1. My US History class finished up the Second World War this week. There is really nothing like that event in all of history, certainly not in living memory. The whole world goes to war, and against an incredibly evil ideology on one side of the globe and what might be described as a civilization gone mad on the other. Ordinary men from all walks of life and dug out of their homes and sent all around the globe: small-town boys form Missouri suddenly find themselves fighting in the jungles of the South Pacific, or lads from Kent battle in the deserts of Egypt. The whole course of life is changed and directed to this one single goal of victory, with everyone contributing as and how he may. Bankers and financiers work out how to pay for everything. Scientists and engineers develop new weapons. Actors and comedians boost morale. Priests and ministers set out to be chaplains. Even knowing all I know about the reality of the war, it still can’t help but seem like a, well, romantic time.

2. Romance, it seems to me, isn’t properly speaking a matter of ‘love’. Rather, it’s a matter of clarity; of issues becoming stark and definite, good and evil revealed in clear forms. ‘Romantic’ is what we call it when what is done and seen feels important. In a world-wide life-and-death struggle, where everyone is risking their lives to defeat definitely evil adversaries, it can’t help but feel romantic.

3. That said, of course, the reality is a lot uglier than we often like to admit. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were most definitely in the wrong, and were horribly evil governments whose armies did unspeakable things. But that doesn’t follow that the Allies were not pretty nasty in themselves. Of course, the Soviet Union being one of the Allies immediately muddies the moral waters, given that it was every bit as monstrous as Germany and Japan. But even limiting ourselves to American and Britain, the Allies did many terrible things as a matter of policy. Just as an example, Britain firebombing German cities like Hamburg, Dresden, Cologne, and Potsdam even long after it was clear that such raids had little strategic importance, and mere weeks or even days from the end of the war, when it was clear Germany was a spent force, is an appalling crime. We not only killed tens of thousands of men, women, and children in horrific ways, but also destroyed countless records, books, and art treasures.

This seems, from what I’ve read and heard, to have been a deliberate assault on German culture and an effort to eradicate ‘Prussian Militarism’, that great bogey of the first war. US Treasury Secretary Morganthau had plans to completely dismantle and de-industrialize Germany, as well as to pay reparations by “forced German labor” and “confiscation of all German assets of any character whatsoever outside of Germany.”

Granted, of course, that the horrors unleashed by Nazi Germany make such attitudes understandable, but then, if we’re fighting for justice and right, we really ought to try to keep a clearer head than that.

3. Prof. Tolkien (who was often very critical of the way the war was conducted) provided, I think, one of the best frames for thinking about this sort of thing:

“Of course, in ‘real life’ causes are not clear cut – if only because human tyrants are seldom utterly corrupted into pure manifestations of evil will. As far as I can judge some seem to have been so corrupt, but even they must rule subjects only part of whom are equally corrupt, while many still need to have ‘good motives’, real or feigned, presented to them. As we see today. Still there are clear cases: e.g. acts of sheer cruel aggression, in which therefore right is from the beginning wholly on one side, whatever evil the resentful suffering of evil may eventually generate in members of the right side. There are also conflicts about important things or ideas. In such cases, I am more impressed by the extreme importance of being on the right side, than I am disturbed the revelation of the jungle of confused motives, private purposes, and individual actions (noble or base) in which the right and the wrong in actual human conflicts are commonly involved. If the conflict really is about things properly called right and wrong, or good and evil, then the rightness or goodness of one side is not proved or established by the claims of either side; it must depend on values and beliefs above and independent of the particular conflict…That being so, the right will remain an inalienable possession of the right side and justify its cause throughout.”
-Notes on W.H. Auden’s review of The Return of the King

That is to say, the right and wrong of sides in war are determined primarily by the causes they fight for and only secondarily (that is, in the case where neither has clear right on their side) by their conduct. So, in the First World War, there really was no ‘good’ side. In the Second, the Axis, being both the aggressors and the advocates of new and deadly ideologies, were definitely the ‘bad’ side, and the many crimes of the Allies can’t change that (though if we take the German-Soviet war as a separate conflict, then neither is really the ‘good’ side). Which means, it seems to me, that we shouldn’t be shy about admitting crimes committed by the ‘good’ side.

4. Honestly, I think there’s value to be found in both the ‘romantic’ image of the war, that presents it as an adventure of good against evil, and in the more nuanced and historical image, where it’s an appalling bloodletting in which everyone does horrible things, albeit not to the same extent. I think the urge to insist on one at the expense of the other is misguided. But we should be clear in our own minds, at least, of which one we’re dealing with.

5. I started reading John Locke last night, then found he kept citing Sir Robert Filmer, so I decided to read him first. Neither one is impressing me so far. Both have a tendency to go for cheap ‘gotcha!’ arguments, like when Locke sneers at Sir Robert for quoting the Commandment as “honour thy father” and asks if he forgot the “and thy mother” part. Obviously (so it seems to me), Sir Robert only quoted it that way because that was the relevant part of the Commandment to his argument, and whether you include the second half or not doesn’t really change anything. Sir Robert does the same thing when he’s quoting, say, Bellarmine, like when he takes the Saint’s comment about God granting authority to the people as meaning that God favors democracy, and thus the people ought not to ‘choose’ monarchy. It seems obvious to me that Bellarmine’s idea of ‘the power comes to the people’ doesn’t mean that God grants them a specific form of the government that they then can choose to change, but that a given people can choose who or what to submit themselves to, as far as civil government is concerned.

Things like that. Enlightenment thinkers, so far as I’ve read them, seem less interested in actually engaging with ideas or understanding what each other are trying to say than with finding ways to make the other side seem ridiculous. They aren’t writing with an eye to the truth, but rather to victory (Dr. Johnson, it seems to me, is a noteworthy exception in that he tends to apply a more rigid logic than rhetorical cheap shots).

6. Leaving such heavy topics aside: this week I also read through one of ERB’s later Tarzan novels: Tarzan and the Forbidden City. He’s definitely slumming it with this one, as it’s a very repetitive series of dangers, rescues, and feats of strength by the titular character. Jane’s absent without mention (in England, maybe?) and the story – centering around a mythical jewel in a lost civilization – kind of just stops without much of a satisfying resolution.

That said, it’s Burroughs, so it’s not going to be wholly worthless. There’s a fair degree of rich creativity on display, with the lost tribes having a form of scuba gear and an undersea temple, as well as Greek-style galleys. And the main heroine has a decent degree of personality (the secondary one, not so much), like when she laughs off the professions of love by two of the expedition members, then weighs their merits by their respective reactions. It’s overall very light, not particularly good fare, but a fair example of ‘basic pulp’ style.

7. And I honestly can’t recall whether I made this meme or someone else did, but I found it in my folders and thought it was funny: