IRONY dealt us a strange hand last month. As the World War II craze swept through America, pundits mourned our generation's inability to think about much beyond Britney and the NASDAQ. We seemed to pale in comparison to our grandparents who defeated the Nazis in Europe and island-hopped across the Pacific.
Everything changed on Sept. 11. Now we have our own war, and it's a brave new conflict unlike anything we've previously faced.
Yet history still offers us valuable lessons. Despite the new challenges in what the television networks have dubbed "America's New War," its similarities to World War II are striking. Today's players each have their Nazi era counterparts, and the way events transpired in our grandparents' war offers important lessons for our own struggle.
Begin with the enemy. We fought the Nazis in World War II - as despicable and indisputably evil an enemy as a democracy could confront. Our enemy this time is militant Islam - both active militants and governments that tolerate militant rhetoric and action. The Nazis were racists, zealots and murders without remorse. They believed in the inherent superiority of their system and their people - and they were dead wrong.
The fanatics who planned, financed and carried out the attack on our country believe in their absolute superiority. Like Hitler, militant Muslims seek to impose their worldview - a worldview that will destroy civilization and drag us backward into the Dark Ages.
The new enemy does not hate us for our actions or our policies. Our support for Israel is not their central gripe, although fanatic anti-Semitism is a common tenet of both Nazism and militant Muslims. They hate us for who we are, for our core beliefs in democracy and freedom, for everything that makes us better than them. To doubt for one second that we are right and they are wrong is to appease, as dangerous and fruitless as appeasement during the 1930s.
But we cannot cast too wide a net. Most Germans were not Nazis, and most Muslims are not militant. The model we must follow is World War II in Europe, not Asia. In the war against Japan, misguided racial prejudices in the United States framed the Japanese as universally evil, unfairly lumping loyal American citizens in with kamikaze pilots as "the enemy." In Europe, we more successfully distinguished between "good Germans" and "bad Germans" - not confusing shared blood or shared faith with shared hate.
Germany and Germans' national pride have long, proud traditions in the world and remain strong today as forces for good. The same should be true for mainstream Muslims. Just as the Nazis hijacked Germany and marginalized its greatness for a generation, some violent Muslims are trying to destroy authentic Islam. We must encourage mainstream Muslims to join our side in this fight - to protect civilization and to preserve their faith.
As we stood by Great Britain in World War II, we must wholeheartedly support Israel in the war on Islamic militants. Britain started fighting the Nazis before us and suffered on the front lines of the battle. Israel began suffering the wrath of the Islamic fanatics long before the first airliner hit the World Trade Center. Israel will prove an invaluable ally, and the United States must be a loyal friend of the Middle East's only democracy.
Our greatest successes in World War II were not our battlefield victories. America truly won the war by reconstructing a postwar Europe better than the one that had been bombed and shelled to rubble.
We can do the same in the Middle East. The first postwar West German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, held office for more years than Hitler. Nazism was not central to Germany; much the opposite - it was an anomaly, an aberration. The same is true for militants in Islam. Development aid and support for moderate democracy are critical for the construction of a new Middle East that must rise from the ashes of the Islamic militants' eventual defeat.
But how can we have another World War II without a country to fight? After all, a war against bands of terrorists in the mountains is no war at all.
The truth is that 2001 is not analogous to 1941 - it is closer to 1931. The Nazis were then a force in Europe, but they did not yet have a country.
If it is a "real war" we want, all we need wait for is a Taliban-style coup in Egypt or Saudi Arabia. Then we can fight a real country with a real army. Or we can stop this cancer before it spreads and destroys the moderate Islamic world along with much of the West.
The United States will emerge victorious regardless, just as we did in 1945. By following the path of weakness and appeasement, we will win at a greater cost with high casualties and more pain. But if we destroy today's Nazis as yesterday's Nazis should have been destroyed - before they hijacked Germany for their evil purposes - we'll have fewer heroes, more survivors and a better world to show for it.
(John Schochet is a first-year law student.)
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