July 27, 2007
Another Great Rightist IV Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:10 AM EST Alex Burns writes that “there’s at least the semblance of a pattern that people today are reminiscing about right-of-center nationalists from the recent past. I suggested in my last post that this had to do with a popular yearning for “supposedly more straightforward times. . . . That most of these ‘greatest’ men—all of them but Salazar and Reagan—were accomplished anti-Nazis, seems to confirm this. If there’s one international conflict remembered for its moral clarity, World War II is it. In the midst of our comparatively muddled struggle with Islamic extremism, one inclines toward sympathy with this nostalgia.” I agree with Mr. Burns’s argument that the appeal of the Second World War when choosing a greatest fellow citizen derives from its moral clarity, at least among the general populations of France, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, and very probably among Germans (although among some contemporary elites—academics, journalists, etc.—there is nowadays an attempt, in my view grossly excessive, to muddy the moral clarity of the war). In the popular mind, greatness, which is what the polls are measuring, still seems to consist of leadership in war and politics, despite an academic fashion for deemphasizing war, conventional political history, and the notion of “great men” generally (a recent book on Garibaldi, recently and extensively reviewed in The New Yorker, apparently argues that Garibaldi cannot have been a great man because we have learned that there are no such people). It is interesting that polls do not show people rejecting the very category of great men, but instead confirming a pretty old-fashioned idea of who fits that category. The polls may be silly, but perhaps those polled are less so. My guess is that ordinary people very sensibly think you are the greatest national figure if you stopped Hitler because they retain a lively impression of just how urgent a task that was, and I also suspect that Reagan’s current celebrity is a mark of the decline of history teaching in the schools, specifically an academic bias against war as an object of interest and profound achievement. If you do not put political and military history in the foreground, and I suspect many American schools no longer do, you seem to open up the door to Ronald Reagan dominating the popular mind. This is probably an unanticipated result, given the ambition of the people who revise curricula, but not, in a sour way, an entirely unamusing one. Mr. Burns also writes that “if we’re ever fortunate enough to live in generally peaceful times, I wonder whether we would find people choosing Martin Luther King, William Shakespeare, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, Louis Pasteur, and Johannes Gutenberg as their ‘greatest.’” Aristides de Sousa Mendes, who saved the lives of 12,000 Jews and issued visas to more than 20,000 other refugees from Hitler, was indeed a splendid man, but his choice as the greatest Portuguese would confirm the primacy of unpeaceful times when denominating greatness. If Mr. Burns is right, and I was making my choice in a peaceful time, I’d presumably have voted for Camoens, the Portuguese epic poet, in part because I once learned, with considerable difficulty, to pronounce a loose approximation of his name, and that was so much trouble that I’ve never gotten him out of my mind. But in fact I cannot imagine doing picking Camoens, maybe because I’ve read only a few lines of The Lusiads; I’d have no trouble picking Shakespeare, although I have no great objection to the choice of Churchill. Oddly enough, the sort of people who spend a lot of time attempting to debunk Churchill are often the same sort of people who spend a lot of energy trying to debunk Shakespeare (you may have to spend your life in universities to know a lot of such people). Churchill, of course, seemed to hold Shakespeare in rather lofty esteem. He would, though, wouldn’t he? It also occurs to me that a century ago, a lot of Americans would have ranked Goethe with (or at least close to) Shakespeare, and one reason for Goethe’s precipitous fall is his simple bad luck in having written in the language spoken by Hitler. I do not think Shakespeare’s reputation is too much dependent on his luck in writing in the same language as that spoken (to considerable effect) by Churchill, the man associated in the popular mind with stopping Hitler. But it probably hasn’t hurt.
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