The New York Review of Books
Volume 55, Number 7 · May 1, 2008

What Have We Learned, If Anything?

By Tony Judt

The twentieth century is hardly behind us but already its quarrels
and its achievements, its ideals and its fears are slipping into the
obscurity of mis-memory. In the West we have made haste to dispense
whenever possible with the economic, intellectual, and institutional
baggage of the twentieth century and encouraged others to do
likewise. In the wake of 1989, with boundless confidence and
insufficient reflection, we put the twentieth century behind us and
strode boldly into its successor swaddled in self-serving
half-truths: the triumph of the West, the end of History, the
unipolar Ameri-can moment, the ineluctable march of globalization and
the free market.

The belief that that was then and this is now embraced much more than
just the defunct dogmas andinstitutions of cold war-era communism.
During the Nineties, and again in the wake of September 11, 2001, I
was struck more than once by a perverse contemporary insistence on
not understanding the context of our present dilemmas, at home and
abroad; on not listening with greater care to some of the wiser heads
of earlier decades; on seeking actively to forget rather than
remember, to deny continuity and proclaim novelty on every possible
occasion. We have become stridently insistent that the past has
little of interest to teach us. Ours, we assert, is a new world; its
risks and opportunities are without precedent.

Perhaps this is not surprising. The recent past is the hardest to
know and understand. Moreover, the world really has undergone a
remarkable transformation since 1989 and such transformations are
always unsettling for those who remember how things were before. In
the decades following the French Revolution, the douceur de vivre of
the vanished ancien régime was much regretted by older commentators.
A century later, evocations and memoirs of pre-Word War I Europe
typically depicted (and still depict) a lost civilization, a world
whose illusions had quite literally been blown apart: "Never such
innocence again."[1]

——————————— ——————————-

But there is a difference. Contemporaries might have regretted the
world before the French Revolution. But they had not forgotten it.
For much of the nineteenth century Europeans remained obsessed with
the causes and meaning of the upheavals that began in 1789. The
political and philosophical debates of the Enlightenment had not been
consumed in the fires of revolution. On the contrary, the Revolution
and its consequences were widely attributed to that same
Enlightenment which thus emerged – for friend and foe alike – as the
acknowledged source of the political dogmas and social programs of
the century that followed.

In a similar vein, while everyone after 1918 agreed that things would
never be the same again, the particular shape that a postwar world
should take was everywhere conceived and contested in the long shadow
of nineteenth-century experience and thought. Neoclassical economics,
liberalism, Marxism (and its Communist stepchild), "revolution," the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat, imperialism, and "industrialism" – the
building blocks of the twentieth-century political world – were all
nineteenth-century artifacts. Even those who, along with Virginia
Woolf, believed that "on or about December 1910, human character
changed" – that the cultural upheaval of Europe’s fin de siècle had
utterly transformed the terms of intellectual exchange – nonetheless
devoted a sur- prising amount of energy to shadowboxing with their
predecessors.[2] The past hung heavy across the present.

—————————————- ————————

Today, in contrast, we wear the last century rather lightly. To be
sure, we have memorialized it everywhere: shrines, inscriptions,
"heritage sites," even historical theme parks are all public
reminders of "the Past." But the twentieth century that we have
chosen to commemorate is curiously out of focus. The overwhelming
majority of places of official twentieth-century memory are either
avowedly nostalgo-triumphalist – praising famous men and celebrating
famous victories – or else, and increasingly, they are opportunities
for the recollection of selective suffering.

The twentieth century is thus on the path to becoming a moral memory
palace: a pedagogically serviceable Chamber of Historical Horrors
whose way stations are labeled "Munich" or "Pearl Harbor,"
"Auschwitz" or "Gulag," "Armenia" or "Bosnia" or "Rwanda"; with
"9/11" as a sort of supererogatory coda, a bloody postscript for
those who would forget the lessons of the century or who failed to
learn them. The problem with this lapidary representation of the last
century as a uniquely horrible time from which we have now,
thankfully, emerged is not the description – it was in many ways a
truly awful era, an age of brutality and mass suffering perhaps
unequaled in the historical record. The problem is the message: that
all of that is now behind us, that its meaning is clear, and that we
may now advance – unencumbered by past errors – into a different and
better era.

But such official commemoration does not enhance our appreciation and
awareness of the past. It serves as a substitute, a surrogate.
Instead of teaching history we walk children through museums and
memorials. Worse still, we encourage them to see the past – and its
lessons – through the vector of their ancestors’ suffering. Today, the
"common" interpretation of the recent past is thus composed of the
manifold fragments of separate pasts, each of them (Jewish, Polish,
Serb, Armenian, German, Asian-American, Palestinian, Irish,
homosexual…) marked by its own distinctive and assertive
victimhood.

The resulting mosaic does not bind us to a shared past, it separates
us from it. Whatever the shortcomings of the national narratives once
taught in school, however selective their focus and instrumental
their message, they had at least the advantage of providing a nation
with past references for present experience. Traditional history, as
taught to generations of schoolchildren and college students, gave
the present a meaning by reference to the past: today’s names,
places, inscriptions, ideas, and allusions could be slotted into a
memorized narrative of yesterday. In our time, however, this process
has gone into reverse. The past now acquires meaning only by
reference to our many and often contrasting present concerns.

This disconcertingly alien character of the past is doubtless in part
the result of the sheer speed of contemporary change. "Globalization"
really has churned up people’s lives in ways that their parents or
grandparents would be hard put to imagine. Much of what had for
decades, even centuries, seemed familiar and permanent is now passing
rapidly into oblivion. The past, it seems, really is another country:
they did things differently there.

The expansion of communication offers a case in point. Until the last
decades of the twentieth century most people in the world had limited
access to information; but – thanks to national education,
state-controlled radio and television, and a common print culture
– within any one state or nation or community people were all likely
to know many of the same things. Today, the opposite applies. Most
people in the world outside of sub-Saharan Africa have access to a
near infinity of data. But in the absence of any common culture
beyond a small elite, and not always even there, the fragmented
information and ideas that people select or encounter are determined
by a multiplicity of tastes, affinities, and interests. As the years
pass, each one of us has less in common with the fast-multiplying
worlds of our contemporaries, not to speak of the world of our
forebears.

All of this is surely true – and it has disturbing implications for the
future of democratic governance. Nevertheless, disruptive change,
even global transformation, is not in itself unprecedented. The
economic "globalization" of the late nineteenth century was no less
turbulent, except that its implications were initially felt and
understood by far fewer people. What is significant about the present
age of transformations is the unique insouciance with which we have
abandoned not merely the practices of the past but their very memory.
A world just recently lost is already half forgotten.

————————————– ————————–

What, then, is it that we have misplaced in our haste to put the
twentieth century behind us? In the US, at least, we have forgotten
the meaning of war. There is a reason for this. In much of
continental Europe, Asia, and Africa the twentieth century was
experienced as a cycle of wars. War in the last century signified
invasion, occupation, displacement, deprivation, destruction, and
mass murder. Countries that lost wars often lost population,
territory, resources, security, and independence. But even those
countries that emerged formally victorious had comparable experiences
and usually remembered war much as the losers did. Italy after World
War I, China after World War II, and France after both wars might be
cases in point: all were "winners" and all were devastated. And then
there are those countries that won a war but "lost the peace,"
squandering the opportunities afforded them by their victory. The
Western Allies at Versailles and Israel in the decades following its
June 1967 victory remain the most telling examples.

Moreover, war in the twentieth century frequently meant civil war:
often under the cover of occupation or "liberation." Civil war played
a significant role in the widespread "ethnic cleansing" and forced
population transfers of the twentieth century, from India and Turkey
to Spain and Yugoslavia. Like foreign occupation, civil war is one of
the terrible "shared" memories of the past hundred years. In many
countries "putting the past behind us" – i.e., agreeing to overcome or
forget (or deny) a recent memory of internecine conflict and
intercommunal violence – has been a primary goal of postwar
governments: sometimes achieved, sometimes overachieved.

War was not just a catastrophe in its own right; it brought other
horrors in its wake. World War I led to an unprecedented
militarization of society, the worship of violence, and a cult of
death that long outlasted the war itself and prepared the ground for
the political disasters that followed. States and societies seized
during and after World War II by Hitler or Stalin (or by both, in
sequence) experienced not just occupation and exploitation but
degradation and corrosion of the laws and norms of civil society. The
very structures of civilized life – regulations, laws, teachers,
policemen, judges – disappeared or else took on sinister significance:
far from guaranteeing security, the state itself became the leading
source of insecurity. Reciprocity and trust, whether in neighbors,
colleagues, community, or leaders, collapsed. Behavior that would be
aberrant in conventional circumstances – theft, dishonesty,
dissemblance, indifference to the misfortune of others, and the
opportunistic exploitation of their suffering – became not just normal
but sometimes the only way to save your family and yourself. Dissent
or opposition was stifled by universal fear.

War, in short, prompted behavior that would have been unthinkable as
well as dysfunctional in peacetime. It is war, not racism or ethnic
antagonism or religious fervor, that leads to atrocity. War – total
war – has been the crucial antecedent condition for mass criminality in
the modern era. The first primitive concentration camps were set up
by the British during the Boer War of 1899-1902. Without World War I
there would have been no Armenian genocide and it is highly unlikely
that either communism or fascism would have seized hold of modern
states. Without World War II there would have been no Holocaust.
Absent the forcible involvement of Cambodia in the Vietnam War, we
would never have heard of Pol Pot. As for the brutalizing effect of
war on ordinary soldiers themselves, this of course has been
copiously documented.[3]

———————————- ——————————

The United States avoided almost all of that. Americans, perhaps
alone in the world, experienced the twentieth century in a far more
positive light. The US was not invaded. It did not lose vast numbers
of citizens, or huge swathes of territory, as a result of occupation
or dismemberment. Although humiliated in distant neocolonial wars (in
Vietnam and now in Iraq), the US has never suffered the full
consequences of defeat.[4] Despite their ambivalence toward its
recent undertakings, most Americans still feel that the wars their
country has fought were mostly "good wars." The US was greatly
enriched by its role in the two world wars and by their outcome, in
which respect it has nothing in common with Britain, the only other
major country to emerge unambiguously victorious from those struggles
but at the cost of near bankruptcy and the loss of empire. And
compared with other major twentieth-century combatants, the US lost
relatively few soldiers in battle and suffered hardly any civilian
casualties.

This contrast merits statistical emphasis. In World War I the US
suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the UK,
France, and Germany the figures are respectively 885,000, 1.4
million, and over 2 million. In World War II, when the US lost about
420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8
million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7
million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records
the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting
fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six
weeks of fighting in May-June 1940. In the US Army’s costliest
engagement of the century – the Ardennes offensive of December
1944-January 1945 (the "Battle of the Bulge") – 19,300 American
soldiers were killed. In the first twenty-four hours of the Battle of
the Somme (July 1, 1916), the British army lost more than 20,000
dead. At the Battle of Stalingrad, the Red Army lost 750,000 men and
the Wehrmacht almost as many.

With the exception of the generation of men who fought in World War
II, the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss
remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries.
But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on
national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War
II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental
Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half
a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million,
and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate
figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield, in
China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses
(excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less
than 2,000 dead.

As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced
democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a
sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today.
Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and
trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators
excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe
it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather
than any structural difference between the US and otherwise
comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses
to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent
neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans
understand – in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic
fantasies – seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with
Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans
have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true
significance.

That same contrast may account for the distinctive quality of much
American writing on the cold war and its outcome. In European
accounts of the fall of communism, from both sides of the former Iron
Curtain, the dominant sentiment is one of relief at the closing of a
long, unhappy chapter. Here in the US, however, the story is
typically recorded in a triumphalist key.[5] And why not? For many
American commentators and policymakers the message of the twentieth
century is that war works. Hence the widespread enthusiasm for our
war on Iraq in 2003 (despite strong opposition to it in most other
countries). For Washington, war remains an option – on that occasion
the first option. For the rest of the developed world it has become a
last resort.[6]

————————————– ————————–

Ignorance of twentieth-century history does not just contribute to a
regrettable enthusiasm for armed conflict. It also leads to a
misidentification of the enemy. We have good reason to be taken up
just now with terrorism and its challenge. But before setting out on
a hundred-year war to eradicate terrorists from the face of the
earth, let us consider the following. Terrorists are nothing new.
Even if we exclude assassinations or attempted assassinations of
presidents and monarchs and confine ourselves to men and women who
kill random unarmed civilians in pursuit of a political objective,
terrorists have been with us for well over a century.

There have been anarchist terrorists, Russian terrorists, Indian
terrorists, Arab terrorists, Basque terrorists, Malay terrorists,
Tamil terrorists, and dozens of others besides. There have been and
still are Christian terrorists, Jewish terrorists, and Muslim
terrorists. There were Yugoslav ("partisan") terrorists settling
scores in World War II; Zionist terrorists blowing up Arab
marketplaces in Palestine before 1948; American-financed Irish
terrorists in Margaret Thatcher’s London; US-armed mujahideen
terrorists in 1980s Afghanistan; and so on.

No one who has lived in Spain, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Japan, the UK,
or France, not to speak of more habitually violent lands, could have
failed to notice the omnipresence of terrorists – using guns, bombs,
chemicals, cars, trains, planes, and much else – over the course of the
twentieth century and beyond. The only thing that has changed in
recent years is the unleashing in September 2001 of homicidal
terrorism within the United States. Even that was not wholly
unprecedented: the means were new and the carnage unexampled, but
terrorism on US soil was far from unknown over the course of the
twentieth century.

But what of the argument that terrorism today is different, a "clash
of cultures" infused with a noxious brew of religion and
authoritarian politics: "Islamofascism"? This, too, is an
interpretation resting in large part on a misreading of
twentieth-century history. There is a triple confusion here. The
first consists of lumping together the widely varying national
fascisms of interwar Europe with the very different resentments,
demands, and strategies of the (equally heterogeneous) Muslim
movements and insurgencies of our own time – and attaching the moral
credibility of the antifascist struggles of the past to our own more
dubiously motivated military adventures.

A second confusion comes from conflating a handful of religiously
motivated stateless assassins with the threat posed in the twentieth
century by wealthy, modern states in the hands of totalitarian
political parties committed to foreign aggression and mass
extermination. Nazism was a threat to our very existence and the
Soviet Union occupied half of Europe. But al-Qaeda? The comparison
insults the intelligence – not to speak of the memory of those who
fought the dictators. Even those who assert these similarities don’t
appear to believe them. After all, if Osama bin Laden were truly
comparable to Hitler or Stalin, would we really have responded to
September 11 by invading…Baghdad?

But the most serious mistake consists of taking the form for the
content: defining all the various terrorists and terrorisms of our
time, with their contrasting and sometimes conflicting objectives, by
their actions alone. It would be rather as though one were to lump
together the Italian Red Brigades, the German Baader-Meinhof gang,
the Provisional IRA, the Basque ETA, Switzerland’s Jura Separatists,
and the National Front for the Liberation of Corsica; dismiss their
differences as insignificant; label the resulting amalgam of
ideological kneecappers, bomb throwers, and political murderers
"European Extremism" (or "Christo-fascism," perhaps?)…and then
declare uncompromising, open-ended armed warfare against it.

This abstracting of foes and threats from their context – this ease
with which we have talked ourselves into believing that we are at war
with "Islamofascists," "extremists" from a strange culture, who dwell
in some distant "Islamistan," who hate us for who we are and seek to
destroy "our way of life" – is a sure sign that we have forgotten the
lesson of the twentieth century: the ease with which war and fear and
dogma can bring us to demonize others, deny them a common humanity or
the protection of our laws, and do unspeakable things to them.

——————————————- ———————

How else are we to explain our present indulgence for the practice of
torture? For indulge it we assuredly do. The twentieth century began
with the Hague Conventions on the laws of war. As of 2008 the
twenty-first century has to its credit the Guantánamo Bay detention
camp. Here and in other (secret) prisons the United States routinely
tortures terrorists or suspected terrorists. There is ample
twentieth-century precedent for this, of course, and not only in
dictatorships. The British tortured terrorists in their East African
colonies as late as the 1950s. The French tortured captured Algerian
terrorists in the "dirty war" to keep Algeria French.[7]

At the height of the Algerian war Raymond Aron published two powerful
essays urging France to quit Algeria and concede its independence:
this, he insisted, was a pointless war that France could not win.
Some years later Aron was asked why, when opposing French rule in
Algeria, he did not also add his voice to those who were speaking out
against the use of torture in Algeria. "But what would I have
achieved by proclaiming my opposition to torture?" he replied. "I
have never met anyone who is in favor of torture."[8]

Well, times have changed. In the US today there are many respectable,
thinking people who favor torture – under the appropriate
circumstances and when applied to those who merit it. Professor Alan
Dershowitz of Harvard Law School writes that "the simple cost-benefit
analysis for employing such non-lethal torture [to extract
time-sensitive information from a prisoner] seems overwhelming."
Professor Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago’s School
of Divinity acknowledges that torture remains a horror and is "in
general [sic]…forbidden." But when interrogating "prisoners in the
context of a deadly and dangerous war against enemies who know no
limits…there are moments when this rule may be overridden."[9]

These chilling assertions are echoed by New York’s Senator Charles
Schumer (a Democrat), who at a Senate hearing in 2004 claimed that
"there are probably very few people in this room or in America who
would say that torture should never ever be used." Certainly not
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who informed the BBC’s Radio
Four in February 2008 that it would be absurd to say that you
couldn’t torture. In Scalia’s words,

Once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game. How close
does the threat have to be? How severe can the infliction of pain be?
I don’t think these are easy questions at all…. But I certainly
know you can’t come in smugly and with great self-satisfaction and
say, "Oh, it’s torture, and therefore it’s no good."[10]
But it was precisely that claim, that "it’s torture, and therefore
it’s no good," which until very recently distinguished democracies
from dictatorships. We pride ourselves on having defeated the "evil
empire" of the Soviets. Indeed so. But perhaps we should read again
the memoirs of those who suffered at the hands of that empire – the
memoirs of Eugen Loebl, Artur London, Jo Langer, Lena Constante, and
countless others – and then compare the degrading abuses they suffered
with the treatments approved and authorized by President Bush and the
US Congress. Are they so very different?[11]

Torture certainly "works." As the history of twentieth-century police
states suggests, under extreme torture most people will say anything
(including, sometimes, the truth). But to what end? Thanks to
information extracted from terrorists under torture, the French army
won the 1957 Battle of Algiers. Just over four years later the war
was over, Algeria was independent, and the "terrorists" had won. But
France still carries the stain and the memory of the crimes committed
in its name. Torture really is no good, especially for republics. And
as Aron noted many decades ago, "torture – and lies – [are] the
accompaniment of war…. What needed to be done was end the war."[12]

We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw
today in our war on terror – between the rule of law and "exceptional"
circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal
protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between
normal people and "terrorists," between "us" and "them" – are not new.
The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame
distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past:
internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder – those very crimes
that prompt us to murmur "never again." So what exactly is it that we
think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our
self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can
build its very own internment camp and torture people there?

Far from escaping the twentieth century, we need, I think, to go back
and look a bit more carefully. We need to learn again – or perhaps for
the first time – how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers
alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no
good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in
order to justify that war’s indefinite continuance. And perhaps, in
this protracted electoral season, we could put a question to our
aspirant leaders: Daddy (or, as it might be, Mommy), what did you do
to prevent the war?

Notes
[1] Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word – the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

– Philip Larkin, MCMXIV

[2] See, for example, Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, first
published in 1918.

[3] See Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941-1944, edited
by Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1995).
Many German soldiers on the eastern front and in Yugoslavia recorded
their worst crimes for the delectation of family and friends. The
American prison guards in Abu Ghraib are their lineal descendants.

[4] The defeated South did indeed experience just such consequences
following the Civil War, however. And its subsequent humiliation,
resentment, and backwardness are the American exception that
illustrates the rule.

[5] See my discussion of The Cold War: A New History (Penguin, 2005)
by John Lewis Gaddis, in The New York Review, March 23, 2006.

[6] It should be noted, however, that a younger generation of
political leaders in the UK – starting with Tony Blair – has proven
almost as indifferent to the lessons of the twentieth century as
their American contemporaries.

[7] See Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of
Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005); Marnia Lazreg, Torture
and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton
University Press, 2008); and Darius Rejali, Torture and Democracy
(Princeton University Press, 2007).

[8] Raymond Aron, La Tragédie Algérienne (Paris: Plon, 1957),
L’Algérie et la République (Paris: Plon, 1958), and Le Spectateur
engagé (Paris: Julliard, 1981), p. 210. For a firsthand account of
torture, see Henri Alleg, The Question (Bison, 2006; originally
published in 1958 as La Question). La Torture dans la République, by
the late Pierre Vidal-Naquet, is a penetrating account of how torture
rots the political system that authorizes it. First published in
English in 1963, this book has long been out of print. It should be
retranslated and made required reading for every congressman and
presidential candidate in the US.

[9] Alan M. Dershowitz, Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the
Threat, Responding to the Challenge (Yale University Press, 2002), p.
144; Jean Bethke Elshtain, "Reflections on the Problem of ‘Dirty
Hands,’" in Torture: A Collection, edited by Sanford Levinson (Oxford
University Press, 2004), pp. 80-83.

[10] Senator Schumer is quoted in The Wall Street Journal, November
2, 2007. For Justice Scalia’s remarks, see
alia_N.htm.

[11] Lena Constante, The Silent Escape: Three Thousand Days in
Romanian Prisons (University of California Press, 1995); Jo Langer,
Une Saison à Bratislava (Paris: Seuil, 1981); Eugen Loebl, My Mind on
Trial (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); Artur Gerard London, L’Aveu,
dans l’engrenage du Procès de Prague (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).

[12] Le Spectateur engagé, pp. 210-211.