the Great War and the grand disillusion

[Mr Craig Clark]

Christopher Tassava <ctass at suba.com> writes:

> 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.

...which raises a question that has haunted me (and possibly Hag as 
well) for some time. To whit, why is there little or no trace of the 
Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1903) in TRP, specifically in _V._? TRP 
is not unconcerned with our little of the tip of Africa here, as his 
fascination with Namibian history shows, yet there is little mention 
in his work of a war which saw civilian populations drawn into a war 
between arguably the best-equipped army in the field in its day and a 
group of poorly-trained guerillas equipped with obsolete weaponry. 
The Anglo-Boer War is a good candidate for the first modern war in 
history: it even saw the establishment of a concentration camp system 
and some good old-fashioned genocide (british exterminations of Boer 
civilians). Not to mention some really surreal stuff - the Irish 
forces who came out mto fight with the Boers, etc.

(Excuse me if I'm not very compos mentis - influenza viruses have 
interpenetrated me...)
Craig Clark

"Living inside the system is like driving across
the countryside in a bus driven by a maniac bent
on suicide."
   - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"