Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, was a Polish writer who emigrated to the United States. He lived and taught in the United States for over forty years, from 1960 until his death in 2004, at age ninety-three He is best known as a poet, but he also wrote many books of nonfiction. A recurrent theme in his work is concerned with the struggle of an individual to maintain humanity in a world of senseless brutality. The piece of his writing entitled “American Ignorance of War” is a small excerpt from his nonfiction book, The Captive Mind. That book was originally written in Polish in 1951 for a post-World-War-II European audience. The meaning of that excerpt from his larger work should be judged in its full context. That context includes Milosz’s personal biography, the historic time and conditions when he wrote The Captive Mind, the audience he was addressing, and the full argument that he presented. Using that full context, Milosz’s observations in the excerpt entitled “American Ignorance of War” are instructive and insightful, and they stand the test of time.
Milosz’s own life experience is the source of his views expressed in “American Ignorance of War.” He was born in 1911 in Poland. He lived in and through the most terrible period of his nation’s history, 1933-1945, in its most besieged city, Warsaw. During those years Warsaw was at the center of the worst horrors of World War II in Europe. Milosz states flatly that “the war in Eastern Europe was much more devastating than what Western Europe experienced” (1157). That assertion is a matter of historic record, it is not one man’s personal opinion. World War II is considered the worst war that Europe ever experienced. In view of the extent of the war’s devastation of Western Europe, it is difficult to comprehend the degree and kinds of destruction that Eastern Europe suffered. At the conclusion of the war, the victors arranged that the Eastern half of Europe would belong to the USSR. Everyone in that geographic territory was suddenly locked behind the “Iron Curtain.” The people caught in this imposed arrangement had to adjust and survive without having begun to recover from the experiences and effects of the war. Milosz himself served the new Polish government as its cultural ambassador from 1945 until his defection to the West in 1950. His book, The Captive Mind, was his attempt to explain, and share with the world, what had taken place in the post-war years 1945-1950 to people in Eastern Europe, suddenly subjected to Soviet rule. The Captive Mind was very well received in Europe and in the United States, and Czeslaw Milosz became world-famous. The Captive Mind was considered one of the great anti-totalitarian works of the twentieth century, along with Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and George Orwell’s 1984. Milosz emigrated to the US in 1960. From 1960 until 1998 he was a professor in the Department of Slavic Language and Literature at the University of California at Berkeley. He became a US citizen in 1970. The last few years of his life he divided his time between his residences in Cracow, Poland and Berkeley, California. He died in his Cracow apartment in 2004 at age 93, honored in the US and worldwide for his many contributions to literature and to humanistic thought.
“American Ignorance of War” opens with a question that Milosz presents as a common concern among people in Eastern Europe at the time: “Are Americans really stupid?” (1156). For a contemporary American reader, that question is startling and offensive. Milosz makes it immediately clear that the question is not malicious. “In the voice of the man who posed the question, there was despair, as well as the hope that I would contradict him” (1156). The questioner does not want to hear or believe that Americans are, in fact, stupid. Milosz’s answer to the question does not try to place blame. He tries to provide a rational explanation to the questioner. His explanation revolves around the basic fact that the United States had no direct experience at all of World War II on its mainland. Therefore. Milosz explains, Americans have no frame of reference for understanding the terrible experiences that Eastern Europeans endured. Americans’ daily routines were never disrupted. Their values remained intact. Their ideas of respectability and normalcy were sustained Their idea of their own personal human worth, the stability of their political, economic and social system, their personal safety and prosperity, the physical appearance of their homes and cities, were all untouched and unchanged by the war. In short, Milosz explains, “they have never undergone the experiences that teach how relative their judgments and thinking habits are” (1158). Eastern Europeans, on the other hand, had every detail and aspect of their personal lives, their beliefs and values, their houses and cities, their economic, political and social routines, torn away abruptly and violently. Anything and everything that had been “normal” or “natural” before the war was gone suddenly and by force. Americans are “ignorant” of this kind of experience
Milosz presents a catalogue of some of the horrific conditions that an American would find incomprehensible and unimaginable, but that the Eastern European faces every day. He then asks, “Which world is ‘natural’?” (1158). He immediately answers his own question. “Both are natural, if both are within the realm of one’s experience” (1158). He explains that Americans think that their prosperous, safe, stable order is “natural” and will prevail everywhere because anything else is “incompatible with human nature” (1158). That is the ignorance he refers to in his argument. He uses the examples of the terrible experiences of Eastern Europe to explain to Americans that the unthinkable can and does happen, with no warning and with lightning speed. He explains that such terrifying catastrophes force people to behave and think in ways that are completely different from all they thought and did before the catastrophe. A new “normal” emerges. He further explains that Eastern Europeans suspect that sooner or later Americans will experience in their homeland something like what Eastern Europeans endured in theirs. Milosz explains that this is not a wish for harm or evil to befall innocent others. It is “the conclusion [the Eastern European] draws from his observations” (1159) learned in “a hard school, where ignorance was punished not be bad marks, but by death” (1159).
The excerpted segment ends with this thought, although the book from which it comes does not. It is possible, with these ideas presented out of context, for the American reader to conclude that Milosz is expressing anger, or that he is voicing the resentments and jealousies of people in despair. But what is most noticeable about Milosz’s thoughts is that they are careful and understated. He writes with quiet restraint about unspeakably difficult things. Today, there is a great deal for Americans to consider in what Milosz wrote in 1951. At the very least, two of his points deserve careful, objective consideration. First, as a result of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the possibility of a catastrophic war suddenly hitting the US mainland is not as unimaginable or “unnatural” as it seemed up till that terrible day. Americans now have a firsthand glimpse of how such an unexpected catastrophe can happen. Americans have also glimpsed the psychological terror and political upheaval that such a catastrophe creates. Second, since 1945 the United States has steadily maintained active military engagements around the globe. None of these military engagements have touched the soil of our mainland. People all over the world are forced to exist in unimaginably terrible war conditions unknown to Americans. Like the Eastern Europeans after World War II, people in all these regions of the globe worry that Americans are ignorant of what life is like for those who are forced to experience war directly.
Work Cited
Milosz, Czeslaw. “American Ignorance of War.” Legacies: Fiction, Poetry, Drama,
Nonfiction. Schmidt, Crockett & and Bogart, Eds. 5th Edition. Independence:
Cengage Learning, 2012. 1156-59.
