Charm, smiling at the good mouth,

Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid.

–Ezra Pound, “E.P. Ode Pour L’Election De Son Sepulchre“ (1915)

I’ve been meaning to write something about the new German adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front, linking it directly to the unquiet atrocities Putin is visiting on Ukraine, which constitute a genocidal “remake” of the atrocities Nazi Germany visited on Ukraine (particularly on Ukrainian Jews) in World War II. It remains difficult to realize that the Western world has learned nothing from the fact that 7 million ever-younger men lost their lives fighting over an only slightly changing front from 1914-1918. Following in the path of the earlier Hollywood film versions of All Quiet (1930) and Stanley Kubrick’s French-based Paths of Glory (1957), director Peter Berger is committed to putting the German patriarchy on trial, starting with the patriotic ravings of a gymnasium headmaster as he sends off a pack of naïve 18-year students to the front in the waning days of 1944 and the insanely brutal order of a well-fed general to send what remains of that cohort and hundreds more for one last assault against the relaxed French lines a few hours before the 1918 armistice was to take effect. Berger could not, of course, anticipate that a few months before his film’s European release Putin would give only a slightly less lethal order to draft hundreds of thousands of young and old Russian civilians to serve as cannon fodder in Ukraine. While this order sent thousands of better-educated and wealthier draftees packing to Turkey, Georgia, and Kazakhstan, most of the others passively submitted to the will of the tyrant as men have passively submitted for thousands of years in every corner of the earth, from ancient Babylon and Persia in the Middle East to the Incan and Aztec Empires in the West to the lockstep legions of the Roman, Ottoman, French, and British empires to 20^th century Germany and Japan, and in America during the war in Vietnam.

So much that has happened around the world since 1918 makes little that Putin is doing in/to Ukraine seem difficult to imagine, except for its specific siting in a post-Soviet Ukraine, more closely linked to Europe than Asia. To mention only a few prominent “instances,” we have Japan’s aggressive assault on China in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War as a test site for Nazi and fascist blanket bombing, Germany & Japan’s initiation of the Second World War and the Nazi-driven Holocaust visited largely on Jews, followed by wars and/or genocidal projects undertaken in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Balkans, Iran & Iraq, Uganda, Rwanda, the Congo, the Gaza Strip, and more lately in China and Myanmar. (What am I leaving out? The “Dirty Wars” in Chile and Argentina? The daily and continuing terrors visited upon the citizens of Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, and innocent victims of the drug wars in Mexico?) For long-term global consequences, few wars can match the United States’s invasion, conquest, and inanely conducted occupation of Iraq, which prompted the rise of ISIS throughout Iraq and Syria and the gradual, unforgivable abandonment of Afghanistan culminating in the recent return of the Taliban to power. These and collateral events have encouraged tens of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers to bang on the doors of Europe, leading to defensive responses that have fueled the growth of destabilizing xenophobic movements in Italy, France, Germany, Hungary, Denmark, Poland, and Sweden. But what makes what Putin is doing, both in Russia and Ukraine, and what Trump, Bolsonaro, and Erdogan have been doing in the United States, Brazil, and Turkey, respectively, so troubling in 2023—a hundred years after poets like Pound and Eliot were offering their damning summations of the failures of Western civilization—is how graphically it replicates the regressive authoritarianism that swept through Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, and post-revolutionary Russia to such world-destroying effects, demonstrating that history has taught its aiders and abettors nothing.

The peculiar twist Putin brings to this mix involves the development and deployment of advanced weaponry, whose lethality outstrips much that was deployed prior to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki but whose widespread assaults on civilian targets all too clearly replicates the tactics deployed by fascists in Spain, the Japanese in Nanking, the Wehrmacht in Great Britain, the Allies in Dresden, and the United States in Cambodia and Vietnam. It is this seemingly indiscriminate but likely targeted violence against civilians that should prompt the world en masse—or at least the United Nations–to put a stop to it but, instead, the only real support Ukraine is getting—advanced weapons systems of its own–adds fuel to a seemingly endless fire (prompting both soldiers and civilians to serve, however heroically, as cannon fodder), with the only punishment visited on Russia involving drags on an economy that seems capable of weathering whatever sanctions are imposed on it.

Retrospection at this point is pointless. But at a moment in time, roughly a hundred years after the convulsions of the Great War, the Russian Revolution, and the Irish Civil War, a time when, as Yeats wrote and would no doubt write today, “the best have lost all conviction/ and the worst are filled with a passionate intensity,” it’s worth wondering what courage, conviction, and imagination might have done to pre-empt the catastrophic destruction of Ukraine—which, I write prospectively if not prophetically, will come if Putin has his way and no powerful global force confronts and disarms him. The United States government was considerably more certain last January than was the government of Ukraine that the encircling Russians were planning to invade. But if so, why, instead of pulling Americans out of Ukraine did we not immediately move armed forces into Ukraine as the most pronounced way of calling Russia’s bluff. Such a pre-emptive move would no doubt fly in the face of Obama’s similar refusal to confront Russia in Syria (with the globally destabilizing consequences addressed above) and Biden’s shamefully disordered abandonment of Afghanistan. (Why not make the closure of the Bagram airbase the last not the first sign of our departure from Afghanistan, allowing it to serve as a collection point for airborne rescues of Afghan asylum-seekers, particularly those who had been compromised by working with and for Americans?) But indecisiveness, with a wary eye always cast on the polls and on those nasty Republicans, seems to be the MO of today’s governing Democrats: both sign and symptom that we may be drifting back into the dithering and high-minded debating that left Weimar Germany open to the unwavering aggression of those party to “passionate intensity,” which most certainly was on offer in the vile, gleefully transgressive attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

If one compares the astonishing courage and resilience of Ukrainians of every stripe in defense of their right to self-determination with the lassitude and indifference of an American public in the face of daily challenges to our most valued institutions, it may well seem that we are sleepwalking ourselves into a nightmare from which it will be difficult to awake. Which brings me back to All Quiet on the Western Front. In the scene in which the self-styled ubermensch general orders men, who have just been celebrating the imminent armistice, back to the front, several of them protest while the great majority look on in sad bewilderment. That bewilderment turns to abject terror when the protesters are immediately singled out and, within seconds, shot to death by executioners who themselves are likely motivated by the fear of being singled out. (“Some quick to arm,/some for adventure,” as Pound writes, “some from fear of weakness,/some from fear of censure,/some from love of slaughter, in imagination,/learning later . . ./some in fear,/learning love of slaughter.”)

The film’s protagonist, Paul Baumer, who has just lost his best friend and mentor, turns about with the rest of his company and re-enters the fray against the unwitting French, fighting with savage abandon until pausing regretfully, face to face for a second time in the film with a man he has just effectively killed. A bayonet thrust through Paul’s back brings this bout of conscience to its end, minutes before the Armistice is announced and the surviving warriors return to their corners, and, eventually, their homes where the Germans will father recruits just in time for 1939, giving a second generation of unwitting French not a moment to hold their breath before all of France is overrun. If there is a message in this for the present, it’s one that Thomas Mann delivered in the abbreviated end of The Magic Mountain,his very long novel treating the sentimental education of Hans Castorp as he sleepwalks through life as a would-be convalescent at a Swiss spa populated by idle, well-to-do, and often genuinely tubercular Europeans. This insular journey takes up 700 pages before returning a healthy Hans to the mainland just in time to join in the Great War, where his life is snuffed out in a couple of pages.