Quote:
Originally Posted by Tegyrius
Rae, how would you say Junger's observations line up with the postwar societal issues we see in Savage Continent?
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It's been a while since I read
Savage Continent, but I don't think the two book premises are incongruous.
Junger's point is that there is more social cohesion, more solidarity during a crisis, but usually
only during, not after. He points out (and I neglected to mention) that as soon as the crisis is over, that social cohesion is usually lost pretty quickly. He gave an example of a town in Peru that was hit by a devastating landslide in the 1990s (IIRC). With road links to the outside world severed, the survivors, of different classes and ethnicities that, traditionally, hadn't gotten along, put aside their differences and worked together to stay alive. They didn't turn on each other. Once the road links were reestablished, cooperation ceased and old divisions reappeared. He interviewed several survivors of the siege of Sarajevo who looked back at that time almost wistfully, and bemoan the state of the city today, because, to paraphrase the pervading sentiment, "back then, everyone was in it together and now, everybody's out for themselves".
In
Savage Continent, we're seeing the immediate aftermath of a crisis. Nations were recovering, or forming, and the immediate mortal danger of bombings and battle were gone. The machinery of state still existed (or was hastily constructed) and, in the case of the USSR, took advantage of the devastation of the war to seize and consolidate power. Refugees existed in a sort of liminal state- often, they were stateless- and were frequently used as pawns in the emerging geopolitical struggle of the nascent Cold War. There was still a lot of bad blood between war enemies, scores to settle. For example, the Soviets didn't care about German or Polish DPs. Also that cohesion is intra-community. No examples of embracing outsiders were given. During the Blitz, Londoners felt and demonstrated increased solidarity with one another, but they had very little sympathy for Dresdeners in 1944 (and vice-versa). In Savage continent, DPs were often considered outsiders and so didn't benefit from any increased, crises-derived social cohesion in their respective "host" countries.
I'm not sure either another explicitly made this point, but I think they would agree that there are different degrees of crisis. The immediate aftermath of the WWII, which much of Europe in ruins and millions of DPs is clearly a crisis in and of itself. But I think Junger would argue that it is a crisis of less magnitude than the war itself- i.e., the closer to existential the crisis, the greater the community cohesion. As the danger lessens, so does the cohesion.
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