History- Part I

Yesterday, I read in the Chicago Tribune that there is only one (1) living World War One veteran in America. There is also one Canadian, and two British veterans still alive, as well as several Frenchmen. He doesn't mention Russians, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, Serbs, Turks, etc. The author - Cory Franklin - is mainly arguing that the United States is neglecting its duty to history and our veterans by failing to educate its youth properly. He says:

And yet, how much do we teach our citizens about World War I today? My son's high school American History textbook covers American involvement in the war in less than two pages, roughly the same amount of coverage it gives to the Reagan Iran-contra affair. Dismissed in a single sentence are 50,000 combat deaths the United States suffered in less than a year and a half, more than 10 times the number of Iraq War casualties to date. The 650,000 civilians who died of influenza at the end of the war, a pandemic spread by closely quartered Army troops, are not mentioned in the book at all.

And as bad as we are with our own history, we know even less of the experience of other countries at war. America, of course, was relatively lucky in World War I; Europe and Russia lost nearly 20 million soldiers and civilians. The history textbook doesn't even mention them.

Franklin's right, of course, but what's between the lines is this: That World War I is not an American war - it is a European one. The war's narrative is a complicated one; it involves European nationalism, the effects of rapid industrialization, the simultaneous rise of Western Democracy and the European bourgeoisie, and their threat the the aristocracy and the thousand-year-old empires. These are difficult concepts for an American student to grasp. (Just as it is difficult for us to understand why the Kurds don't want to live with the Shiites, or the Albanians don't want to live withe Serbs.)

The American Narrative - like American literature - is simple compared to the European's. (