Some Costs of the Great War

Nationalizing Private Life

The Great War’s costs were truly astronomical. As with numbering the stars, the final accounting is in God’s hands. The lives, the treasure, the faith in ordered society—all were among the costs. Wilfred Owen suggested in his disconcerting poem “Strange Meeting” that the culture of Europe seemed hell-bent on trekking away from progress. He clearly had in mind what the literary historian Paul Fussell would later call the “troglodyte world” (1975, chap. 2): a kind of Hobbesian vision, one might say, rendered in pen and ink by Otto Dix. Costs, indeed.

Yet in this article I am concerned not so much with the number of lives ended as with altered lives or, rather, with changes in the status of the private life of the modern individual, the modern family, the modern community. I am concerned here with private property, the autonomy of the individual, and the disastrous trend, which World War I accelerated, toward the state’s exercise of a right to take anything within its reach on its whim.

My secondary theme is that this great change in private life was already under way before 1914. The real agent of change was not the war itself, but the state and its backers and minions. That the war accelerated the change, however, was bad enough (see Rothbard 1994). Political and intellectual leaders in all countries welcomed the war for the augmented collectivism it would inevitably bring. In the United States, one of the more important figures who welcomed the war was John Dewey, a veritable god in the pantheon of our modern civil religion. Dewey saw the war, rightly, as the accelerator of the coming industrial society, a managed positivist society that he thought of as democracy itself.

admin here:I read this piece not knowing what I’ll get from it. I still don’t know. But it’s got me to thinking. I know how war is the governments excuse to deny us our civil liberties and war enriches the government. But this article shows how it was done. How the French government ripped apart the lives of so many villages…. I didn’t know about it before.

But that a long time ago. I know, but it’s going on today.

From disasters such as that of Vauquois and a hundred other French towns and villages, we gain insight into the genesis of the state management of disasters in the twenty-first century. Individuals who try to protect their own property during a storm are regarded as opponents of the state and problems for the police. The recent Federal Emergency Management Agency debacles in the United States are only the latest and most massive version of this way of doing things.

Did this remind you of New Orleans after Katrina hit? The police tackling the old woman who showed that she had a gun to protect herself and she wanted to stay on her own property.

You should read it here.

H. Hunt Tooley — INDEPENDENT REVIEW