Three lessons of World War II for Today’s Generation (Michael Bess)

[struggle4progress]

By Michael Bess

World War II was profoundly different from the conflict the United States currently finds itself waging in Iraq, but that titanic struggle of the mid-twentieth century does offer three valuable lessons for the leaders and citizens of today. Here is how I would sum them up:

... This is an oversimplification because Iraq under Saddam was a very different place from Nazi Germany; and Iraq today is completely unlike the liberated Germany that John J. McCloy presided over after 1945. Saddam was certainly an arch-criminal, just as Hitler was – but their two regimes, apart from the common feature of being brutal dictatorships, differed from each other in profound ways. Germany had a sixty-year history of parliamentary democracy before the Hitler era; Iraq did not. Germany had a complex and diversified industrial economy; Iraq’s economy was predicated primarily on oil production. Germany, by the 20th century, had largely overcome the strife between Catholics and Protestants that had plagued it in previous centuries; Iraq’s bitter division between Sunnis and Shiites was still festering just beneath the surface. Germany did not have a large ethnic minority clamoring for independence; Iraq had the Kurdish north. Germany after 1945 formed part of a continent-wide European movement for reconciliation, economic integration, and peaceful political coordination. Iraq sits in the middle of one of the world’s most intractably fractious and violent regions ...

History teaches few clear lessons, but the lesson here is unequivocal. Staying true to our values is relatively easy in peacetime; but it is precisely in times of danger and crisis that our commitment to our deepest ideals is truly tested. We need to ask ourselves: If I choose to sacrifice fundamental rights and basic moral principles in the short-term interest of national security, will my country still be the kind of society I can respect and cherish – even if my side wins? Is there such a thing as paying too high a moral price for victory? In the name of survival, will I have lost my soul? ...

The most important long-term consequence of World War II lies in the new institutions of international collective security and global legal governance that it impelled humankind to build. The war brought about a wave of fervent internationalism that resulted in the creation of the UN, the Fourth Geneva Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the IMF, and the World Bank – to name just a few. It set into motion a process of building international law, a process that has recently culminated in the creation of the International Criminal Court, the world’s first truly effective global-scale tribunal. If humankind is going to survive the next hundred years, it will only be by working through (and steadily improving upon) these instruments of international security, arbitration, and cooperation bequeathed to us by the “greatest generation” – the victors of World War II. There is no other way. The coming age of biological weapons will be even more dangerous and unstable than the current age of nuclear weapons. If we fail in building an ever more effective set of global institutions, centered on law and collective security, our chances as a species will not be very good. This commitment to internationalism should lie at the heart of our country’s foreign policy for the coming century ...

http://www.hnn.us/articles/34704.html