the Great War and the grand disillusion

[Christopher Tassava]

I've always wondered about the import of WWI to our lovely century here.  
It's certainly not a central concern of Our Man, but I think that it 
relates.  And even if the war wasn't a major turning point in the history of 
warfare (a watershed in bloodshed?), I think that the fact remains that the 
Great War - the shocking ferocity of a war amongst the most "civilized" 
nations in the world - stunned a fairly idealistic West out of many of its 
ideas about melioration and Progress.  WWI, quite literally, machine-gunned 
the Enlightenment idea that the world was a perfectible place.  The Great 
War made it evident that a brief social project couldn't correct the last 
couple of kinks in Western culture; the problems were deeper and far more 
permanent.  The Great War provided a nice segue into the uglier, later parts 
of century, even if it didn't cause them: it provided a state-of-the-art 
model for total warfare, an exhilarating excursion into the power of 
nationalism and propaganda, a test lab for new and improved weaponry, an 
excuse for further centralization of the state...  What the Great War 
wasn't, however, was an unprecedented event.  I mean, read Thucydides for 
some classical total war, or look at the effect of the crossbow on medieval 
war for technology's effect on warfare, or the Crusades for frenzied "Us 
versus Them" sociopolitical thinking.

I think it's an interesting question.  I'd like to hear some other ideas 
about the question.

Xferen

"No, this is not a
disentanglement from,
but a progressive
knotting into..."

Thomas Pynchon