	Generational Dynamics
	Forecasting America's Destiny ... and the World's

\| HOME \| WEB LOG \| COUNTRY WIKI \| COMMENT \| FORUM \| DOWNLOADS \| ABOUT \|

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 27-Jul-06
Which war came first, Korea or Vietnam?

Web Log - July, 2006

Which war came first, Korea or Vietnam?

This is the kind of question that today's journalists typically need help with, if we're to judge by an article about NPR's 90-year-old senior news analyst Daniel Schorr.

According to the article, it's not unusual for NPR producers to ask Schorr, on deadline, "Which war came first, Korea or Vietnam?", not having even a clue that the Korean war was in the 1950s, while the Vietnam war was in the 1960s-70s. Or to ask Schorr, "You covered the Spanish-American War, didn't you?" not realizing that even a 90-year-old couldn't have covered an 1898 war.

To someone in my (Boomer) generation, for someone who receives a salary to write or report the news not to even know in what order the Korean and Vietnam war occurred is incredible. Don't you need to know stuff like that to graduate from high school? Perhaps it's true that this isn't a REALLY important question, like whether Elvis or the Beatles came first, or how many times Britney Spears has gotten pregnant, but these are WARS for heaven's sake.

And the fact that it's NPR producers asking the questions doesn't mean that NPR is worse than the NY Times or USA Today or any other news organization. The fact is that most journalists working journalists today are young enough to have no personal knowledge of the Vietnam War. Some of them don't even know anything about the Gulf War.

Here's a quiz. For each of the following American wars, listed in alphabetical order, tell when it happened (approximately), and what the war was about (anything you know):

Chances are that you'll know something about any war that you actually lived through, so if you're younger than 55, you probably won't know anything about the Korean War.

Of the wars that occurred before you were born, there are probably three that you know something about: For World War II, you'll probably know something about Hitler and Pearl Harbor; for the Civil War, you probably know that it was fought between the North and the South and that slavery was an issue; and for the Revolutionary War, you probably know that it was the war of independence from England.

There are other wars that you may remember by name, but really know nothing about; the Vietnam War and World War I are in that category. You may also have been able to guess when the War of 1812 took place.

And did you get the trick questions? In two different cases, the above list contains three different names for the same war.

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, there are good reasons for this.

We frequently talk about "crisis wars" on this web site. These are the worst kinds of wars, the genocidal wars, If you want recent examples of crisis wars, think of the Darfur genocide going on today or the Rwanda civil war of 1994 or the Bosnian war of the 1990s. These were crisis wars for other countries, though not for America.

America has been in two crisis wars since the Revolutionary War that founded it: The Civil War, in which Northern General Sherman marched through the South, and conducted the world's first "scorched earth" war campaign, burning all buildings and crops to the ground; and World War II, in which we firebombed Dresden and Tokyo, killing millions of civilians, and dropped nuclear weapons on two other Japanese cities. (I'm not blaming America for this, only stating that it occurred.)

This brings me back to the quiz: Chances are that the only wars you know anything about are the crisis wars. Non-crisis wars tend to become forgotten or near-forgotten very quickly -- within a decade or two of when they occur. But crisis wars are remembered for much longer periods, often centuries. These are wars that make cataclysmic changes to history.

Incidentally, if you're Mexican, they you probably know something about the Mexican-American War. That's because the Mexican-American war was a crisis war for Mexico, though not for America. Similarly, World War I was a crisis war for Russia (through the Bolshevik Revolution), but not for America.

Now we're headed for another war, a "clash of civilizations" world war that will make cataclysmic changes to history. We can see that war gathering steam today in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan.

We call already see terror groups (like al-Qaeda and Hizbollah) and their sponsors (Iran, China, North Korea) begin to exhibit genocidal fury, including a wanton disregard for the lives of civilians, and a willingness to target and kill women and children in brutal, humiliating ways as a war tactic. And we can also see Israel, desperately fighting an "existential war," beginning to show increasing signs of the same "crisis era fury": destroying civilian infrastructure, but still careful to harm as few civilians as possible. The turning point will be some kind of trigger -- a chaotic event of some kind that will infuriate either the Israelis or the Palestinians, triggering an Israeli-Palestinian crisis war. It might be something explosive (think of bombing Pearl Harbor) or it might be something extremely humiliating (think of the Bataan death march of World War II).

Soon these regional wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan will spread to other regions.

The reason that this is happening is because three generations have passed since the end of World War II, and all the people who remember how horrible that war was are disappearing rapidly and are almost gone.

That's the mechanism by which Generational Dynamics works. People don't remember non-crisis wars that happened before they were born. But people also don't remember the crisis wars that happened before they were born. All they remember is a series of sound bytes, like, "The Civil War was started because Abraham Lincoln wanted to free the slaves," which is completely untrue. Even when people remember a crisis war, they don't remember the horror and anxiety of it.

What's happening in the world today is both exciting and horrific. It's exciting because we all get to see, first hand, how a crisis war builds -- the anxieties and self-doubts, the rising outrage and fury -- and we can see it build step by step. It's thrilling to see how we're witnesses to what is the greatest event world history. And it's most thrilling for you, dear reader, because this web site tells you what's going on in a way that no other web site in the world does.

And it's horrific because of the consequences it will mean for all of us.

It would be nice if today's journalists knew enough history to know that the Korean War came before the Vietnam War, but Generational Dynamics tells us that people never know much of anything that happened before they were born, and that's why "clash of civilization" crisis wars are still necessary. (27-Jul-06) Permanent Link
Receive daily World View columns by e-mail
Donate to Generational Dynamics via PayPal

Web Log Pages

Current Web Log

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 27-Jul-06 Which war came first, Korea or Vietnam?

Web Log Pages

Generational Dynamics Web Log for 27-Jul-06
Which war came first, Korea or Vietnam?