Stranger, probably, more diverse and heterogeneous of opinion, certainly; but, more dangerous?

Maybe I just have a good imagination.

The web is a huge help to people who want to understand that kind of diversity and strangeness. Of course, you have to be literate, time-rich, and interested in understanding. I learned as much about Northern California from my years on the Well as I ever did by going there; and the blogosphere gives one access to a huge range of opinions, many of them nasty, poisonous and ignorant beyond belief. But I'm never certain how influential they are. How could a state that produces Ted Barlow elect George W Bush?

The most frightening thing about the US, at least to European eyes, remains its belief in providence. You haven't really had the First World War. Given how horrendous such a war would have to be to dent American Chosenness, I'd rather you persisted in your delusions.

The most frightening thing about the US, at least to European eyes, remains its belief in providence. You haven't really had the First World War.

Hmm, I don't know about that, Andrew. I'm just hip-deep in reading about the American Civil War right now, and at first glance its carnage and horror seems toe-to-toe with the First World War if you ask me.

Oh yeah. The ACW saw some of the world's first trench warfare, cities razed for strategic purposes, and god-awful POW camps.

I'm just hip-deep in reading about the American Civil War right now, and at first glance its carnage and horror seems toe-to-toe with the First World War if you ask me.

Yeah, but the American Civil War was 140 years ago. WWII was within the memory of living Europeans.

Europe - especially my little corner - is littered with solemn war memorials covered in the names of the local dead. Americans very nearly celebrate the Civil War, picnicking at battlegrounds and doing decenial reenactments. Fairly few Americans think of the Civil War as a matter of good versus evil. It certainly wasn't taught that way by my (Louisiana born) 8th grade history teacher. Although Kaiser Wilhelm is no longer deemed quite so evil as he once was, it is only by comparision with Hitler that he has gained that less-than-demonic status.

Europeans treat war with a degree of horror and repulsion that Americans on the whole just don't, and the reminders of a brutal century have a lot to do with it.

Americans very nearly celebrate the Civil War, picnicking at battlegrounds and doing decenial reenactments.

And some don't seem to really think it's over.

Fairly few Americans think of the Civil War as a matter of good versus evil. It certainly wasn't taught that way by my (Louisiana born) 8th grade history teacher.

Well, sure. Your teacher's birth state was on the Evil side.

Yeah, but the American Civil War was 140 years ago. WWII was within the memory of living Europeans.

I think he said First World War. But no matter. I think there are some African Americans who would disagree with your contention that the few Americans believe the ACW was about good vs. evil.

Many Americans, by the way, travel to Normandy every year to look at the graves of the fallen Americans who died to liberate the French. One reason they had to this is precisely because Europeans let their revulsion of World War I blind them to the threat of Hitler.

I appreciate your point about the Europeans. I just question the degree to which you think Americans are detached from that view.

Americans, on the whole, are sure they will win.

This is not a comprehensible emotional state to anyone else.

Scott Martens said: "Fairly few Americans think of the Civil War as a matter of good versus evil."

I beg to differ. I very much beg to differ.

I would like to differ, but I am not sure that I can. Some Americans think of it as good versus evil, but the majority seems fairly blase about the whole thing.

Actually, let me rephrase that, because I don't think of it as good versus evil. I think of it as moral principles versus immoral principles, simply because I have trouble thinking that everyone in the South was evil. Engaging in or supporting immoral practices, yeah, but evil is a strong strong word.

Still, the point's the same. I think of the Civil War as a fight for good. Not enough people think of it that way to defeat politicians who visibly pander to Confederate nostalgists.

I think the difference between the Civil War and World War I in the imagination and memory of America and Europe, respectively, is that for Americans, the Civil War was a morally earnest endeavor, whereas after World War I, much of Europe was simply in a state of moral shock. All that effort and for what. The Civil War was terrible, but at least at its end some small good could be ascertained.

Andrew Brown is exactly right: Americans really, really don't grasp what World War I did to Europe's consciousness of itself. From our point of view, it was a fairly straightforward affair--we went over, helped settle the Kaiser's hash, went to conferences, wore top hats, came home and got rich. For Europe, it was the end of a world.

Somewhere in one of Ken MacLeod's books there's a tossed-off remark about Western civilization ending at the moment that the German legislature, nominally dominated by progressive forces, voted for war. I'm probably getting the details wrong. But it's stuck with me.

One aspect of the American Civil War that doesn't get discussed a lot is how important it was to democratic forces elsewhere in the world. Reformers all over Europe felt that the very future of democracy and equality was riding on the success of the Union. Whether they were right or wrong, that's how they felt. The Civil War was a dreadful butchery, but for immense numbers of those involved and even greater numbers of onlookers it was a kind of sacred cause. World War I destroyed the idea of sacred causes.

Bryant, I don't think everyone who fought for the Confederate side, or everything done by them, is evil. I think they fought in the worst of causes; and where their leaders deliberately obfuscated the nature of that cause, the blame falls on their leaders.

You can hear the true causes of the war being sorted out in the language on both sides -- most acutely in Lincoln's clarity, succinctness, and impact when he discusses the issues at stake (esp. in the Second Inaugural Address); and in Jefferson Davis's almost complete break with realitiy.

"But I'm never certain how influential they are. How could a state that produces Ted Barlow elect George W Bush?"

By being the state that elected Ann Richards before George W. Bush.

By the same means a a country can elect Harold Wilson, Clement Atlee, and Margaret Thatcher.

By being heterogenous, and split.

"Europeans treat war with a degree of horror and repulsion that Americans on the whole just don't, and the reminders of a brutal century have a lot to do with it."

Perhaps so. Certainly there's a case to be made. But Korea wasn't a picnic, and how did the Vietnam War end for America?

(And though I've made the point many times that, of course, Europe, Russia, China, Southeast Asia, and Japan, suffered vastly more than America did in WWII, it was still also not a fun outing for America.)

I'm going to stick with what I said. I do think Americans are more detached from the notion of war than Europeans are, although as WWII fades out of living memory, it is becoming less true.

On the Civil War:

I think there are some African Americans who would disagree with your contention that the few Americans believe the ACW was about good vs. evil.

and:

I beg to differ. I very much beg to differ.

I'm sticking with my claim that Americans mostly don't see the Civil War in the same moral category as WWII. That is my experience from 20 years of living in the United States, entirely in areas that did not try to succeed from the Union. That is not to say that there are no Americans who aren't willing to class the Confederate flag with the swastika as a symbol of hate, and certainly African Americans are the most likely to do so.

I'm making broad generalisations, so I have to qualify them. But I have always been disturbed by the degree to which the Civil War is romanticised and its causes and consequences so thoroughly obscured in America.

Could you imagine if German TV had a show where a pair of young German men drove around in a Volkwagen bug called the General Rommel with a giant swastika painted on it, using their wits and keen driving skills to evade corrupt local police in their rural Bavarian village? The program would contain no directly racist content, nor anything that explicitly referred to the Third Reich, and there would, of course, be token Jewish and Eastern European walk-ons on the show, but almost everyone who appears would be wholly Aryan. Characters would however, frequently make reference to the superiority of their traditional German values by comparison to "sophisticated city-folk."

If such a program were made, there would be a huge public outcry about anti-semitism and Nazi symbolism on German TV. In fact, the program would be illegal under present German law. But, of course, you will all have recognised by now that I'm describing The Dukes of Hazzard.

WWI is a different story. Nowadays, most people think of all the participating governments as fairly evenly corrupt. I am not arguing that the Civil War was less brutal than WWI (it was, but not by so much.) I am arguing that WWI and WWII together have had a very different impact on the countries where it was fought than the Civil War has had in America.

I am not making the much grosser generalisation that Americans are cowboys who don't think about the violence they can cause in war. (Although, like so many stereotypes, I think there is a grain of truth to it.) Nor am I suggesting that Vietnam or Korea were not amply violent or brutal. However, the US lost some 50,000 men in Vietnam, out of a million or so troops sent to war. (I may have the figures wrong - my memory of American history isn't what it used to be.) How many casualties were there in Korea compared to the number mobilised? I live in Belgium, where WWI took out a whole generation of young men, and WWII was hardly less destructive. They measure their losses as a percentage of the whole population.

Nor do I seek to undermine the significance of American losses in WWI or WWII, however, it is different to loose a son or a father in a distant war (or in WWII's case, a grandfather or great-uncle by now) than to live in a town where no buildings predate 1945 because they were all destroyed, where a large war memorial dominates the central square and where signs around the edge of town direct you to a large war cemetary. Foreign wars mean sacrifice, but there is a limit to what is being risked. The people at home rarely feel directly threatened. Local wars can kill anyone.

America hasn't really had a local war since 1865. People's homes haven't been threatened, the families of soldiers haven't been at risk. Or at least, all this was true until September 2001.

I wrote:

Somewhere in one of Ken MacLeod's books there's a tossed-off remark about Western civilization ending at the moment that the German legislature, nominally dominated by progressive forces, voted for war. I'm probably getting the details wrong. But it's stuck with me.

Long ago there had been another country, called the International. It was a country of the mind, a country of hope, and it encompassed the world. Until one day, in August 1914, its citizens went to war with each other, and the world ended. Everything died in that war, God and Country and International and Civilization; died, and went to hell. Everybody died. The survivors thought they were alive, but they were not. After August 1914 there had been no living people in the world--only dead people on leave, the damned and the demons.

The last morally responsible people in the world had been the Reichstag fraction of the German Social-Democratic Party. They had voted the credits for the Kaiser's war, against every resolution of their past. They had known the right thing to do, and they had chosen the wrong. All subsequent history had been that of the damned, of poor devils struggling in the hell these men had pitched them into; and nobody could be judged for how they behaved in hell.

This thought, with its bleak blend of Christian and Marxist heresies, had originally been expounded to her by David Reid, one night many decades ago, when he was very drunk. It had sustained Myra through many a bad night. At other times--in the days, and the good nights--it seemed a callow undergraduate nihilism, shallow and wicked and absurd. But in the bad nights it struck her as profound and true, and, in its way, life-affirming. If you thought of people as alive and each having a life to live, you'd get so depressed at what so many had got instead, this past century and a half, that on a bad night you'd be tempted to add your own death to theirs, and thus make an undetectable increment to that already unimaginable, unthinkable number.Ken adds, in his email:

I don't know if the Reichstag was in fact dominated by progressive forces--the SPD had, I think, fourteen deputies, and I don't know how many the liberals had--but the key point was that the SPD was the decisive "progressive force" and its parliamentary caucus voted for the war.

The classic socialist response is Rosa Luxemburg's "Junius Pamphlet."

The best account I've read of the event is in one of the final chapters of Bertram D. Wolfe's Three Who Made a Revolution. The feeling it produced in me of being stuck in a nightmare whose end I already knew is probably what inspired [the passage under discussion].

I grew up with some of the same sort of Marxist mythos as I suspect Ken MacLeod did (N.B. "mythos" doesn't mean false) and I heard the same story. I don't remember how many seats the SPD had, but it was far from the majority. Karl Liebknecht was the only SPD member in the Reichstag to have the courage to vote against the war.

Here was the mainstream of socialism - a movement that had been built on opposition to existing authorities and on the global brotherhood of the workers - voting in favour of a nationalist war in coalition with those they professed to despise. Germany wasn't the only country where this happened, but it happened there first and Germany's socialists were more powerful than those of other contries.

Over the course of the war, many seated, parliamentary socialist parties backed the war and IIRC some participated in coallition governments.

Afterwards, the Second International parties of Europe were little more than conventional political parties that posed no threat to the existing order. Having vested themselves in the horrible war that followed, it was no longer possible to see any genuine internationalism or revolutionary potential in them. The disaffected more radical wings of their parties moved further and further into the orbit of the Soviet Union, except for the Trotskyists who frequently orbit their own planet.

For old-style socialists, this event represents the end of the worker's movement as a force able to genuinely able to undermine the existing order. The remaining alternatives were either marginalisation or capitulation. Disaffected workers stopped turning to the socialists when they sought political solutions, and looked to the more radical communists and fascists. The results are pretty much known to everyone.

This version of the story is sort of boiled down from the versions I've heard from hard leftists over the years. It's simplified, and I won't vouch for its full historical accuracy or completeness, but this is basically why a Trotskyist or even a Wobblie might see the War Credit vote as the defining moment in the fall of the working class movement.

Even though I hardly count myself as an old-style socialist, I agree that it was a pretty terrible choice and a horrible mistake. Politics is about compromise, but this once they should have stood on principle and risked losing a few elections.

I think that Patrick brought out very clearly the point I was trying to make. At the end of the ACW, the winning side knew what it had been fighting for, and saw that this had been gained. A memory of the horrors of war may well have persisted; but like the horrors of WWII, they were horrors in a worthwhile cause.
The first world war was different. It was not so much the greater horror of the fighting -- though nothing in previous wars compared with the duration of a battle like Verdun -- but the realisation at the end of it that God had been on both sides, and all the ideals were equally bankrupt.

The repercussions of the Civil War are still very much alive and integral to America's cultural struggles today.

For an excellent set of books about how the war affected ordinary people, even in parts of the country we don't typically think of as involved, read PG Nagle's War in the West series.

However, I do agree that America is detached from the rest of the world's troubles, due to the fact that we haven't been as vulnerable to disruptions and violence as other countries, prior to 9/11. I had my eyes opened when I lived in Kenya for 2 years.

Americans, as a people, truly care about what goes on around the world. But as a people, we don't really understand its causes, nor what we should (and shouldn't) do about it.

I used to refer to it as our malevolent innocence.

-l.

The key difference between the US & European experiences of war is (like real estate) location, location, location. Scott Martens references this above; I've lived in Israel -- the difference is almost indescribeable. It has been over 100 years since sustained modern warfare took place on US soil. All wars since the Civil War have been "over there". That's about 3 generations who have had to get on a boat and cross an ocean to reach a battlefield.

"...stranger than you imagine, and probably more dangerous."

Yup, and if I say any more, then I'll be labelled an enemy of your state.

The brutality of the American Civil War was a major step beyond what had gone before. The brutality of The Great War surpassed the American Civil War by orders of magnitude. There were individual battles in The Great War which had more fatalities than the ACW had casualties.

American Civil War: 970,000 dead AND wounded in four years, to suppress a rebellion covering 13 states, destroy the practice of slavery in North America, and preserve the Union.

Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele): 500,000 dead and wounded in four months to move the Ypres salient about two miles east.

Of course, the brutality of the Great Patriotic War and its offshoots dwarfs The Great War: The Soviets suffered an average of 15,000 fatalities *every day* for four years--that's Antietam every day for 1400 days--and absorbed about half of the deaths of all of World War II in the process.

Any theories about why the SPD voted for WWI?

A data point about Americans and the Civil War: I went to school in Delaware in the sixties, and came out thinking that the North was the good guys and the South was the bad guys. (Note: Delaware was on the southern edge of the Union.)
This wasn't a huge part of my mental landscape--I read _Gone with the Wind_ several times without being outraged by it.

My forebearers had come to the US at the turn of the century, so there's no direct family connection to either side, but I identify as a northerner.

Until recently, I assumed that all those southerners who knew so much about the details of the Civil War were dedicated hobbyists--I didn't know that it was taught so thoroughly (at least on the military side) in the schools.

As others have said, nearly all the wars that influence the American consciousness occurred elsewhere: Americans have rarely fought on home soil. There's the Revolution, and the Civil War. That's about it, I think.

Also, the American wars were often For A Good Cause. The Revolution was a fight for independance (although the Hated British were hardly as evil as is popularly made out, e.g. the execrable "The Patriot"); the Civil War a fight for the Union and for democracy; WWII a fight to save the world from Hitler (interesting that it took you so long to catch on, though); Korea a UN-sanctioned action; Vietnam a battle against Those Godless Commies. Whether these actually were good causes or not (I think, with the possible exception of Vietnam, they all were), I think Americans generally think of them as such.

Europeans think back to WWI, which, despite efforts to couch it in moral terms, really was the most pointless waste of human life I can think of. WWII, too, which, while for (some -- don't forget Italy and Germany!) a good cause, involved far too much carnage on behalf of Europeans to be remembered fondly. I don't know if Europeans think back that far, but the Thirty Years' War was pretty damn pointless, too.

Most Americans, I believe, see war as a chance to finally rush in and kick some bad guy arse. Europeans see it more along the lines of what it really is. Is it any wonder the USA is more pro-war?

Well, I grew up in the American South -- Florida and Texas and eventually Arkansas, to be precise -- and nevertheless emerged from the various local school systems fairly clear on the concept that the Civil War had a wrong side and a right side, and that the Northern side was the right one.

I hadn't thought, at the time, that this was something that would take most people a lot of intellectual effort to figure out. (The phrase "self-evident" comes to mind, in fact.) But based on the number of times since then that I've had people present the idea to me as though they expected me to experience it as some kind of world-shattering revelation . . . I may have been wrong.

Mark, the notable absentee (to me) from your list is the War of 1812. What we were taught in Ontario was that it was a war started by the USA which didn't accomplish anything, which nobody won. Our heroes from that war were soldiers who fought major defensive actions on Canadian soil.

Canadians have a tendency to say that Americans don't remember the War of 1812 because the US started it and didn't win, so tht it does not fit the "national self-image" down here. We are such ultragringos that we don't know much about wars against Spain & Mexico or the wars of displacement of aboriginal peoples, which are better remembered and considered by the US to have been won.

Even the wars fought within what are now the boundaries of the US and Canada are different from the wars in Europe for their inhabitants. Not only were their staggering numbers of deaths, one's day to day life is conducted on battlefields and surrounded by monuments and less formal reminders of past wars. In the US, even the Civil War was something that happened far away for many people, and many live in cities and towns that hardly even existed in the nineteenth century.

Mark,

There is also the 'other' kind of war that the US has been involved in since before it was independent: the territorial war. As Bob Webber mentioned. The Indian Wars (especially the Seminole Wars, the Ohio Wars, and the Great Plains War), the Spanish-American War, and the Mexican War, just to name the biggies. (William Appleman Williams catalogues 150 foreign military interventions made by the US before WWII.) But, as you say, these are hardly part of the mainstream American popular consciousness.

And, of course, most of these wars occurred to get what is now considered American soil, but they can't be said to have been fought on American soil, so the casualties and damage are likewise less enshrined in the national consciousness.

These wars are also remarkable for having been fought in many cases under false pretexts and questionable legality (see the Lincoln quote mentioned in the 'tinfoil hat' thread for commentary re the Mexican War.) We like to *think* we're on the side of right and justice and truth, and that gets manipulated. Misinformation is planted, we get all worked up, go in, win, and then later find out it was a lie (be it the Maine or the Kuwaiti babies). If we find out at all (Barbary Wars, anyone?). So maybe that's part of why these actions get short shrift on the History Channel.

Certainly the misinformation thing seems to have held true in our last few adventures: Grenada, Panama, Gulf I, to name a few.

We're a nation that is schizophrenic when it comes to our wars: on the one hand, we deny our involvement; on the other, we're addicted to it like a heroin junkie. *Before* Reagan built up the defense industry, "50% of all our scientists and engineers were employed in military related work, the federal budget expenditures provided $418 per person for the military, $200 per person for health care, and $32 per person for education." (William Appleman Williams, _Empire as a Way of Life_)

Bob:

My father forced me as a teenager to learn Canadian history, since we were living in "enemy territory", a.k.a. New Jersey, and the local school system barely realised that Canada existed. The way he told the story was that the US started the War of 1812 and lost. Washington was torched, no US claims on Canadian soil were upheld, and at the siege of Detroit, 90 untrained Canadian farmers induced the US forces to surrender by marching in circles around the fort to convince them that the Canadian troops were far more numerous than they were.

Of course, Dad also went on to explain how the perfidious British had betrayed Canada in favour of an alliance with the US ever since. Papa wasn't a very good socialist, but he was definitely a Canadian nationalist.

I won't claim that this is an accurate history of the war, but it is a damn sight more entertaining.

Nancy:

I'm sure there is a well researched book on the subject of the War Credit vote out there somewhere, but I can't recommend one. Ken McLeod's recommandation is probably the place to look.

Rosa Luxembourg's analysis is in part online at the Marxist International Archive.

The causes - again from the semi-mythical history of socialism I was raised with - are most frequently attributed to:

1 - Bernsteinism. Named after the now hated Eduard Bernstein, it was a reformist tendency that advocated bourgeois liberalism (= becoming a normal political party) in place of more revolutionary methods.

2 - Bureaucratic tendencies in the German SPD. As the party grew larger and more polular, it actually started to look like a normal political party, with a party machine designed to win elections, not support principles.

3 - Betrayal by the trade union leadership. The trade unions stood more for their own empowerment than the socialist cause. Their ability to mobilise votes and their role in funding the party corrupted the SPD's parliamentary caucus.

4 - The poor quality of the proletariat. I think Hobswam said that you can chart the history of socialism by complaints about the poor quality of the proletariat. The people were nationalists. My country, right or wrong and make the damn French pay! Well, their country was wrong and they paid the price. Politicians who go too far against the public's gut response to crisis loose elections. The SPD didn't want to loose elections. (See point one.)

Scott, I like your father's version of the War of 1812 better than the one I learned in school: his is more American.

from mark:

"WWII a fight to save the world from Hitler (interesting that it took you so long to catch on, though); "

Part of this was WWI. The US fought the largest war that we had fought in a half-century. Twenty years later, Europe was obviously going to have 'WWI: the sequel'. It wasn't unreasonable for the US to tell Europe to go off and have fun. IMHO, this was reinforced by the fact that the US had the prospect make a lot selling to the UK and France, and that the political right in the US didn't relish opposing Hitler.

"Americans, as a people, truly care about what goes on around the world. But as a people, we don't really understand its causes, nor what we should (and shouldn't) do about it."

I wouldn't argue with this, but it puzzles me because I'm not clear how it differentiates Americans, as a people, from some other people, or which other people. Nor am I clear how it could be falsified. What would be a case of a people who "really understand [the causes of what gones on around the world] and what we should (and shouldn't do about it"? Do such a people exist? Could they, without being Arisians?

If not, what useful point is being made?