Some Things Never Change

On February 21, 1918, Life magazine published the editorial cartoon shown below (entitled "The Pessimist"), which mocked the defeatists and "peace-at-any-cost"ers advocating an American withdrawal from WWI.

Click on the image to see a larger (and more readable) version:



What's so amazing about this cartoon is how relevant it is to contemporary politics -- the "pessismists" of 1918 are exactly like the "peace movement" today -- the arguments are the same, the attitude is the same, and the message of the man on the stage in the cartoon is exactly the message of today's Democratic party leadership. (And notice the Germans in the orchestra playing the "No Hope Waltz" as an accompaniment to the defeatist American media's "Peace at Any Price Dirge" -- an exact parallel of the Left/Islamist alliance today.)

The cartoon comes courtesy of the excellent American Art Archives.

What makes this especially interesting is that the very concept of an "ant-war movement" was started during WWI, and that the motivation and strategies of the movement have been unchanged since its inception.

Of course, the reason the peace movement started during WWI was that -- of all the wars the US has been involved in -- it was one of the more "pointless" conflicts, in that it started over nothing and ended in a stalemate. But WWI was a rarity -- most wars before and (especially) since have had a strong moral justification and were much more "necessary": WWII, the overall "war against communism" (which included its component battles, such as the Korean War, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and so on), and the modern misnamed "War on Terror" which everyone knows is actually a war to neutralize the ongoing jihad of Islamic extremism.

Let this cartoon echo through the ages and be a warning to Americans today: don't let the pessimists lose the war on our behalf.