Adam Hochschild
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Today is Memorial Day here in the United States, the day on which we remember those who have fought and died in the service of our country. It’s fitting, then, that we are talking to Adam Hochschild about his To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 (Houghton Mifflin, 2011).
The book itself is a memorial of sorts, or rather a reminder of what may, in hindsight, seem to us to have been a kind of collective insanity. The Great Powers fought World War I over nothing in particular. They pursued no great cause, sought to right no terrible injustice. They appear to us, therefore, to have fought for no good reason and to have been, therefore, out of their heads. But here we are wrong, for the combatants were not insane. Not at all. They simply lived in a different world and, therefore, thought differently than we do. They fought, as Adam points out, because they wanted to fight. For them, the bloody struggle of nation against nation was a necessary and salutary phenomenon. War made them who they were; if they did not fight, they were nothing. And so they fought bravely and died in droves over nothing, really, but honor. Of course there were exceptions, people much like us who believed that war was neither necessary nor salutary in any way. Adam sensitively chronicles their (futile) attempts to convince their kin and countrymen that war all bad and no good. They, too, fought bravely and sometimes died. We should remember them, too, on this Memorial Day.
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When will it ever end, when will it ever end? Thanks for writing this book. We are reading it in 2 book clubs.
Prof. Poe, this was an interesting interview. I’d never focused much on the war resisters of WWI, beyond the German mutinies that ended the war.
I also was interested in your Ronald Reagan quote about never using nuclear weapons, which I’ve never seen in print. I know that Mr. Reagan had a visceral hatred of the threat posed by nuclear weapons in general, and MADD in particular. However, I’d expect that he’d be more likely to say that he’d never resort to FIRST use of such weapons, not that he’d never use them under any circumstances. If you can find the quote, it would be great to have a link to it, or to know the source.
That made me think that it would be useful in many of your podcasts to have links to articles and other resources that the guests mention. (E.g., similar to what’s done at the Econtalk podcasts: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/08/ohanian_on_the.html#more ). If this web page has that capability, I’d guess that many of your guests would like to post links of various types.