War and Peace: A Full Symphony of History's Possibilities

A full symphony of history's possibilities

Bards and journalists have always known that war is the most dramatic of stories, the richest to tell. It is dense with spectacle and passion, with endless subplots of fear and bravery and cowardice, of betrayal and hope. Although it is grotesque to say it, war has everything, which may explain its persistence on the human agenda. It is character and politics and statecraft and violence and destruction and redemption, almost the full symphony of his tory's possibilities. War is mankind in full panoply and in extremis. It has always been, too, a form of madness. But until this century, the world has been more inclined to consider the necessity of war, the glory of it, at any rate the inevitability of it, before pausing to reflect on its insanity. War was an adventure and a rite of passage:

each generation of young men had to have its war. In the past few generations, the character of wars has changed—both the wars that were fought and now the one that nobody has dared to begin. There was World War I, the war of the trenches; the futility and waste of human life, the vast pointlessness of the exercise, led much of civilized opinion to the conclusion that warfare had become madness.

It was left to Adolf Hitler to embody the idea of war as individual psychosis, and to the Bomb to give the world its presiding terror: the vision of one maniac pressing the obliterating button. Hitler's extravagant madness broke over Europe in a dark wave. He began with Poland at the end of the summer of 1939. As usually happens with history in the process of occurring, it was sometimes difficult for the world to weigh Hitler, to judge him, to predict him, to know his ambition or his lunacy. He was a perfect phenomenon of the age of Einstein, in which seemingly infinitesimal causes can produce spectacular effects: cataclysms. Hitler was an atom, a nonentity convinced he could conquer the world. But the very madness of Hitler's enterprise made war, from the Allied perspective, seem sane and necessary. If ever there was a war that should be fought, it was that one, against such evil. But war always has its reasons, its internal logic. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was despicably aggressive to most Americans but made abundant sense to the Japanese general staff. It was an essential means of staking out the Japanese sphere of influence. That imperial ambition was only extinguished, at last, by the terrible light that burst over Hiroshima. The end of World War II was the beginning of the unthinkable. The Bomb became the black presiding presence in the world: in the logic of arms race and nuclear deterrence, the wild id of the world was made to function as superego; the very terror of the thing enforced constraint. Evil will make us be good. The world lived with it, the alternative being the threat of planetary death. The image of such global cessation was arresting. So the unthinkable came to be not only thinkable but endlessly and eloquently conjured, by cold statistics, projections of megadeaths, and a procession of movie fantasies. An entire rhetoric of doomsday burgeoned, evoking the horror that was imminent, the last flash tomorrow. But in burgeoning, it had the ironic effect of becoming itself a convention, and thus routine.