Gordon Dryden: Lessons of war more important than ever

COMMENT

Maybe it's the death of Michael King, so soon after completing The Penguin History of New Zealand. Or maybe the devastation and killing in Iraq. But somehow Anzac Day seemed much more important this year than any others I can remember.

A good time, too, to recall George Santayana's famous quotation: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

But the lessons are much wider and different than those raised by Ron Smith in his article Appeasement policy puts us all in danger.

Perhaps the biggest lesson of all is, beware of simplistic, single-word or simple-sentence dogma.

All who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s can remember the now-obvious bias of New Zealand's primary-school history book, Our Nation's Story. Michael King and other historians have since spent years trying to dispel its one-sided message of the glories of the British Empire.

So what are some of the lessons New Zealanders might ponder from our own involvement in war?

The Musket Wars of the 19th century led to at least 20,000 being slaughtered, thousands more being enslaved, and almost all tribal boundaries being redrawn. As Michael King put it in his introduction to Ron Crosby' s 1999 book, The Musket Wars: "If any chapter in New Zealand history has earned the label 'holocaust', it is this one."

In World War I, New Zealand suffered, with Belgium, the biggest proportionate losses of any country - in our case, 17,000 dead. Can anyone now justify the senseless and bloody slaughter of that four-year disaster? Yet at every school Anzac Day service I attended in the 1930s and 1940s, we were regaled with the myth that our soldiers had died fighting for "God, King, country and our freedom". The Germans and Turks, of course, were told the same.

World War II? Most who lived through it would probably agree with Dr Smith on the major lessons, including the peril of appeasement, but also the danger of any other global power wanting to dominate the world.

The Vietnam War? I happened to be in America in 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson announced that North Vietnam had fired on an American naval vessel "in international waters" in the Gulf of Tonkin.

With this "grave threat to the United States", America declared itself at war. So did Australia and New Zealand - on the oft-repeated ground of the "domino effect", that if Vietnam goes, so will the dominoes fall in the rest of Southeast Asia.

More than 50,000 American deaths and 2 million Vietnamese deaths later, the US was finally defeated in 1975. But the dominoes didn't fall. And then came the proof: the Tonkin Gulf incident was a lie. An American naval boat had deliberately gone inside North Vietnam's 12-mile limit to provoke an attack.

And how about the Cold War? There is no doubting the disastrous consequences of the Soviet domination of eastern Europe after World War II. But from 1950 to 1990, America's enormous military budget was ramped up each year on the basis of the well-publicised alleged parity between US and Soviet military forces.

Yet such parity did not exist. In 1970, Moscow didn't even have a public phone-book. By any standard, the Soviet economy was in ruins. And when the Soviet empire finally collapsed in 1989-90, we discovered its economy was the same size as that of the Netherlands.

And what of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, democracy in the Middle East, and religious fundamentalism?

Since 1988, America's foremost management thinker, Peter Drucker, who served on a government panel analysing the lessons of the Vietnam War, has been warning that terrorism, not conventional warfare, poses the new threat.

What a tragedy the "military and industrial complex", to use President Eisenhower's term, did not listen.

As for atomic weapons of mass destruction, one Middle Eastern country has possessed them for years - Israel. The enforced exile of most Palestinians from their own country is one of the tragedies of recent history. Anyone who doesn't understand that will not understand Middle East politics.

In terms of democracy in the Middle East, Iran enjoyed the first taste of it in 1951 under the government of Mohammed Mossadegh. But American intervention soon ensured that he was overthrown and replaced by the Shah.

In turn, this led to the eventual revolution by Shi-ite fundamentalist clerics - just as a democratic vote in Iraq today would almost certainly result in government by the 65 per cent Shi-ite majority.

As for religious fundamentalism, "zealotry" might be a more accurate description and it is certainly not confined to Islam.

The top-selling book in America this year is Glorious Appearing: The End of Days. It's the sixth in a series that has so far sold 40 million copies. The theme is simple: we are approaching a time of "rapture" when God will take away the goodly and leave the rest of us to be ruled by Satan.

* Gordon Dryden is an Auckland author.