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Entry: All Quiet on the K Street Front Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/all_quiet_on_the_k_street_front#404 Post contents: 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. Sent at: 2008 07 06