The Cultural Consequence of World War I.

• Author: Sempa, Francis P.

The Cultural Consequence of World War I

By Roger Kimball, Editor of The New Criterion

Text: http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Guilt-trip--Versailles--avantgarde---kitsch-7942

Roger Kimball, the editor of The New Criterion, delivered the David Armstrong Memorial Lecture in Melbourne, Australia, in August. Kimball's lecture mixed history with culture, and provocatively challenged conventional wisdom about the Great War and its consequences, both historical and cultural.

As Kimball notes, the events leading up to the First World War produced two general outlooks on the future: war was inevitable, or war was impossible. The reality, of course, was that war was neither inevitable nor impossible. Whether war broke out depended on the decisions and actions of statesmen, politicians, and generals.

The Great War, he states, was not a meaningless or unnecessary war. It was fought, as wars had been in the past, to decide the mastery of Europe and the international balance of power.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, cultural disillusion preceded the war; it was not a consequence of the war, though the war certainly intensified the disillusionment. How could it do otherwise given what Kimball accurately describes as "four years of that butchery by attrition that was trench warfare in the age of total war."

Kimball notes that our view of the war and its consequences was shaped in part by John Maynard Keynes' The Economic Consequences of the Peace that blamed the alleged harshness of the Treaty of Versailles for the rise of Hitler and the Second World War. Kimball...