If you only have time for one long article today, you could do much worse than to read Matthew Continetti's piece in the Weekly Standard. He starts with one of those small stories that emphasizes how large a role providence plays in our affairs:
On December 13, 1931, there was a traffic accident in New York City. A man exited a cab on the Upper East Side and was crossing Fifth Avenue when he was hit by a car traveling around 35 miles an hour. The force of the impact threw the man to the pavement. He struck his head. Two of his ribs were cracked. A crowd formed around him; one of the witnesses hailed a taxi to take the man to the hospital. When he was admitted to Lenox Hill the doctors noted that he was bruised and battered but would make a full recovery. He had cheated death.
The patient remained in the doctors’ care for eight days. While he was there the driver who had struck him visited. The patient made it clear that the accident had been his own fault; the driver, an unemployed mechanic, had nothing to fear. The incident had occurred because the patient, an Englishman, had looked left as he crossed the street when he should have looked right. The grateful driver left the hospital carrying an autographed copy of the patient’s latest book. The New York Times wrote about the meeting the next day. The headline read, “Churchill Greets Driver Who Hit Him.”
Beyond the fact that a similar incident today would end up in the courts for years (lawsuits alleging that the municipality had been neglectful of safety for the distracted, a newly empowered disabled group; lawsuits for wrongful injury against the driver, and for PTSD against the injured pedestrian; only the limited imaginations of our tort bar provide any limits to the lawsuits engendered) the notion that perhaps the pivotal figure of the 20th century could have been removed from the scene before the drama even began, is chastening.
Continetti concludes:
Are things so very different today? Iran’s megalomaniacal dictatorship marches toward nuclear weaponry. North Korea shells its neighbor with impunity. Jihadists execute terrorist attacks throughout the world. China expands its reach. We know who the troublemakers are and where the challenges to American primacy and global stability come from. But we have our own distractions. We have the fantasy of abolishing nuclear weapons, of “resetting” relations with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, of reconciling the irreconcilable in the Middle East, of achieving rapprochement with “the Muslim world.”
A few people in December 1931 recognized the growing danger. The patient at Lenox Hill Hospital was one. Another was the New Yorker correspondent Mary Heaton Vorse, who wrote from Germany, “No one knows what is going to happen. No one knows—but everyone knows that cataclysm is at hand.” Vorse was somehow able to divine the next 14 years of world history by sitting in a nightclub. “The next act will be starker,” she concluded. “It will be steel instead of rococo marble.”
The lesson of the 1930s is not only that aggression ought not to be appeased. It’s that aggressors keep pushing until they encounter resistance. And by the time that happens, it may be too late to prevent the deluge.
What unites our two eras, in the end, is their unpredictability. This, and the fact that people in one time had no better idea of what might happen than people in the other.
Picture Churchill as he lay stricken on Fifth Avenue. “Perhaps it is the end,” he recalled thinking. He did not have the luxury of knowing, as we do, what would happen next. He did not know how well he would recover—or if he would recover at all. He was ignorant of the challenges that awaited him. For people alive in the 1930s, each day brought a tangle of developments that were difficult to interpret and impossible to analyze from the detached perspective of historical study. There was no guide for the perplexed. There was no cheat sheet that told them what to do. There was no way of knowing when the crisis was “over” because there was no way of knowing what tomorrow would bring.
Our leaders don’t have to worry about mass unemployment on the scale of the 1930s. But they do have to worry about structural deficits of perilous magnitude, debt burdens, sovereign default, and currency wars. Our leaders don’t have to worry about Japanese expansion or the rise of Adolf Hitler. But they do have to worry about nuclear weaponry falling into the hands of apocalyptic theocrats, and a nuclear-armed Hermit Kingdom that may choose war over dissolution. The stakes during one era may have been greater than the other. Time will tell. But that doesn’t mean the challenges are dissimilar. To the contrary: A difference in degree is not a difference in kind.
Of course, we have one thing that Americans in the ’30s did not. We have their history. We have their words. We’d do well to heed them. “Nature is merciful and does not try her children, man or beast, beyond their compass,” Churchill wrote from his hospital bed in December 1931. “It is only where the cruelty of man intervenes that hellish torments appear. For the rest—live dangerously; take things as they come; dread naught, all will be well.”
It is de rigueur to minimize the danger from the radical Islam/Leftist alliance. People who raise the red flag are routinely dismissed as cranks, neocons, and conspiracy mongers, yet in 1931 the Nazis were a minor nuisance primarily affecting Germany. We are already allowing the Islamist/Left alliance to determine the limits of free speech in much of the West (see Phylis Chesler's A Showdown with Evil); we do not respond to repeated attacks and atrocities (because the victims are Jews/Israelis or limited in number, or merely other Muslims, or Hindus); and once Iran attains a bomb the possibility of countering their aggressive use of terror as an element of statecraft will become severely constrained. As a bonus, an arms race in the Middle East between Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia and Egypt, all paragons of stability and rationality, will have incalculable results.
On the home front, our reticence to address our economic imbalances and an unsustainable entitlement state, means that the crunch, when it comes, will be far worse than if we had addressed the issues when we had the time and the reserves.
It is possible that 2010 will one day be seen as a turning point, when the world began to climb out of the abyss; it is perhaps more likely that it will be seen in retrospect to have been merely the first act of a drama which overturned our comfortable notions of how the world operates.
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