Tony Judt argues in an article in the New York Review of Books that one of the reasons why America has become increasingly willing to use force and is willing to use torture in this century is because it has never learned some of the most important lessons of the twenty-first century and has forgotten the ones that it did learn:
With the exception of the generation of men who fought in World War II, the United States thus has no modern memory of combat or loss remotely comparable to that of the armed forces of other countries. […] I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance.
[…] Ignorance of twentieth-century history does not just contribute to a regrettable enthusiasm for armed conflict. It also leads to a misidentification of the enemy. […] We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and "exceptional" circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and "terrorists," between "us" and "them" —are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur "never again." So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there?
Judt offers only part of an explanation because it doesn’t answer why a few European lefties such as Bernard Kouchner and André Glucksmann, who know as much about the twentieth century as Judt have become willing to fight wars or rather to intervene to use Benedict XVI language in countries in the name of human rights and for humanitarian reasons. My own explanation to this puzzling turn of history is that to these humanists the most important lesson of the twentieth century is that war is preferable to injustice, to genocide because it prevents them or at least stops them from becoming bigger crimes, crimes against humanity. To them, the use of force and other methods, objectionable most of the twentieth century, has become like the use of an amputation of a body part to prevent the spread of cancer throughout one’s body. Their argument is that war is an evil, which can become a good even if it not used as the last resort as long as its objectives are noble. Thus, the goodness of war depends not on whether it is an effective method to achieve a goal or whether everything was done to prevent it, but rather on its objectives. One of the problems with history is that it isn’t a thing in itself since people must interpret it and do so with the help of their own experience and biases. One of the troubles with the beginning of this century is precisely the fact that people have sacralized, objectifies, and politicized history in attempts to justify both follies and the unjustifiable.
