I fire up Salon for my lunch-time read and get this subtitle:
Wartime leaders have always demanded docility. But if the press had
revealed the hideous truth about WWI, millions might have lived.
Oh boy. They're going into WWI. This should be wildly entertaining. Are they going to imply that a press report about the front-line conditions would have stopped the flu epidemic? If only a NYT reporter could have leaked information about the attack on Chateau-Thiery, the war would have ended sooner... somehow.
I don't even get to anything on WWI before they start to dig a hole:
It's a common intelligence gambit to let the enemy know you're onto their
networks because the revelation will often roll them up of its own momentum.
Right. No mention of the fact that, that is what you do after you've milked the network dry or, it looks like the enemy may actually find out that you know about their network. Other than that, from what I've read, you keep this stuff secret because the more the enemy doesn't know about what you know, the better. Saying that the NYT is exposing secret agents is a total crock.
So truth, as J.B. Priestley aptly wrote, became the first casualty of World War I. Over the ensuing four years of terrible carnage it was joined by 20 million dead soldiers and civilians and countless more gruesomely wounded. The Great War, before it ended, made the Russian Revolution possible -- unless one imagines Kerensky and his handful of zealots could have subdued Moscow were the czar's armies not frozen to their machine guns on the Eastern Front. It also caused the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which spawned a Balkan conflict that continues to this day, and the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, beginning but surely not ending with the creation of an artificial state, Iraq, whose warring nationalities and sects have been at one another's throats for a thousand years, yesterday inclusive. And finally, Germany's defeat forced the abdication of the Kaiser, which was followed by the inevitable collapse of the feeble Weimar Republic, which in turn begat Nazi Germany and World War II, which left 50 million dead and gave rise to the Cold War, Korea and Vietnam.
All absolutely true. But the implication that, if only the reporters had been allowed to report the horrors of the war, after it had already started, it would have been stopped is just nuts. There was tons of information and misinformation about that war. None of it would have prevented things from going to a grizzly conclusion. The Christmas Truce had more of a chance of shutting down the war than some intrepid NYT reporter leaking the secret that an attack on the Somme was imminent. Because, for this comparison to work, it has to be a secret that is reported, not cold facts.
Would it have come to all this if the London Times and Le Monde and the New York Times -- even the German press -- had published authentic accounts of the horrors at Ypres and Passchendaele and the Somme?
That's it? That's the counter-factual? Oh, if only someone had let the information run free, then the hippies protesting the draft would have stopped the war... Oh wait, that was Viet Nam. Which, isn't surprising when you consider this:
I was a young staffer at Time magazine when the Nixon administration was firing almost as much ammo at the press as it was at the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army.
That explains quite a lot really.
2 comments:
I'm afraid that their facts are rather convinient related to WWI, and not completely factual. First, the Russian revolution was moved ahead by the Germans assisting and conspiring with Lenin to organize and actually transfer him into Russia. The war did in fact make it possible, but additional freedoms of the press wouldn't have stopped the revolution even if the war had been cooled early.
The Balkans conflict isn't related to Austro-Hungary's breakup. In fact, Serbia was already independant, Macedonia was still under control of the Ottoman empire and AH controlled Bosnia-Hercegovina. The map was very complicated and included nationalist movements in Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Albania. If they are trying to attach the conflict in the Balkans to WWI, they have made a simplistic error.
Iraq is even funnier. Hmmm, who was controlling that area at the start of the war? The Ottoman empire? And stability was so well established that the Ottomans had no issues with the arab tribes in the area? Please. Again, this mess existed before the war, it just was handed to another overseer. Didn't get better, but didn't get worse until the British left.
And as for the collapse of the Weimar government, What was the expectations of the end of the war? Does the author truly think that a radical party like the Nazi's would have been impossible, or are they just ignoring just how close they came to a German socialist revolution?
Then the contention that the MSM could have stopped it deserves some serious ridicule. Many of the papers were nearly jingoistic in their support of the war. Many of them chose to suppress the horrors of the war voluntarily. Nial Fergeson goes into some details about the truth of the press during the war in his "The Pity of War."
I love that bit about letting the enemy know that you're onto them. I bet letting the Japanese know we had broken the purple code would have caused their navy to collapse. Or maybe letting the Germans know about Ultra would have stopped the european conflict in its tracks.
What a huge stinking pile.
Yeah, I had thought about bringing up the Imperial Navy code & Enigma and for that matter Venona, Kim Philby, and what's his name who was betraying the Sub locations back in the 80's (asshole), but I decided to just deal with the concept presented rather than all the ways it was bloody stupid.
I totally missed the Balkans situation. Bloody hell, that was the start of the war, not caused by it. I feel like an ass for skipping over that one. Thanks for the backstop.
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