The Churchill Loop

              Whenever world events appear to border on bedlam, and our adversaries, perceived or true, appear to threaten our security or national interests, politicians and pundits reach for the time-honored historical comparisons to Winston Churchill, the British prime minister who led England and Empire through the Second World War.

            The latest iteration of the “Churchill Loop” is now being applied to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who addressed Congress on March 3 to warn America about the Iranian leadership as the Obama administration negotiates with the Islamic Republic over its nuclear program. Churchill had warned his country about Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.

Netanyahu, well aware of our penchant of seeking comparisons to Churchill whenever we feel some sort of military response is in order, made sure he sounded Churchillian when he spoke to Congress: “Even if Israel has to stand alone, Israel will stand.”

Churchill giving his famous V for victory sign on May 20, 1940, more than a week after he became prime minister. (Credit: Imperial War Museum)

 

That was enough for pundits such as Thomas Sowell of the Hoover Institute to wax on about Netanyahu’s Churchill-like stance, imploring an ignorant, naive world to recognize the Iranian machinations to rule the globe, if not just the Middle East. Comparing Netanyahu to Churchill, Sowell wrote, “Both warned the world of mortal dangers that others ignored, in hopes that those dangers would go away."

The problem with this comparison is that Netanyahu, in his speech to Congress, did not tell the world anything that it doesn’t already know about Iran and its machinations. In 2015, unlike 1935, technology has made communications vast and penetrating, and America’s ability at covert operations, better known as spying, is wide reaching and effective, as is our allies.

 

We actually do know what’s going on in the world, but it’s never easy to address, or know how to address, the issues and problems that are ever arising. It’s not that the world is suddenly on fire, it has always been on fire. How could it not be with seven billion people living on the planet, all of them striving for better lives? The key is trying to keep the fire under control without creating more fire.

However, this, and the fact that the United States is the most powerful military on the planet and always on the technological vanguard with its weapons systems, blocks the narratives that pundits like Sowell and politicians like Arkansas’ U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (he of the recent letter-to-the-Iranian-leaders fame) like to tell.

In Cotton’s recent “maiden speech,” which newly elected senators give on the Senate floor, the freshman senator referred to Churchill’s “unnecessary war” quote from World War II to make a point about America’s defense.

“I know many of you in this chamber stand with me, and I humbly urge you all, Democrat and Republican alike, to join in rebuilding our common defense, so that we will not face our own unnecessary war, our own period of consequences,” Cotton said.

Earlier in the speech, though, Cotton called for American “global military dominance,” sounding less Churchill-like and more like a certain unsavory leader of that era. Despite his poor choice of phrasing, Cotton’s point is that projecting American power through its military is a stabilizing force. Perhaps, but it’s not clear how the rest of the world would feel about this. The last nation that tried global domination with its military ended up bombed to pieces and split into geographical and ideological halves for 45 years.

            It’s worrisome when politicians rush to Churchill to make their case for military intervention and condemn his predecessor, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who irresponsibly – not naively – believed a peace deal with Hitler was possible. They do so without context or reality for what really occurred in those years leading to the Second World War.

           Chamberlain was inflexible as a statesman. He refused to reconsider his policy of appeasement until it was too late. Yet, in the 1930s, British voters were unwilling to consider war, having 20 years earlier lost a generation of men in World War I. Chamberlain adhered to his constituency, but when it came time to lead, to tell voters what they didn’t want to hear, that it was time to standup to Hitler, he failed miserably.

            President Franklin Roosevelt had the same problem with American voters until that foreign war they believed was an ocean or two away came home to them at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Churchill was correct about Hitler’s ambitions, but he was hardly alone in that realization. In his January 1939 State of the Union address, Roosevelt warned Congress and the American public “of the need of putting our own house in order in the face of storm signals from across the seas.” In September of that year, Hitler invaded Poland and World War II started.

Historian James McGregor Burns wrote in Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom that FDR was relieved the night he won an unprecedented third term in 1940 because, after years of isolationism, he could prepare to fight the Nazi dictator: “There were altogether too many people, he felt, who thought in terms of appeasement of Hitler.”  

Churchill grasped the Nazi threat clearly, but he failed miserably when it came to understanding a threat just as great as Hitler, if not greater – The Japanese Empire, which had been slaughtering its way through China since the early1930s.

Churchill thought of the Japanese as a lesser race, according to William Manchester in his The Last Lion biographic trilogy. To Churchill, the Japanese were incapable of mounting an effective military campaign against the vaunted British. He often repeated this belief to his War Cabinet, and choosing, because of this belief, not fortify such colonial possessions as Hong Kong and Singapore.

But in December 1941, when the Japanese bombed the American naval fleet at Pearl Harbor and took England’s Asian possessions – as well as American and Dutch possessions – and sunk England’s two revered battleships, Prince of Wales and Repulse, the prime minister was stunned. Manchester wrote that Churchill sat for long moments “mumbling repeatedly to himself: ‘I don’t understand what happened. I don’t understand it.’”

            Churchill was one of the world’s great statesmen, and a politician like Tom Cotton shows promise – as a freshman senator he ably convinced 46 other senators, most of them veterans of the chamber, to co-sign the misguided letter he wrote to the Iranians.

            Yet, politicians and pundits should watch their narratives. Churchill didn’t, and he lost a large chunk of the British Empire, two battleships that were the pride of Britain and her navy, and countless lives.

 

 

The Road Back From War

      From birth to death life is a journey, for some more arduous than others, but a journey nonetheless, fraught with the sadness and joys, the challenges and achievements, the fears and triumphs that mold our humanity.

       Like any journey, we will on occasion wander paths – sometimes reluctantly, sometimes eagerly – that are in directions we neither want to go nor should go, but we go nonetheless, to find out where they lead or what we could learn along the way.

        As it is so with America and war.

        War becomes unfashionable after the last one fought. America struggles to get away, only to find ourselves wandering down more paths of conflict, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes eagerly; embracing war when we are successful, opposing war when we are failing – always forgetting, whether in blood or treasure, that war is wasteful.

      Wars are never won or lost. They are just ended, left to be fought on another day, in another season, but always for the same reason – power and glory, the same old story.

Erich Maria Remarque, here at ease at the Hotel Curhaus in Davos, Switzerland, 1929, knew the futility of war. The title of his World War I novel about war’s ravages on the human spirit, “Im Westen nichts Neues,” means “In the West Nothing New.” When the novel was published in English, it had a more benign, perhaps deceiving title: “All Quiet on Western Front. (German Federal Archive)

America began the 21^st century like she began the 20^th century – at war. Then it was the war to keep her imperial possession – the Philippines – from Filipino resistance fighters; today it’s to battle global terrorism and protect her self-interest – oil and markets.

We fight to keep the nation secure and the world stabilized, though the citizenry is not interested in world stability, they are interested in their safety and security. Few know clearly the power of their military. Fewer care to know the destruction it has wrought.

        Our sense of duty and self-interest to stabilize countries in the war-torn Middle East keeps pulling us down Conflict Road. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have made us weary; we want an end to the fighting in a region where we have long been, once dared not go, now dare to go again.

           Narratives about our wars in film and verse tell some of us we have been worthy along that road, abiding our ideals; and tells some of us that we have been unworthy, failing to abide those ideals. Reality is ever more complicated.

          The road to war is never ending, always another fight just around the corner; just one more, but always just one more.

            Long and uncertain is the road back from war. We struggle to keep in that direction, to reach a time of peace, but we find the way difficult to navigate. We are doubtful, but always hopeful; we are vengeful, but desire to be peaceful.

           We try and take the road back from war, but it always leads us down the next road to war.

 

 

 

Divided We Govern

           After watching President Obama in last week’s State of the Union layout what is likely the Democratic blueprint for next year’s presidential race and listening to the legislative agenda of the Republicans who now have complete control of Congress, this congressional session could well be meaningful and productive.

Why would this occur after six years of rancor between the White House and Republicans? For one reason: the government is divided.

            Obama, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) need each other, if they want to accomplish progress on critical issues such as minimum wage, healthcare, immigration, transportation infrastructure, etc.

            Even the political calculations – as the two parties’ angle for voter advantage in 2016 – are such that they have to work together. Perhaps it’s the hyper speed of our technology or the sluggish economic growth, but the old way of politics, of putting off needed legislation until the time is opportune politically, appears no longer wise or practical.

            Over the last 60 years some real progress in America has been achieved because of divided government, and by this I mean one party holds the White House and the other both houses of Congress.

            Still, divided government has often been confrontational more than compatible.

Happier times at the Capitol: A snowball fight in 1930.

 

In 1947-49, the Republican-controlled 80^th Congress, which Democratic President Harry Truman called the “Do Nothing Congress,” sought to roll back New Deal legislation such as Social Security that was enacted between 1933 and 1946 by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic-controlled Congresses. The GOP also rejected Truman’s Fair Deal legislative agenda. After serving in the minority for 14 years, during which time labor made great strides, the GOP was eager to re-shape the national agenda for business.

            The Republicans passed many pro-business bills and looked for ways of undoing the New Deal, but they had miscalculated in their political strategy. Not only did it ruin their chance to take the White House after 16 years of Democratic control – Truman won handily despite polls’ and pundits’ predictions to the contrary – they lost control of Congress to the Democrats for another four years. Republicans took power again with Dwight Eisenhower’s election to the presidency in 1952, but lost it again in the mid-term two years later.

            As supreme allied commander during World War II, Eisenhower understood the need to work with people you disagree with. He easily grasped the congressional Republicans’ folly, and he knew that the overwhelming majority of Americans favored the New Deal because those programs improved their lives. The agenda of the extreme elements in his party left him wary.   

            On Nov. 8, 1954, a week after the GOP lost Congress in the mid-term election, Eisenhower said, “Should any party attempt to abolish social security and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things ... Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Working to accomplish great things with those you don’t always agree with in post-war Berlin, June 5, 1945: General Eisenhower with England’s Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery on his left and on his right, General Georgy Zhukov of the U.S.S.R. and Jean de Lattre de Tassigny of France. (Bundesarchiv Berlin)

           Divided government set in once again, but this time the two sides worked together. The Democratic-controlled 84th Congress of 1955-57 worked with the Republican president and accomplished significant pieces of legislation such as the Air Pollution Control Act, at the time establishing just an information role for the federal government but which started the government on the road toward eventually adopting more comprehensive laws for clean air, water and soil. The Democratic Congress and Eisenhower passed and enacted the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which, at the time, launched the largest public works project in history, creating thousands of jobs and transforming the American road system and economy – all those new highway systems needed cars as well as businesses to serve the tired and hungry motorists.

           According to a biography of the president by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, “Eisenhower favored a more moderate course, one that he called Modern Republicanism, which preserved individual freedom and the market economy yet insured that government would provide necessary assistance to workers who had lost their jobs or to the ill or aged, who through no fault of their own, could not provide for themselves. He intended to lead the country "down the middle of the road between the unfettered power of concentrated wealth . . . and the unbridled power of statism or partisan interests."

           “As President, Eisenhower thought that government should provide some additional benefits to the American people. He signed legislation that expanded Social Security, increased the minimum wage, and created the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He also supported government construction of low-income housing but favored more limited spending than had Truman.”

            Divided government continued with the 85th Congress, and Eisenhower and the Democrats produced such legislation as the first civil rights act since the 1860s, paving the way for subsequent legislation bolstering civil rights, and the National Aeronautics and Space Act that created NASA, launching the space age. 

            For the next 25 years, the Democrats controlled Congress, through Democratic and Republican presidents. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 brought the Republicans control of the Senate, which they held for six years, but in 1987 Democrats were again in control of Congress while Republicans held the White House into the presidency of President George H.W. Bush. Once again, significant legislation is passed including the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, launching the Internet age.

                       President Eisenhower with a future U.S. president, George H.W. Bush

 

           Voters seem to prefer divided government, but they gave single-party control of the two branches another try with the election of Democratic President Bill Clinton in 1992, but two years into Clinton’s term Republicans gained control of Congress. In the ensuing years we’ve had periods of divided government, but congress hasn’t been as productive or successful as it was during the presidencies of Eisenhower and H.W. Bush.

            Now we have another divided government. If Obama and the Republicans can succeed in making real progress that satisfy some of the nation’s concerns then voters may start to realize that a divided government may be the best way to get things done. This could be particularly so if places where the government is also divided, Pennsylvania (Democratic governor, GOP legislature) and Maryland (Republican governor, Democratic legislature) are also successful in working together to move things forward.     

            And if that is how voters think as they go into the ballot booth – and granted, this requires some complex thinking but voters are capable of it – then the parties’ political cognoscenti will have to worry about which party the voters favor for the White House (Democrat or Republican) and for Congress (Republican or Democrat). 

 

 

 

Watch the Balkans

         Three news stories appeared today, none of them related in their reporting but taken together hint at simmering unrest in a region that a century ago served as the kindling that sparked the First World War.

History doesn’t repeat, but it does haunt. Many of the economic, diplomatic, military and communication structures – not to mention the well-documented history of the war-torn 20^th century – did not exist when the Europeans went sleepwalking into World War I, as historian Christopher Clark so compellingly described in his book, “The Sleepwalkers: How Europeans Went to War in 1914.”
 

                Sarajevo following anti-Serb riots in the aftermath

                                 of the archduke's assassination in June 1914.
 

Nonetheless, history shows passion and delusion has conquered reason, and that is no different today. War is often the risk that ambitious political leaders will pursue to secure power – see Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – and corporate leaders will welcome to increase wealth.

Here are excerpts from the three news stories, starting with the Balkan nation of Serbia, which 100 years ago this year Austria-Hungary went to war against after Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb nationalist, entered the city of Sarajevo in Bosnia-Herzegovina and assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. A crisscross of alliances quickly brought the rest of Europe into war.   

From the Associated Press:

               Fears of Serbia return to iron rule of nationalism

Hate speech is on the rise. Anti-Western propaganda fills the airwaves. Liberal journalists are pulled off air. Nationalists talk up redrawing Balkan borders. Mafia-style hits, a hallmark of the Milosevic years, are returning. And as Russia and the West collide over Ukraine, Serbia is falling firmly into the camp of traditional mentor Moscow, even as it tries to advance its case for EU membership.

"Somebody wants to remind us of the 1990s," said government ombudsman Anika Muskinja-Hajnrih. "That is worrisome."

Serbia, whose stability is crucial for peace in the still-volatile Balkans, has been simmering with ethnic and social tensions that exploded after fans brawled during a European Championship qualifying match between Serbia and Albania. The fight, which involved players and fans over an Albanian flag that was flown over the stadium, stirred the most strife in the multi-ethnic north of Serbia where Ballaj is from.

             From Public Radio International:

            American and Russian energy giants battle over a small Romanian town

           Like many areas of Eastern Europea, the rural town of Pungesti is dependent on Russian energy delivered by Gazprom, the oil and gas behemoth based in Moscow. So the town's mayor, Vlasa Mircia, invited Chevron to drill for natural gas in the area, hoping to end Gazprom's monopoly.

But Mircia's idea didn't go as planned: Some of the town's residents staged violent protests, driving both Chevron and Mircia out of town — or did they?

"It depends who you listen to," says New York Times reporter Andrew Higgins.

Protesters say they were fighting back against a big, rapacious multinational. But Romanian officials, including the country's prime minister, accuse Gazprom of orchestrating the protests.

Those officials believe the Russian government, which is the majority owner of Gazprom, is trying to keep Romania in line and in Moscow's pocket. It's also concerned about Romania's smaller and poorer neighbor, Moldova, which is considering closer ties with the European Union.

There's also simple bad blood: Romanians have a long history of tension with Russia, especially under Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

           Fromthe Washington Post:

           As oil prices plunge, wide-ranging effects for consumers and the global economy

The 40 percent drop in the price of the international benchmark Brent-grade crude oil over the past five months will reduce annual revenue to oil producers worldwide by a whopping $1.5 trillion.

“Those losses are staggering,” Edward Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, wrote to investors Monday.

The losers include Russia, where the value of the ruble has been crumbling, inflation has crept up to more than an 8 percent rate and oil prices have done more to hurt the economy than Western sanctions.

Under The Gun

             The shooting by a police officer of an unarmed black youth in Ferguson, Mo. may have less to do with racism and more to do with what appears to have become the American way of handling things – “shoot first, ask questions later.”

 Just one of many examples: A 47-year-old Florida man shoots and kills a 17-year-old black youth because the teenager was playing his car radio too loud. The shooter later told police he felt threatened. A jury recently decided he was the threat and he was given life in prison. Two lives destroyed, needlessly. Why?  In another Florida incident in which a whole series of peaceable actions could have been taken to resolve a traffic dispute, a gun was used. Although no one was killed, a man went to jail, and lives were disrupted.

In Ferguson, after the St. Louis grand jury decided not to file charges against the police officer, protestors responded by shooting police officers. Meanwhile, a group of “volunteers” armed with guns and led by a weapons engineer took to the rooftops in Ferguson to protect businesses from looting by the protestors.

Just days before the protests began in Ferguson, two Cleveland police officers arrived at a park, where someone reported a youth wielding a gun. They were warned the weapon might be a fake. Two seconds on the scene and one of the officers shot a 12-year-old-boy whose pellet gun was missing the orange tab that indicates it’s not a real gun.

            It appears we are substituting a civil society built on enlightenment and justice to a land where the individual is the law unto himself. A Pennsylvania state lawmaker recently took that approach during a holdup near the state Capitol. (See Harrisburg lawmaker exchanges gunfire with would-be robbers). The governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Corbett, seems to endorse the idea. He recently signed a law that allows gun owners to sue cities that adopt laws to protect the public from gun violence.

America is a culture of guns. Fear mongering is used to fight any effort to regulate guns for safe communities. There are those of us who still believe in the preamble of the Constitution and Abraham Lincoln’s consecration of the words “We the People” in his Gettysburg Address: “This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.” Funny, the words almost sound fanciful. 

 

                                           Photo by Oleg Volk

The Declaration of Independence, the foundation on which the Constitution was drafted, establishes that we are endowed with certain unalienable rights: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. People do have a right to own guns, but should that right infringe on those who don’t own guns or on the right of the society at large to live without fear of firearms? The challenge is finding a balance, which today is clearly lacking. Gun carnage appears to be unfolding across the land.

Allowing people to carry guns as weapons for protection seems to have opened a Pandora’s Box for anarchy. Last June, two Las Vegas police officers and a civilian were killed by a young couple whose motive was they hated the government. The couple took their own lives, but not before shouting “this is a revolution!” and covering the bodies of the officers in a Gadsden flag, the traditional American flag with the coiled snake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me.”

            Gun violence has long been out of control in America. How can we not say something is wrong when 20 elementary school children are shot dead sitting at their desks because an emotionally disturbed young man was allowed easy access to an array of powerful firearms? The irony is we do say something is wrong, but we do nothing to address it. 

            Gun violence is so pervasive that it has become matter-of-fact in our lives. We are numb. We do nothing. We choose to live under the gun.  

Re-arranging the Deck Chairs

            The nation’s mid-term elections have swept Republicans into power in the Senate, added to their already significant majority in the House, and chastened President Obama to announce that he has heard the voters and will work with the GOP to break the years of gridlock in Washington.

            Outgoing Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has, as the presumptive new majority leader, pledged to work with Obama. The president said he’d “enjoy a Kentucky bourbon” with the man who has spent 30 years in Congress. Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), 31 years in Congress and the presumptive new minority leader, has promised to work with McConnell.

            Hopeful as it all sounds – and hope appears at the moment to be the only thing to hold onto – the reality is that the same people that created the gridlock are still in Washington, only their seats have changed.

            So, will the Republican Congress and the Democratic president finally get down to such pressing issues as immigration reform, tax code overhaul, foreign policy in the Middle East, Ebola, energy, transportation, climate change, agriculture, education funding, banking reform?

One day after the election GOP House Speaker John Boehner fired a shot across the presidential bow, warning Obama not to take unilateral action on immigration reform. He and McConnell have promised to repeal Obamacare, but the Republicans don’t have veto-proof majorities in either congressional chamber. The votes, if they occur, will largely be symbolic and counter-productive. None of these sounds like a good start, but they could be, and may actually lead to the negotiating and compromising that can produce good legislation.

 

The S.S. United States

The real test of bipartisan cooperation will come when a vacancy occurs on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nothing brings out partisan fighting like a nominee for the highest court in the land. Will they still work together then?

                It used to be, and perhaps this is wishful thinking, that politics ended when it came time to hammer out agreements on policy.  Politics now seems to always trump policy. Our system of government is set up in such a way that the majority and minority have to deal with one another, but in recent years the two parties have seen ways around this by either not holding legislative sessions or shutting down the government. Neither tactic has proven constructive or productive.

                We have a tendency in this country to exaggerate the policies of the party we oppose as destructive to the country. Certainly, some of those policies are, but that’s why we have a deliberative process, publically and legislatively, to determine whether a policy is good or bad. Democracy is supposed to be about finding common ground on issues that everyone can agree, though not necessarily like. That ideal seems to have been lost.

                It’s not that the nation doesn’t have good leaders. It does, and in both parties. What the nation needs is a different approach to leadership; an approach that is innovative and inclusive, not combative and exclusive. Maybe now that will occur. We have three test cases to see whether divided government can work in our democracy: Washington, Pennsylvania and Maryland.

                Obama et al, and McConnell and Boehner et al, may have to re-think strategies that move the country forward while keeping their members and voters, well, if not happy, at least grateful the country isn’t going to hell in a hand basket.

 Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov.-elect Tom Wolf and the Republican-controlled general assembly, and Maryland’s Republican Gov.-elect Larry Hogan and the Democratic-controlled state legislature, must craft  creative ways to move their agendas, if they, and their states, are to succeed.

Six months should tell us whether the election heralded in a new era of substantive cooperation and robust leadership or just re-arranged the deck chairs on a sinking ship.

The World at War

Science fiction writer H.G. Wells opened his seminal novel, “War of the Worlds,” with this passage: “No one would have believed in the last years’ of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own.”

Released in 1898, the novel (and still popular today with the latest Steven Spielberg film iteration made in 2005), is about an invasion from Mars. It stood out among a British genre of “invasion literature” that began around 1870. Stories about enemies invading the United Kingdom, crown of a British Empire that reached its zenith in 1922 with one-fifth of the world’s population under its rule, gripped readers until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

In one respect, Well’s novel was prophetic about the global conflagration. The clash of empires and cultures (worlds), the feverish bent to destroy, the disregard for human life, and the delusion that firepower and machines would lead to conquest were themes reflected in the novel. Wells would continue to write fiction and non-fiction books prophetic about the progress of mankind.

The most stunning similarity between “War of the Worlds” and World War I is what actually defeated the Martians and what could have defeated the armies engaged in fighting, if peace had not been reached on Nov. 11, 1918 – germs, microorganisms that causes viruses and disease.

Wells’ Martians had not accounted for the Earth germs that humans, through the evolutionary process, had become immune but which Martians had no such biological defenses. Despite the awesomeness of Martian technology – the British Maxim gun was no match against the incinerating “heat ray” – the invaders could not stop the unseen germs, which do not discriminate when they attack and kill.

Wells thinking was influenced by his early training in biology. He viewed life through the Darwinian lens that only the strongest of species, human, plant or animal, survive. As a writer, his “War of the Worlds” plot device that saved mankind was not only clever but prescient. Despite man’s awesome military power that left 17 million dead at the end of World War I, the influenza virus the followed the fighting demonstrated it was more powerful than men at killing people.

The 1918 flu pandemic, which lasted until 1920, infected 500 million people worldwide, and killed an estimated 50 to 100 million, according to historical records compiled and reported by the Center for Disease and Control. Ninety-six years later, scientists and historians still study the outbreak in their effort to determine exactly what caused it, where it originated, and whether there was one strain or multiple strains of influenza in the pandemic. 

As for the outbreak’s origin, one theory points to a major military hospital and troop staging area in France. Modern transportation’s easy movement of sailors, soldiers and civilians around and between continents is believed to have contributed to the speed at which the virus spread around the globe. A recent National Geographic article cites a Canadian historian who believes the flu originated in China.

“Historian Mark Humphries of Canada's Memorial University of Newfoundland says that newly unearthed records confirm that one of the side stories of the war—the mobilization of 96,000 Chinese laborers to work behind the British and French lines on World War I's Western Front—may have been the source of the pandemic,” the magazine reported.

Wherever the virus originated, the evidence that it likely spread because of war mobilization is a deadly irony.  In the United States, isolated from the ravages of World War I, the virus ripped across the nation with a vengeance, killing an estimated 675,000 people, six times the number of Americans killed on Europe’s battlefields, according to historical accounts.

The influenza pandemic reportedly started in Kansas, then spread east to New York and then west, as Atlantic coast cities telegraphed Pacific coast cities to warn them of a virus that in some cases struck people down as they walked along the street.

Desperation and fear mounted. Things got ugly. In downtown San Francisco, before a crowd of pedestrians outside a drug store, a municipal health officer shot a blacksmith for refusing to wear an “influenza mask.” The wounded man was taken to a hospital and placed under arrest, according to the Oct. 28, 1918, Bellingham Herald in Bellingham, Washington.

Headlines in the Oct. 4, 1918 edition of the New York Times read:

 

The virus came in three waves; it went from Europe to America and back to America. It raged around the globe. It was a terror unlike the terror of war.

Today, the world is at war. Wars rage in Europe, the Middle East and Africa -- Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Sudan. Low-level conflicts percolate in Asia, Africa, South America and North America (the drug wars in Mexico that spill over the U.S. border). Mobilizations, though, are in the tens of thousands, not tens of millions as in World War I. War, it seems, is a perpetual state for mankind.

The world also is threatened by a virus that, like influenza in 1918, can only be fought with precaution and quarantine as scientists search for a vaccine: Ebola. It’s a disease that has a high fatality rate that leads to bleeding inside and outside the body. Unlike influenza, though, Ebola is not airborne spread (coughing or sneezing) but through contact with an infected person’s blood or bodily fluids. It was discovered in Africa in 1976.

Though it rages in Western Africa, where ignorance and superstition is aiding its spread, Ebola poses minimal risk to the rest of the world – at least for now. Dr. Jefferson Sibley, who runs a hospital in central Liberia where a 14-year civil war that ended in 2003 killed more than 250,000 people, recently told Time magazine that Ebola is worse than war.

“The good thing about the war was you heard the gun sounds, you could run and take cover,” Sibley said, in the magazine’s Aug. 25, 2014 issue. “Ebola is not like that. You never know where it is coming from or who is bringing it to you.”

Nature can always best us when it comes to killing, but we have achieved the means to destroy ourselves and the planet with nuclear weapons, another Wellsian prophecy. In “War of the Worlds,” H.G. Wells warns us not about invaders or Martians, but about ourselves. We can be our own worst enemy, clinging to our self-interest, failing to heed the past or to consider the impossible as possible, thinking wishfully instead of realistically.

“War of the Worlds” opens with the words “No one would have believed,” but Wells expects his readers to consider believing the unbelievable. As he writes in the novel’s epilogue: “The broadening of men’s views that has resulted can scarcely be exaggerated. Before the [Martian]cylinder fell there was a general persuasion that through all the deep of space no life existed beyond the petty surface of our minute sphere. Now we see further.”

Wells died August 13, 1946 at his home in London. He was 79. At the time, post-World War II Europe and Asia lay in ruin from the airplanes and weapons of mass destruction that Wells prophetically wrote about in his 1907 novel, “The War in the Air,” which, in Wells' view, readers refused to seriously consider. When a new edition of the novel appeared in 1941, the third year of World War II, Wells penned in the preface that his epitaph should be: “I told you so. You damned fools.” The italics are his.  

(Images and photos: Painting of Martians in "War of the Worlds" by Henrique Alvin Coreat; a young H.G. Wells; policemen masked against the influenza virus in Seattle, Washington, 1919; London in World War II)