The Carthaginian Peace

 I went on last time about Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace at such length that it may have felt exhausting; but there is still one further key sense in which the book resonates with our time that I was not able to explore then in much depth: namely, the way in which the Allies' treatment of their defeated adversary resembled a recent particularly disgraceful episode in the annals of U.S. military history. (More on that shortly.)

Keynes's chief purpose in the book, let us recall, was to decry the Treaty of Versailles, which he saw as a dishonorable and ultimately self-destructive effort to take advantage of a defeated foe. The ruinous settlement that the treaty imposed, Keynes argued, was really a sort of "Carthaginian peace," meaning that it was peace attained through the cruel and utterly gratuitous extirpation of the already defeated and prostrate enemy. 

"A sandy and false foundation"

Writing in his 1919 classic The Economic Consequences of the Peace, J.M. Keynes warns his English contemporaries that they are living on borrowed time. In the wake of the first World War, he observes, many felt a glow of triumph and renewed prosperity. Not only had their nation won the great struggle and crushed the wicked adversary, but now their economy was in a position to reap the spoils. What could go wrong? 

Keynes insists (and it would take less than a decade to prove him right) that the general economic crisis caused by these events had only been delayed, rather than averted. It might be possible to disguise for a time the real cost of the war and—worse still—the peace imposed after it, but eventually everyone on the globe would feel the effects of the victorious Allies' decision to effectively shut down and dismantle their defeated foe's economy. 

World War Analogies

 In searching for historical analogies to make sense of the present-day war in Europe, the first that came to mind—for me as for so many others—was to the origins of World War II. After all, the pattern seemed so familiar. Putin had established a pretext for invasion through various disingenuous claims about a trans-historical ethnic solidarity and the need to protect the rights of Russian-speaking minorities, which he then used as a rationale to hive off the territory of his neighbor. 

On analogy to the events in Europe in the late '30s, then, Putin's annexation of Crimea would be something akin to the Anschluss; the effort to provoke a situation in the Donbas which would justify intervention would be the equivalent of the Sudetenland Crisis; and Putin's final decision to simply drop all diplomatic pretenses and invade outright could be analogized to Germany's unprovoked incursion into Poland in 1939. 

It's obvious that this analogy has force: I still continue to believe it has relevant lessons to teach us. But suppose that the war in Ukraine is not only like the start of World War II, but is also unfolding a bit like the course of World War I? 

Ichabod

During the great struggles of the Northern abolitionists in the decades leading up to the Civil War, the worst setback for their cause—the most bitter in its defeat and the most heinous in its consequences—came not exclusively from the pro-slavery politicians of the South, but also in part from one of their own elected representatives and former champions: New Hampshire's Daniel Webster, who notoriously let them down by backing the Compromise of 1850. 

This was a deal with the Southern states that was billed as necessary to preserve the union—but it came at the cost of enacting the federal Fugitive Slave law, which forced Northern states to return people escaping slavery to the hands of their captors. Webster's decision to countenance such a bargain was seen by many in the anti-slavery cause as the ultimate betrayal. It prompted John Greenleaf Whittier for one to pen the mournful words in "Ichabod": he who might/ Have lighted up and led his age,/Falls back in night. 

Lewis's Prophecy

 As I recall, there was a resurgence of interest in Sinclair Lewis's 1935 political novel, It Can't Happen Here—about the hypothetical rise of a fascist dictatorship in America—just about the time that Donald Trump was running for office. It's not hard to see why. Not only was Trump just the kind of carnival-barking demagogue that Lewis prophesied would be the downfall of our democratic institutions; the title also conveyed something of what we were all feeling: 

The prospect of a Trump presidency was just the sort of unthinkable-monstrosity-gradually-unfolding-before-our-eyes that Lewis seemed to have in mind. We all said to ourselves, in the early months of Trump's candidacy, "it can't happen here," and yet we—like Lewis's characters—lived to see it happen; the phrase therefore lent itself to the title of a thousand journalistic think pieces of the time—used with the same ironic tone with which Lewis intended it—one of which appeared on this blog, shortly after Trump won the GOP nomination. 

C'est Moi

 At some point a few years back—around 2017 or so—a friend pointed me to a publisher seeking manuscript submissions for young adult novels. I was intrigued by the challenge and so thought I might try my hand at writing a potboiler. I read the website closely to better understand what they were looking for. It appeared—at that point at least—that stories involving teenage vampires were still very much in demand. "Sounds simple enough," I said to myself. 

Okay, so—teen vampire romance. How to write that... I thought. I knew that there needed to be a protagonist. So I gave her a name and put her in a high school classroom. But then what should happen? I knew that there was supposed to be a vampire, but that his vampiric identity shouldn't be immediately obvious. He should pass incognito among us, carefully seeking out plausible excuses to avoid mirrors, garlic, and sunlight. So I made up a character and put him in the same classroom.