Scott Alexander once described a particular building in Europe thusly:
It seems haunted. It’s beautiful enough, full of artwork praising peace and the brotherhood of mankind, complete with Latin invocations and Biblical quotes on all the walls. In the center is a great council chamber, where the delegates used to meet. But yesterday it was dead silent. There’s something eerie about sitting there, in this empty room where people once tried to save the world, failed, and then disappeared…
And you may say: the world is still here. The horror those people fought was not literally the end of the world.
Still, they gathered: the greatest idealists of the age. The organized. They built a grand headquarters. All to one aim: to ensure that no matter what happened in politics or economics or technology, there would never be a second world war.
The building is still there.
The League of Nations was not the only such attempt. In the wake of World War One, The Oxford Union, a debating society at that university, adopted a motion that “This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and country”. This promise spread throughout the world, exact phrasing changing as needed, with sixty thousand young men swearing it in the United States alone. As the same age cohort of a later generation would say, what if they threw a war but nobody came?
Nevertheless, the war was thrown. And as its nature became clear, a great many of those who had taken the oath volunteered and fought anyway.
And some historians have argued that by making certain countries look vulnerable, the oath actually encouraged the war. Causality in history is always hard to determine.
Nor were idealists the only ones making the attempts. The maginet line was an attempt to make such a war tactically unviable. And one can hardly fault their willingness to work hard on it.
And the crippling sanctions were probably someone else’s attempt to prevent a war.
So many attempts. So many mistakes. So many failures. Or one failure, from many angles.
And so, so many people who trusted and were disappointed.
Speaking of mistakes and untrustworthiness, I’ve maintained the tradition of having a deliberate error in this speech. Just so that nobody moves from counting on some nebulous idea of ‘them’ keeping us safe to counting on me.
Because the warning signs of coming dangers are gathering again. The danger of yet another world war not least among them.
And there’s still no sign of anyone we can count on.
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