits of the future, too, in the way
that science-fiction writers often are, especially about the ways that new technologies interact with human beings. But he can be very wrong about the present.

In a recent interview with Tim Adams, published in the
Observer
, Gibson confessed that he had stopped writing about the future because new technologies were happening too fast. “What I grew up with as science fiction is now a historical category,” he said. “Previous practitioners, H. P. Lovecraft, say, or H. G. Wells, had these huge, leisurely ‘here and nows’ from which to contemplate what might happen. Wells knew exactly where he was and knew he was at the centre of things.”

Whereas we, poor orphans, are adrift on a heaving ocean of constant change, living our jump-cut lives in a state of constant uncertainty. If you haven’t heard this line of argument before you are presumably a cave-dwelling hermit. Every generation dramatizes its own experience of the world, and talking about how hard it is to live with endless, unpredictable, high-speed change is one of the favourite occupations of the Western intelligentsia. It is, of course, nonsense.

We do not live in an era of major change, neither in the technologies that shape our environment nor in the social values that shape our lives. That kind of experience is still available in the developing world, when villagers move to the cities, but in the rich countries change has slowed to a crawl.

Between 1825 and 1875, people had to get used to railways, steamships and the telegraph: the average speed of land travel increased fivefold, and information quite suddenly passed between continents in minutes, not weeks. Cities of over a million people proliferated, and the deferential social order of the countryside began to give way before the onslaught of egalitarian values. Revolutionary ideas like Darwinism and Marxism changed the whole way that people looked at the world. That really was high-speed change.

In 1875, gas lighting was the big new thing that made the streets safe and the evenings at home several hours longer. By 1925, gaslight was gone and electricity was everywhere. Horses were replaced by cars, aircraft were becoming commonplace, and the richer homes had radios, telephones and fridges. These were genuine mass societies, complete with their own new forms of education, entertainment and politics, and they also developed mass warfare on an unprecedented scale.

H. G. Wells didn’t inhabit a huge, leisurely “here and now” from which to contemplate what might happen when he wrote
The War of the Worlds
in 1898. He was recently divorced, living with a former student in a rented flat less than a kilometre from where I am now sitting, in the midst of a London that had grown tenfold in population in less than a century. What made the book sell was that it echoed all the secret fears of a society shocked and dazed by the speed of change.

Between 1925 and 1975, the pace of change was still high, but it was slowing. Major new technologies like electronics and nuclear fission provided better radio (it’s called television) and bigger explosions, but the pace of change was mostly incremental and did not transform people’s experience of the world. Antibiotics revolutionized medicine, however, and the gender revolution fundamentally changed relations between the sexes. If you were born in 1925, the world you lived in when you turned fifty in 1975 was a very different place.

Whereas if you were born in the developed parts of the world in 1975—or even in 1955—you have seen very little fundamental change in your lifetime. You travel in basically the same cars and trains and planes as your parents and even your grandparents did. You have the same domestic appliances and roughly the same social values as the previous generation, and modern medicine has not extended your predicted life span by even five years. Even popular music is an unbroken continuum since the 1950s. The only truly major new technology that has permeated the entire society in this whole period is computers.

Which, of course, was precisely the technology that William Gibson fixed on as the basis for his dystopian futures, but despite all the hype, the “Information Technology Revolution” really isn’t enough to redefine the way we live. We inhabit a period that has seen no more by way of fundamental technological change, and considerably less intellectual and social upheaval, than the latter half of the eighteenth century.

We should probably be grateful for that, because high-speed change, however exhilarating at the start, really is disorienting and exhausting if it lasts over a whole lifetime. But it’s probably coming back to destabilize the lives of our children and grandchildren, who will likely face drastic changes in the climate that will affect everything right down to the availability of food for their families.

The cause of those changes, ironically, will not be the high-tech innovations of the twentieth century but the dirty nineteenth-century technologies with which we built our industrial civilization. In other words, we are going to get two waves of disruptive change for the price of one. This has just been the island of tranquillity and prosperity in between. Lucky us.

We are awash in deliberate lies and subtler distortions of reality that are meant to justify mistaken and counter-productive military strategies, and people are dying as a result. Some of them are our soldiers, and many more of them are the people our soldiers kill. The “terrorist threat,” grotesquely inflated by both official sources and the media, is the ultimate justification for these strategies
.

Ridiculous though it sounds to outsiders, Americans are regularly told that their survival as a free society depends on beating the “terrorists.” They should treat those who say such things as fools or deliberate liars not worthy of a moment’s attention, but they don’t. If you control the terminology you control the debate, so the U.S. government puts a huge effort into controlling the definition of “terrorism.”

“Terrorism,” like “fascism,” is one of those words that people routinely apply to almost any behaviour they disapprove of. We had a particularly impressive spread of meanings on display last week.

At one extreme, the U.S. State Department released its annual
Country Reports on Terrorism
, a congressionally mandated survey of all the incidents that the United States officially regards as terrorism. There were, it said, 14,499 such attacks last year. (That’s seventy-one fewer than the previous year, so there is hope.)

At the other extreme, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor and current nemesis, when asked to justify his earlier remark that the 9/11 attacks on the United States were “America’s chickens coming home to roost,” helpfully explained that the U.S. had dropped atomic bombs on Japan and “supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans,” so what did Americans expect?

“You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you,” Wright elucidated. “These are Biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright bombastic divisive principles.” Are we to believe then that it was God who selected a bunch of Saudi Arabians and Egyptians to punish the United States for its misdeeds against the Japanese, Palestinians and South Africans?

Mass slaughter of the innocent as a tool of divine justice is a familiar concept in the Bible (Jericho, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Ten Plagues of Egypt), and it would have held equal appeal for the nineteen Arab fanatics aboard those hijacked aircrafts on 9/11. But divine terrorism doesn’t really qualify under the State Department’s definition, since God, even when he perpetrates “premeditated, politically motivated violence … against non-combatant targets,” is not acting as a “sub-national group or clandestine agent.”

God is more of a sovereign power in his own right. This puts him in the same category as sovereign states, whose actions, however violent and even illegal, cannot by definition be described as “terrorism.” If you don’t believe me, ask the State Department.

So much for Jeremiah Wright’s attempt to define the American use of nuclear weapons against Japan as terrorism. It was terrible and terrifying,
and it was intended to terrorize the Japanese people into surrender, but it was not terrorism. Neither are Israeli actions against the Palestinians, even if a hundred Palestinians are dying for every Israel victim of Palestinian terrorism, and a high proportion of the dead Palestinians are innocent civilians. Israel is a state, and as such, by definition, what it does cannot be called terrorism.