Iwas born during what some English called the recent unpleasantness, the Russians call the Great Patriotic War, some call the Holocaust and the rest of the world calls World War II. World War I, known at the time as The Great War, was just another chapter of internecine war (the monarchs were often cousins) that plagued Europe for 1,000 years. The reparations of that war set the stage for WWII.
WWII was over by the time I learned to talk and the modern world was born. It is the only world that I know; the only world that the vast majority the world population knows. It has been a period of relative peace, at least with no wars between major powers, and an amazing increase in prosperity. Although the world population has at least quadrupled in that time, the number of people leaving living in extreme poverty, has decreased. In 1945 most of the population lived in extreme poverty and now it’s only a small percentage mostly within Africa.
In the 1930s dictatorships were rising in several major countries, most notably Germany, Italy, and Japan. Their avowed goal was world domination. It was not clear that after they controlled the world how they would share it, but most suspect it would be an endless fight between themselves for dominance. Meanwhile, other dictators were assembling their own superpowers to take control from the winner. The death count in the period from1936 to 1946 was around 200 million. Now we face a choice. Do we get a continuation of this period of peace and prosperity, the last 80 years. Do we preserve the progress we made in equality and opportunity or do we pull the plug, destroy the systems and institutions that provided that. Do we abandon the Democratic process in favor of strong man leadership such as those we see in countries like Russia, North Korea, China, Turkey, Iran? It’s easy to break things, but much harder to put them back together. Do we go back to, when, when do you think was really better?
We learn from history that man, or at least man’s governments do not learn from history. Most of us only know the history we learned in public or parochial school. The history of heroes, Kings and generals, dates and conquests but very little about famines and plagues, or victims of conquest; very little about the advance civilizations destroyed by colonialism. Until the 17th century, the normal state of man was usually some form of slavery, vassalage or indenture. Almost everyone was in some way subservient to someone else. Suicide and murder were essentially the same crime because the perpetrator was depriving the king of his servant’s service. For most humans, life was as described by Thomas Hobbes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutal and short.”
Starting with the 1659 English Bill of Rights, common people began to acquire some dignity and through a long brutal process involving wars and setbacks humanity made progress toward universal dignity and adequacy.
After the war, 1945, the U.S.A. came up with a revolutionary strategy — instead of exacting reparations from our previous adversaries, Secretary of State General George Marshall had a better plan. Repair the damage on both sides so that no country would be motivated to attack its neighbors. Since then, no democracy has attacked another democracy.
The idea may have originated with Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, having won the civil war and reunited the nation: “With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
That is the mostly charitable, generous, loving world I believe I was born to inhabit, but there are those who would take us back to an earlier concept of life under a “Dear-Leader, aka Fuhrer” — nasty, brutal and short. Vote as if your future is at stake.
Ken Obenski is a forensic engineer, now safety and freedom advocate in South Kona. He writes a biweekly column for West Hawaii Today. Send feedback to obenskik@gmail.com