The topic for my Thursday morning breakfast group this week was the war trials that took place in Japan following its surrender after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Earlier this year, we spent two Thursday mornings on the Nuremberg trials that followed the surrender of Germany. So we were pretty well filled with information and thoughts about war trials – how defendants were chosen, how judges were chosen, how crimes were defined, and so forth and so forth.

But I began to think about a different aspect of all of this. I began to think about what happened to Japanese and German society when the war ended. Both countries were completely militarized, both countries were completely ruthless, and both countries were highly expansionist. Both peoples were very nationalistic, and they each had a belief in their own ethnic (and, yes, physical) superiority. Before and during World War I, I would guess it would be hard to find an American who had a good word to say about either people. Jerries and Japs were the worst. So much so that Japanese-Americans were incarcerated in remote prison camps, and many German-born Americans were imprisoned.

But then something happened. Within a relatively short period of time, the Germans and Japanese stopped being monsters. Today, over 80 years after the end of the war, they are still two of our strongest (and, yes, in some ways most powerful) allies. Their societies have been remarkably unmilitaristic, and no one is afraid that one day they will run into someone from Germany or Japan in a dark ally.

What happened? I don’t have an answer to that question, I just have the question. Yes, there were decisions made by the allies not to “overly” punish those who were defeated. Those who fought for their governments, those who supported the ideologies of the government…..they were let alone, not punished for the most part, unless they were determined to have been specifically guilty at a high level of war crimes. It is also true that both Japan and Germany were “occupied” by foreign powers for a period of time, and it is true that the Allies (in Europe) and the United States (in Japan) did expend much effort and money to bring about a change in German and Japanese society. And, clearly, something worked. Both societies underwent a 180, very quickly.

This has happened in other places as well, for different reasons. For example, in today’s Turkiye after World War I, the rigid Ottoman Empire was replaced by the Turkish Republic led by Kamal Ataturk, whose goal was to westernize Turkish society, and end all of the mythology of Islamic society. Women could wear western clothing, men no longer wore a fez, secularization became the rule of law. Society (at least in the urban areas) was turned on its head almost immediately. This was all accomplished internally.

The same could be said about several other Muslim countries. Iran, even before the last Shah, had become a relatively free Muslim country, as had Afghanistan. Beirut was as free as could be – the Paris of the Middle East. None of these places are like that today. They each underwent at least two complete social revolutions.

And then look at the USSR. In early 1917, in spite of obvious tensions, Russia was a tsarist empire and everyone knew their place. In November, Russia was no longer and the USSR was a presumably monolithic Communist empire. It stayed that way for over 70 years and then it changed once again, this time to a money driven oligarchy, which it is struggling to maintain.

The list goes on. Think of Cuba, never a paradise, but once a capitalist country, and then a socialist country. After 80 years of socialism, is it absurd to think that may change? What about Iran and other countries of the Middle East? What would be needed to bring about changes there?

Of course we are now at war with Iran (sort of), and we are trying our best to destroy Cuba’s already destroyed economy. Is it unheard of to think, for better or for worse, that we might succeed one day in helping create a secular Iran or a capitalist Cuba? What would we have to do in order to accomplish this? What would be the ethical questions involved? Ethical considerations have changed drastically. In the colonialst mid-20th century, it seemed natural for countries like Britain and the U.S. to take control of other countries and set them on what seemed to us to be proper paths. This is certainly not the case today.

Perhaps in 1945 we and our allies had the moral strength and the will to accomplish these major tasks, as well as general world-wide support, but now we don’t.

If individual societies will have to reform themselves, where will their leaders come from? How would replacement governmental structures, replacement economic systems, be developed and agreed upon and adopted with a minimal of economic or social disruption? Can it happen internally without the existing internal structure totally disintegrating (Russia and Turkiye)? Do we need a major war, not the kind we currently are involved with in Iran, with atomic bombs and firebombed cities before a society today is ready for change, and only then with outside guidance?

It seems to me that a total societal change cannot take place until after any internal or external war that sets the stage is ended. If a war is still going on, you cannot redo society. Instead, you need to fight the war.

It’s really a conundrum. You feel for the people living under control of the Iranian or Afghan or Cuban governments today. But without something cataclysmic, perhaps nothing can happen. And today, no one really accepts an externally driven cataclysm as acceptable. So perhaps we are stuck.

There are other things we have learned as well. At one time, the United States and its allies, even with the differences between them, could all be viewed as men (the multi-gendered term “men”) of good will. But now that we see that our own government can be taken over by people who do not fit in that category, can we even presume to think that we can play the role we played in 1945?

You can see the goal that I would like our world to strive for, you can see the place where it would be nice to wind up. But it looks like while we suffer under that old “Chinese curse” of living in interesting times, we are also constrained by that good old American saying:

You just can’t get there from here.