In order to give my works of speculative fiction a degree of authenticity, I find it important to research how things happened in the past. From there I can project how things might happen in the future. Currently I am working on the beginnings of a galactic war and I must ask what drives all these alien races to fight one another. To help answer that question I turned to our world’s first Great War: World War I.
Prior to my research, my knowledge of WWI could be distilled down to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and something called the ‘Treaty of Versailles’. I knew it led to WWII and that it took place in Europe but the particulars of the ‘Great War’ had been long since lost to me.
One of the first things to jump out at me as I began my research was the concept of trench warfare. I’d heard of trench warfare before and WWI saw this kind of tactic like never before. Unlike wars of the past that involved armies sweeping across vast landmasses, WWI saw the widespread use of the machine gun and suddenly all those soldiers could be mowed down from a considerable distance. The only way to avoid the massacre was to literally dig in below ground and out of sight of the deadly guns. Both the allies and the central powers did just that in WWI often with little more than the length of a football field separating the two side’s trenches. The space in between was appropriately called ‘no-man’s land’ for anyone caught between the two sides would surely be killed.
This effectively turned WWI into a war of attrition, a stalemate. With both sides entrenched and neither wanting to risk certain death by crossing to the other side, they sat and waited hoping the misery of the trench would drive the other side to surrender first.
It occurred to me how appropriately trench warfare is analogous to the current political climate in the United States. In 2017 we are engaging in trench warfare with each other. The trenches aren’t physical, they’re ideological. Instead of guns, we hurl words and protests at our ‘enemy’. Anyone who isn’t in our trench must be in the enemy trench. If you’re a republican but don’t support Trump, you’re in no man’s land. If you are progressive but don’t like the establishment of the Democratic Party, you’re in no-man’s land. But being caught in no-man’s land means certain doom so pick a trench because right now, there is no middle ground (at least that’s the current perception). It’s a war of attrition and one side will either win or both sides will lose horribly.
What did WWI teach us about trench warfare? It was stupid, a lot of people died for no reason and by the end of the war nothing was really gained by it. In the case of WWI, the central powers ultimately lost. While they had better trenches and better weapons, they lacked the necessary influx of supplies to sustain war indefinitely. The allies technically won the war but with so many dead and so little disputed territory changing hands, what was it all for? Everyone was broke by the war’s end and with so much focus on fighting, resources weren’t sent to the real threat that emerged; the Spanish flu which ended up killing more people globally than WWI!
What lessons can we learn then in our ideological trench war today? Does one side have to completely surrender to the other? Do we hold our line so firmly the entire country falls apart by the end? Do we turn our ideological war into a physical war and shed more blood to test the constitution of this country? Or do we lay down are weapons and climb out of the trenches, see our ‘enemy’ as the neighbor they’ve always been? Trench warfare doesn’t work. No one truly wins in the end and if we continue on our current course, we will not have learned the lessons so many died to teach us.
The media, the President, even friends and family may tell us we have to pick a side and no matter what, we have to stay there. I say bullshit. I want to believe that most of us are actually in no-man’s land right now; that only those in a position of power and authority over us are truly engaged in the trench war. The difference between the soldiers of WWI and the American people today is that unlike the soldiers of the past, we have the power to get out of the trench and pull our leaders out with us.
“Okay Jen, how do you suggest we get out of the trenches?”
I think it starts with listening. We hear the words, how can we not? Both sides are shouting at the top of their lungs but are we truly listening? The truth is we may never agree on everything or maybe not on anything but somewhere along the road we stopped listening to the other side and they stopped listening to us. At some point we begin building our trenches and now we’re entrenched. But the idea is not to convince a Trump supporter that he is wrong or a liberal that she is naive; that’s just trying to drag one person out of one trench and into another. The idea is to hear the other side and truly empathize with why they feel the way they do. No man’s land really is the common ground between trenches. From common ground we can work on common goals. Only if we work together can we end our ideological trench standoff. We’re in this test of democracy together after all.