`Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream' still resonates
Most readers of a certain age will remember immediately the wistful, lilting tune that conveys this lyric: “Last night I had the strangest dream/I ever dreamed before/I dreamed the world had all agreed/To put an end to war.”
This song was written in 1950 by folk singer Ed McCurdy. It reflected the devastation of World War II, the developing nuclear standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union and the mounting tension in Korea, and it anticipated the incipient Vietnam War.
In fact, “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” was an unofficial anthem for an ambitious anti-war movement that arose in the mid-60s in response to the futile carnage in Vietnam. Songs such as “Give Peace a Chance” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” inspired a generation to ask this hopeful question: “Suppose they gave a war and nobody came?”
This is probably a corny way to start a column that's going to end with a solemn fact: While humankind for millennia has aspired to abolish war once and for all, humans have much more often beaten their plowshares into swords than the opposite.
War is elemental to the history of humankind. Few human pursuits are more basic to our character than the will to fight.
The pacifists of the '60s often assumed that all war is bad. They had a defensible point. Modern wars, particularly, are indiscriminately destructive and are often counterproductive: They tend to create more problems than they solve. To a committed pacifist, every war is a tragedy and a failure.
But this point of view suggests that there are no values worth fighting for. There are.
Religious people might describe the world in terms of good and evil. I prefer a secular representation: The “good” in this version is the liberal world order that has prevailed since World War II. It's characterized by democracy, freedom of speech, a free press, the rule of law, tolerance, free commerce and cooperation among nations, equality and concern for the rights of individuals, including — or especially — women and children and the LGBTQ+ community.
At the other pole are autocracy, corruption, intolerance, contempt for the rule of law, inequality, censorship, tribalism and inferior status for the least powerful citizens.
This model of the world is theoretical, but it serves as the backdrop for the war in Ukraine, a concrete instance of a conflict that is becoming more and more global: A democracy with aspirations toward the values we treasure is threatened by a corrupt kleptocracy with no respect for the freedoms of the West. And all indications are that Vladimir Putin has no intention of stopping with Ukraine.
However, as our will to support Ukraine deteriorates, especially among Republicans, consider two principles:
First, the fact that this column is a simplification of a complicated world should not tempt us to tolerate any false equivalence between the two cultural conceptions that it describes.
When an interviewer pointed out to former president Donald Trump that Putin is a “killer,” Trump said, “We got a lotta killers. You think our country's so innocent?”
This is wrong. While America has imperfections and shortcomings, we must not lose sight of the profound differences between us and Russia or China or
Iran. There really is a right and a wrong.
Second, the liberal world order that has been in place since World War II was never inevitable, and force is an essential component of its preservation.
Folk singer McCurdy's dream of a world without war reflects a worthy aspiration, and we can still hope and work for the happy day when diplomacy and economic and cultural pressures prevail.
History suggests a different story, however. War is a much more likely outcome. And in a world with nuclear weapons, McCurdy's dream of peace is, at every moment of conflict, vulnerable to becoming a nightmare.
This is not the way it should be; unfortunately, this is the way it is. We fail to acknowledge this at our peril.
The liberal world order that has been in place since World War II was never inevitable.