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Entry: "Never Again" Nation Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/never_again_nation#23600 Post contents: First, thanks so much for your kind remarks, Mr. Gottfried. On the merits, surely our susceptibility to this appeal of abstractions has something to do with our founding documents, which justify American independence not as the vindication of their rights as Englishmen, but rather as the triumph of a universal principle: Lockean natural rights. This rhetoric reached its heights in the Platonic appeals to abstract natural right in Abraham Lincoln. This appeal was tied, as with the neoconservatives, with a grand and religious-sounding rhetoric that promised worldly redemption for our own worldly sins. Even our must run-of-the-mill wars--such as those against hostile Indians--often found rhetorical justification as a civilizing mission of world-historical importance: Manifest Destiny. Americans instinctually do not like going to war. We are not a particularly imposing or bellicose people. But the rhetoric of crusading for justice has always appealed to us. The neoconservaties are close to this tradition, but with a twist, and that twist is the massive significance of the Holocaust as symbol in the mind of Americans and Europeans in the late 20th Century. In World War I, the appeal of "making the world safe for democracy" was rooted in a confidence in the superiority of American institutions. American democracy was dueling with retrograde European empires. Today, the neoconservative rhetoric is rooted in the language of shame and redemption. Shame at America's alleged earlier failures to stop the Holocaust that we must now atone for and make right. The rhetoric has a certain appeal because when Americans go to war, as when they do something as normal as punishing criminals, they like to do so with a sense of abstract right and mission. Americans are uncomfortable with raw appeals to force and interest and identity. Consider the historiography of WWII in recent memory. There seems a certain ambivalence about the Pacific campaign because it lacks the ideological relief of our conflict with Germany. The European campaign, as memorialized in Capra’s films, represented the clash of the democracies with the regimented stoodges of old world dictatorships: the moral validity and practicality of our chosen way of life was on the line. Studying the clash of Nazis and America lets us condemn ourselves and praise ourselves (as in our Western selves) all at once, with the Nazis as the old, illiberal, ethnic-defined west, and America as the vangaurd of modernism and liberalism. In contrast, our battle with Japan had as much in common with the ancient battles of Greece and Persia; it was a classic fight for the integrity of a homeland, brutally attacked by another nation. The Japanese were fighting for little more principle than their own interest in dominating the Pacific. It was perhaps the least ideological war the U.S. ever fought. The Pacific Campaign, fought for the modest principle that people should not attack our country, shows that our fighting men fight quite well when the stakes are concrete and tangible. But rhetorically we are not comfortable with this; it's as if we collectively lack faith in the value of our own survival and the survival of that way of life to praise it now that the spread of liberalism is complete. Sent at: 2008 08 08