{"id":38029,"date":"2017-04-08T03:00:42","date_gmt":"2017-04-08T07:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=38029"},"modified":"2018-10-30T11:40:22","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T15:40:22","slug":"the-three-stooges-of-the-apocalypse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/04\/08\/the-three-stooges-of-the-apocalypse\/","title":{"rendered":"The “Three Stooges of the Apocalypse”"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Warren<\/a> takes a well-deserved kick at Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and (especially) Woodrow Wilson:<\/p>\n

A century has now passed since President Wilson disowned President Washington\u2019s advice to his successors \u2014 to stay out of European conflicts \u2014 and war was declared by the United States on Germany. A moral preener, Wilson justified himself by declaring an even more extravagant mission to go with it:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe world must be made safe for democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

However large, a war is just a war. It should have a beginning and an end. As my old Indian girlfriend explained, \u201cToo much war only leads to peace. Too much peace only leads to war.\u201d As most people prefer peace, most of the time, it is well that war is not a permanent condition. But a war to some idealistic purpose can get very large, and go on for a long time, and morph into conditions which resemble peace, but are not peace. We\u2019ve been making the world safe for democracy for at least a century. By now we have far too much.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

In my view, that Great War, that Totaler Krieg<\/em>, hasn\u2019t ended yet. The old etiquette, that war was for soldiers \u2014 that non-combatants should be non-involved \u2014 became a thing of nostalgia. Vast conscript armies had been summoned, and would never be fully demobilized. The men I call the \u201cThree Stooges of the Apocalypse\u201d \u2014 Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau \u2014 clinched at Versailles this new normal. It was not simply the punitive terms that were imposed on the war\u2019s losers, but a more fundamental reorganization of all national and international affairs: \u201cstatecraft\u201d became \u201cpolicy.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Wilson was also the pioneer of progressive schemes to change the American way of life. He was, in some sense, a second Washington, consolidating a second American Revolution that had begun more modestly with Lincoln and the Union victory in the Civil War. America would be recreated, along bureaucratic lines, in a tireless campaign for full secularization, under centralized government control. The general mobilization of the First World War, now in America as well as Europe, created a new opportunity, by accustoming men to following orders; by the propaganda that made them identify with huge abstractions.<\/p>\n

This is of course an inexhaustible topic, at which I pick away, in my attempts to explain if only to myself what makes our world so different from all preceding. It embraces more than any single force or event. We must also go back to the Prussian invention of the welfare state, and for that matter to the Gatling gun. Post-modernity is an invention of modernity, as modernity was an invention of the Middle Ages. The contemporary revolution has antecedents that may be found in the Enlightenment and in the Reformation. (What will post-modernity beget?)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Warren takes a well-deserved kick at Lloyd George, Clemenceau, and (especially) Woodrow Wilson: A century has now passed since President Wilson disowned President Washington\u2019s advice to his successors \u2014 to stay out of European conflicts \u2014 and war was declared by the United States on Germany. A moral preener, Wilson justified himself by declaring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,7,53,13,246],"tags":[712,1242,1020,1109,942],"class_list":["post-38029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-history","category-politics","category-usa","category-ww1","tag-centralplanning","tag-clemenceau","tag-progressives","tag-versailles","tag-woodrowwilson"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9Tn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38029"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38029\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38030,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38029\/revisions\/38030"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}