All Quiet on the K Street Front
With American soldiers in harm’s way, and dead-ender neocons baying for more American and Iraqi blood to be spilled, one wonders if these sofa samurai have ever read a book about the Middle East, or, as I wrote recently in these here pages, ever seen a movie about the horrors of war. I covered seven conflicts in my youth as a correspondent, the last one being the Yom Kippur War of 1973. One thing I learned is that newsreels do not convey the true horror of war. As the man said “War is hell," but try and tell this to types like Bill Kristol or Robert Kagan, two physical cowards who have the president’s ear (and then some).
The most powerful anti-war book ever was written by a German, Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), in 1929. It became an instant hit and a classic, one that inspired the first mass international peace movement. One year later. Hollywood made a film of it, which won the Oscar for Best Picture. Such was the influence of the movie on its hero Paul Baumer, played by Lew Ayres, that the talented young actor became a conscientious objector during World War II. And got a hell of a lot of flak for it, too.
Remarque was a hell of a man. Good looking, a terrific womanizer and a heavy drinker, he bedded most Hollywood stars he came into contact with, and he came into contact with many of them. He was Marlene Dietrich’s favorite beau, was married to Paulette Goddard, and had affairs with Greta Garbo (yes, she made an exception in his case) Dolores del Rio, Lupe Velez and Louise Rainer, to name but a few. He had served with gallantry on the western front in the Great War as a German officer, and managed to survive Paschendaele, the goriest battle of the war. After his book became a best seller he hung out with people like Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and Leni Reifenstahl, and of course Marlene Dietrich. (He called his sleek Lancia “Puma one," la Dietrich “Puma Two"). After tasting Berlin’s naughty period of cabaret life in the 20’s, Remarque left for Switzerland when the Nazis took over. (His sister was beheaded for anti-Nazi activities in 1943).
Both the book and the movie contain some extremely haunting scenes. In one of the most famous, Paul Baumer kills a French poilu who jumps into his foxhole in no man’s land while trying to take cover. Baumer stabs him in the throat and then he watches the French soldier die while gurgling blood. The German tries to comfort him but to no avail. He apologizes as his enemy dies. He then goes through his pockets and finds pictures of the dead man’s loved ones. His enemy is just like him, a man doing his duty with a family who love him back home. Ayres played that scene as perfectly as it is possible. No mawkishness and no cliches. And it was more than 75 years ago when the film was made. The ending of the movie and of the book is a real bummer. Our young hero--always in a trench, most of his schoolboy friends with whom he had gone optimistically to war now dead--sees a butterfly, the only sign of beauty in the hellish mud and cratered moonscape, and momentarily lets his guard down while he watched the butterfly (schmetterling, in German) sit on his arm. A sniper shot kills him. End of story. It is just about the time when all became quiet on the western front.
Mind you, that was the last gentlemen’s war. Opposing troops did mingle during Christmas, and not only exchanged gifts but also played a historic soccer match. I thought Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, which dealt with that war, showed the inhumanity of the general staff-- definitely worse on the Entente side than on the German in real life-- but except for the famous battle scene, it was mostly propaganda against upper class officers. I suppose the greatest film ever made-- it has been voted that many times, especially in Europe-- is Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, made in the early Thirties, a war film without a single battle.
La Grande Illusion does not tend to do what American film makers cannot resist doing when making a war movie: use nerve-shattering effects with pretentious verbiage and action which aim to give the stomach-churning scenes a metaphysical dimension. (The Marine attack in the last scene of Full Metal Jacket is a perfect example). In La Grande Illusion a French officer is shot while trying to escape from the top security fortress where he is imprisoned. The German commander, played by Erich von Stroheim with enormous and understated pathos, is close to tears for having shot a brother officer, not withstanding that he’s the enemy. He apologizes to the dying man who has sacrificed himself to divert attention from two French soldiers escaping down the mountainside. It is a heart-rending scene, especially as the upper class commander feels great friendship for his fellow upper class prisoner, to whom he has already confessed that the war will mean the end of their class.
Both von Rauffenstein (Stroheim) and Boeldieu (Fresnay), know it’s the end of the line. The Frenchman welcomes death. The German, a flying ace who has had to take up “this useless life" as commander because he is now mostly made up of metal, envies him. They are fighting on opposite sides whereas they should be fighting together against the great unwashed and the politicians. Hear, hear! Think of the brave soldiers in Iraq. And then of the neocons, posing as warriors in their comfy DC leather armchairs--and puke.
Comments
Once again, Taki, you have aimed admirably close to the bull’s-eye truth, but the truth about Remarque and the Great War is closer to this: Remarque succumbed in many ways to the nihilism and morbid self-absorption which was both an effect and a cause of the Great War. (The historian Modris Eksteins devotes a whole chapter to this in his book, “Rites of Spring”, in which he traces the National Socialist culture of sentimentalist kitsch to the nihilistic, suicidal histrionics which Europe, and especially Germany, began to confuse with “progress” even before the Great War began.) Gallant and courageous Remarque was, but he was no more than a fading ghost of what European chivalry’s Modern Age remnant used to be. The Great War was not the “last gentleman’s war”; if any wars were such, the last one ended at Waterloo in 1815. The Christmas Truce of 1914 was rather an encore reappearance of a spirit which by then had almost departed from living memory.
However, it’s true that the neocon chickenhawks in DC wouldn’t know how to recognise that spirit even if it took possession of their leather armchairs and bit them on their asses.
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Thank you for reminding me that the only war worth fighting is the class war. Now please take your “old world” sentimentality back home to the old world and leave the Jeffersonian experiment to the unwashed and fearlessly proud rednecks of America.
Michael Cosper
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What a load from Cosper. There is nothing Jeffersonian about the sovietized neocon-led America. They wouldnt let Tom J (or Ron P) within a mile of the White House. Send the neocons and neolibs to Tel Aviv where they belong. And cut off their means of support.
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The “Jeffersonian experiment” ended with Jefferson, Mr. Cosper.
Your vaunted rednecks may be unwashed but their pride is in an image time is bound to prove false. And as for their fearlessness, well, these are the people who voted for George Bush...out of fear an unjustified fear of inbred Arab Muslim terrorists, thousands of miles away.
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Remarque was married to Paulette Goddard? I had no idea.
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While things were finally falling quiet for our grandfathers on the Western Front, the ideological grandfathers of the neo-cons were just getting started in Russia. The “pre-neo-cons”, or Trotskyites, were putting theory into gory practice. Lev Trotsky left his think-tank colleagues behind in New York’s Lower East Side and took a ship back to Russia. To give Trotsky credit, he didn’t just hang around the Bolshevik version of the Green Zone. No, he was proactive. He was so proactive that Russia is only now recovering from it. I hope Iraq can begin to recover from the current version of “permanent revolution” much sooner. It is worth noting the neo-Trotskyites like Senator Liebermann now tell us that Russia is not recovering, it is back-sliding. Make of that what you wish.
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A very enlightening and insightful piece, on both the personal and universal level. Thank you, Taki.
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True, the experiment failed, but a tolerance for European aristocracy is probably not the answer.
Michael Cosper
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I’m not a southerner, nor a redneck, but I think I would prefer that to the blue-state-us quo.
But before you criticize a vote for Bush, consider the opposition. Bush 41 couldn’t beat Clinton, Senator Ethanol was a joke, and 2000 was decided by a few punch drunk people chasing butterflies in Florida.
And perhaps there is a conspiracy - give us such a string of horrid choices that when someone does engage in a coup and officially rejects the constitution (as opposed to the supreme insult of reinterpreting it to death), everyone will actually applaud. Not that anything good will happen, but at least the coming dictator (Wasn’t that Scylla?) won’t be a hypocrite.
And here I would add a postscript that the most frightening movie I’ve seen was not one of the Saw series or Hostel, but “Johnny Got His Gun”, reminiscent of the current Walter Reed only slightly extrapolated.
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I am Southerner and some of tz’s comments ring true. I did not even bother to vote last time.
I was a Buchannan delegate in ‘92 in Houston. I actually thought the
country was in bad shape back then! What have we allowed to happen?
If you have seen the movie, ‘Vanilla Sky’, then all I can shout is,
“Tech Support!!!!”
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I’ll second the importance of Dalton Trumbo’s “Johnny Got His Gun” in the American lexicon of anti-war novels. Taki, last May, was writing about, at first glance, the contra-Alls Quiet, Ernst Junger’s Storm of Steel, which found not nihilism, but meaning in the act of war. Junger was dismissed from rightwing circles because he though the ‘stabbed in the back’ myth was philosophical garbage. A critical comparison of the two would be a nice touch…
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The Great War was the last Gentleman’s War in
this sense: the combatants on both sides knew
that they were killing men even as their
technology got away from them. They remained
susceptible to recognizable human feelings
whether the art which represents them is
Remarque’s or Junger’s.
Guantanamo prison camp is a fleur de mal that is
beyond the art of Koestler. Mea culpa,
mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
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It’s been a while since I read All Quiet on the Western Front. A Junior High history teacher who was also a WWII and Vietnam veteran had us read it. I’d also recommend the book Hiroshima by John Hersy - another book I was guided to as a kid. Why they aren’t both required reading is a mystery to me.
It’s time I read them again. Thanks for the reminder.
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Hitler served in the Great War! He came out of it a little pissd-off!
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Taki,
When is Ron Paul going to be on the cover
of the “American Conservative”? You know you
like him.
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“Though I cannot like Taki cheer on our “brave soldiers” in Iraq, considering what I’ve seen them capable of doing lately, I can feel profoundly sorry for them, as I feel sorry for the innocents they are killing daily.”
Posted by Dan Guenzel on Aug 22, 2007.
Before a people go out to murder others, for war is murder on a large scale, the others must be demonized. Murdering Huns, murdering towelheads; no difference in the propaganda. What does this say about our young people, that they are so ready to believe lies about others? Isn’t the anti-Muslim propaganda nourishing a root already growing deep in our consciousness? Some men love to kill, bully and humiliate others. That they are given medals for their viciousness does not lessen their shame.
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“Thank you for reminding me that the only war worth fighting is the class war. Now please take your “old world” sentimentality back home to the old world and leave the Jeffersonian experiment to the unwashed and fearlessly proud rednecks of America.”
Michael Cosper
Posted by Michael Cosper on Mar 09, 2007.
Given the amount of Southern support for Bush and especially the occupation of Iraq, something which I should think would be anathema to the Southern soul, I believe the television character Yancy Deringer best portrays the Southern character: Yes, Sir, Mr. Colton; no, Sir, Mr. Colton. Oh, Mr. Colton, Sir, you know my daddy freed all his slaves long before you folks came from up north to teach us how to behave.
And the central banks are still teaching you.
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