Divine Plagiarism

I recently finished reading The Pilgrim’s Regress. Lewis’ allegorical critique of Freud is great, and I laughed out loud at his parody of the Naturalist. Of far more use to our current discussion is his description of the relationship between modernity and nihilism. He describes several philosophers dwelling in a rather austere environment calling themselves ‘tough-minded.’ They are the thinkers of modernity. But they are incomplete. They haven’t followed their thought process all the way through. Traveling north into the harshest of environments, one runs into the logical conclusion of tough-mindedness, the nihilists. They come in two flavors, fascists and Marxists, and they command hordes of dwarves. Returning to the forces of modernity, the protagonist notes that said forces can hardly stand in the face of either flavor of nihilism. Like Hicks notes about his own predicament in Aliens, the philosophers’ only remaining weapon is harsh language.

Lewis’ description would not have been terribly surprising had he made it in 1945. The Communists and Nazis ran roughshod right through the traditional stronghold of modernity, France. Here’s the thing, though. He wrote it in 1933. Before Hitler was a major player. Before the Second World War. And he was right. It would have Britain alone, and Britain would not have held.

People seem to like to play the alternate history game. Just like in our personal hypotheticals, we generally assume all the breaks went the way we wanted them to. We also generally overlook the paths that led us to the hypothetical situation. It is still chic in most academic circles to bash the United States policy on just about everything. It reminds me of a grounded teenager sitting in his room, cursing his parents under his breath. Wishing them gone, the teenager conveniently overlooks the negative effect that their non-existence would have had on his odds of being born. As popular as it is to rage against the machine in scholarly journals, I daresay that academic freedom was not quite at its zenith under either Mussolini or Stalin.

Let’s play the alternate history game, but let‘s actually follow the paths where they lead. Let’s say Chomsky, Zinn, and Ward Churchill all are granted their greatest wish and there was never a United States. In fact, where there is now a country, let’s just say there is a large waterway with a remarkably straight northern border connecting the Pacific to the Atlantic. Seventeen hundreds, no big changes. A side show to the Anglo-Franco wars for world domination never happens, but that hardly alters the outcome of the conflict. Eighteen hundreds, England turns to India for cotton a bit faster. Colonialism holds on a little longer in South America. Or maybe not, depending on how one classifies the norteamericano interventions of that century and the next. Regardless, the story goes pretty much the same. Europe carves up Africa, plays the colonial game for a while. It culminates by way of Bismarck and labyrinthine alliances in the inevitable mistake of the First World War. Even without the eventual American intervention, Britain and France still win, Ottoman empire still comes apart. The monumental incompetence of Tsar Nikolai II still leads to the rise and fall of Kirensky, quickly replaced by a Mr. V.I. Ulanovsk. Penal treaty terms lead to the collapse of the Weimar Republic, and the rise of a certain very unpleasant Austrian failed artist. Really, up to 1939, the history of Europe, Asia and Africa (with the exception of a sliver of land of the West African coast) is largely unchanged by the non-existence of America.

After 1939, things change with a vengeance in our alternate history. Without Lend-Lease armaments, Britain starts in a much weaker position. The Nazis blitz through Continental Europe unchecked, and grind to a halt in a Russian winter. Britain cannot hold, though. Even with the heroic defense of the Battle of Britain, the economic blockade gets them. Or the decades-long attrition with an adversary that now controls the factories of the Continent. There is no help coming, and they either capitulate or starve. No military power remains in the world, save the two flavors of Nietzsche. Welcome to the brave new world. Forget non-violent resistance: these guys don’t mind killing anyone in their way. Forget freedom of speech, forget protests, forget any sort of opposition. There’s no Amnesty International, no trade sanctions, nothing to constrain the actions of either government. Forget life as you know it. Game over, man, game over.

Thankfully, that nightmare world never came to pass. One dragon was vanquished in 1945. The second was struck down in 1991. I’ve heard that one who doesn’t learn history is doomed to repeat it. Perhaps the converse is true. Perhaps one who doesn’t learn from what was done right in history will find out what would have happened were it done wrong. There is now a third strain of nihilism, one that has attached itself to Islam, mutating a religion to serve its own ends. Europe, as before, has nothing that can stand up to the dragon. I’m not sure how the fight turns out this time. Maybe we can buy another season of restraint. I guess we’ll see.