[lit-ideas] Locust Years

  • From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2006 08:38:53 -0700

Bevin Alexander on page 103 of How America got it Right discusses some of
the matters that have interested us in the past and some that are currently
interesting us.  I'll comment below:

 

"Winston Churchill called the 1930s 'the locust years,' an apt and eloquent
phrase.  He was referring to the terrible losses, mistakes, and failures
that devoured all hope of peace during that tragic decade.  The words came
from the Old Testament book of Joel, which described a period of calamity in
ancient Israel as 'the years that the locust hath eaten.'  When today we
look back on those sad times leading up to World War II, we are dismayed at
the inability of well-intentioned people to see what should have been
plainly evident - that Germany, Italy, and Japan were bent on aggression of
the most ferocious and destructive kind, and that they had to be stopped.

 

"Whole libraries have been written trying to explain why the leaders of the
Western democracies appeased the dictators and allowed the crimes to happen
- fear of another bloodletting like the first world war; belief in the
peaceful intentions of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and the Japanese
militarists; paralysis caused by the Great Depression that began in 1929;
the wish that a pact 'outlawing war' would actually be obeyed; and, among
Americans especially, the hope that the murders would occur in places far
away, and that we could remain safe and unaffected behind our oceans.

 

"The decade of the 1930s stands out as the longest and most sustained period
of willful blindness in American history.  During those years our leaders
refused to accept either reality or the duty that bound them to protect
their nation and their civilization.  During the entire reach from the
Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931 to the German defeat of France in
the spring of 1940, America did not get it right, and we and the world
suffered immeasurable harm because of it.  It is no consolation that the
other democracies did no better than we did, for if America had stood up
resolutely, the weaker and more timid democracies would have been
emboldened, and the world could have avoided the most terrible war in its
history.  The 1930s should serve as a cautionary tale to guide our future
conduct - if we allow some aggression to get by, it almost certainly will
grow into more aggression.

 

"Today we tend to look back on the sellout of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany
in 1938 as the worst and most disgraceful failure of the decade.  But in
fact this appeasement of Hitler was by no means the most horrible of the
atrocities we allowed to happen.  We let Japan take over Manchuria and north
China and murder hundreds of thousands of innocent Chinese civilians in
Shanghai, Nanjing, and other cities.  We did nothing when Mussolini's Italy
bombed villages in harmless Ethiopia in 1935-36.  We took no action when
Hitler rearmed Germany in 1934-35 and remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936,
both in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, and we stood idly by when he
annexed Austria in 1939."

 

Comments:

 

A:  We discussed in the past whether there was anything anyone could have
done to prevent Hitler's rise to power.  There was a time when, I argued,
France and Britain could have stopped Hitler.  Judy Evans thought the U.S.
should have come to Britain's aid sooner.  Alexander is more in Judy's camp
than mine.  I have argued that we were in an isolationist frame of mind at
the time and therefore could not have helped anyone.  Alexander doesn't
excuse us for that.  We should have been wiser, we should have gotten it
right but didn't.

 

B:  Alexander says that we should have stopped Japan as well.  Irene Cassidy
is still angry that Japan never apologized for the Rape of Nanking (spelled
"Nanjing" by Alexander) but Alexander blames the U.S. for not stopping the
Japanese militarists.  Perhaps the U.S.should apologize for not stopping the
Rape of Nanking.

 

C:  While it is true that we drew back like the Japanese cartoon and pulled
the covers over our head after WWI, Alexander points out that we had at that
time the most powerful Navy in the World.   It is true that we preserved it
(after WWI) in order to protect our isolationism from all those crazy
foreigners killing each other over there, but we should have known better.
We should have known that Japan had militaristic ambitions that we would
have to deal with eventually and many lives could be saved if we had been
wiser, including the lives lost at Nanking.  

 

D:  I squirm a little over Alexander's anachronistic analyses.  I tend to
think in terms of what we could have done given our isolationistic
predisposition.  Alexander thinks in terms of what we should have done.
Isolationism was wrong and he wants us to learn just how wrong it was so we
don't make that sort of mistake again.

 

E:  We are attempting to avoid more "locust years" by acting quickly to
prevent Militant Islamic aggression in the Middle East?  No one else is in a
position to oppose Militant Islam at the present time, but Alexander says no
one else was in a position to oppose the Germans, Italians, and Japanese in
the 30s.  Yes, Britain and France were over there in Europe and had
militaries, but WWI had made them timid.  WWI, he points out, had not made
the U.S. timid.

 

Lawrence

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