On Repeat : The Reoccurrence of War - My Junior Research Paper

A little bit of background on this essay: Every year in whatever English you take in my school you have to write a research essay. Our topics are generally free range and all you have to do is run the thesis by your teacher. This year, when we were asked to pick our essays there had been a comparison of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to Adolf Hitler. While I in no way agreed with the comparison I started to see the similarities between the wars themselves.

On Repeat - The Recurrence of War

High school students drag their feet to history class, wondering why they have to learn about things that happened decades before they were born. “To learn what humanity did in the past,” a teacher will reply. That response should not only apply to students, but to all people. Reviewing the past is meant to remind students what humanity has done so it can be avoided in the future. Even so, history repeats itself, no matter how horrifying. Recent history has made it particularly easy to see this happen. Currently Syria is fighting a brutal civil war, following other Middle Eastern countries in a quest for a fair democratic government. Unlike other governments, the Al-Assad regime shut down the rebels quickly and violently, which resulted in rebel groups retaliating with force. On a seemingly different note, World War II started with the rise of a totalitarian group, headed by an anti-semitic leader, to an economically and politically damaged country. The Nazi rise to power allowed for a violent attack on the Polish population, resulting in a world war. Despite these differences, the Syrian Civil War and World War II share resemblances through their complex, internal beginnings and the global reactions to the external problems created by the conflicts.

Both the Syrian Civil War and World War II had complex origins, beginning with internal power struggles that exploded into worldwide affairs. While their igniting factors seem very different, they began under similar circumstances. The Nazi rise to power was due to the national unrest that had been caused by World War I, leaving Europe in ruin and Germany in debt for the war. The “War Guilt Clause”, Article 231 of the 1919 Treaty of Versaille, “forced the German nation to accept complete responsibility for initiating World War I” (USHMM). With responsibility for the war came the expenses, roughly 33 billion American dollars. Due to the debt, the German economy began to fall apart, with “hyperinflation wiping out lifetime savings, plunging millions of once solidly middle-class families into abject poverty” (Nagorski 9). German families lived in the streets without food or proper shelter, most unemployed or working for next to nothing. As well as economic unrest, the newly formed Weimar Republic “spawned revolts from both rightists and leftists” (Nagorski 10) and, although there had been hope that the new government would stabilize Germany, created more problems. The breakdown of both the economy and the government allowed for the rise of a far right regime, the Third Reich. The leader of the Nazis was “‘an oratorical genius’” (Nagorski 24) and captivated the German citizens with his charisma, spouting anti-semitic propaganda along with plans for fixing the German economy. With most of the public living below the poverty line with a hatred for the Weimar Republic, Hitler’s ideas meant more money, jobs, and stability.

Similarly, the Islamic State of Syria (ISIS) became powerful in Syria due to the political turmoil. In 2011 several Middle Eastern and African countries began to protest their governments, in a period referred to as the Arab Spring, to make a push for democracy. Several managed to do so peacefully, their country leaders stepping down and allowing the people to form their governments, however, some leaders refused to go without a fight. The Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, was one of these leaders. When he became president, after the death of his oppressive father, Syrians hoped for reform, as he was educated to be a doctor in both Syria and London. This hope of change mirrored the hopes for the Weimar Republic in Germany, and, just like it had in Germany, it quickly became apparent to the Syrian citizens that al-Assad would not be a friend of the people. In April 2011, Assad sent tanks and soldiers to take down both peaceful and violent protestors of the government, according to a humanitarian group called I Am Syria. The civil unrest quickly snowballed into a full blown civil war, with al-Assad’s government fighting civilians turned to fighters and rogue soldiers. When the war broke, it opened a “new and promising front for the Islamic State’s ambitions” (Fisher). Just as the unrest in Germany had allowed for the Nazis to take over, ISIS was able to find people enraged and aggressive enough, due to the governmental issues, to join their group. Along with growing support, ISIS was ignored by the Syrian government and all other intervening governments because they posed no large threat. The group was able to move freely through the war torn country and grow large enough overtime to stage attacks outside of Syria. Both wars have shown that with a governmental unpredictability comes war and the rise of a dangerous group that threatens the world.

With political instability comes a breach of human rights, everything from suspension of voting to the systematic killing of an ethnic group. Chemical attacks are some of the easiest to carry out, as they can be virtually undetectable and deadly within seconds of release. One of the most devastating uses of chemical war in World War II, and arguably human history, was the Holocaust. Around 11 million people, anyone undesirable to the Nazis, were killed in death camps with chemical arms. It began with gas vans, which were “hermetically sealed trucks with engine exhaust diverted to the interior compartment” (USHMM). The first “killing center” was Chelmno, where interned people were killed in gas vans such as the ones that had been killing gypsies, Jewish people, and the mentally unstable since mid-1941. Camps began to build cement gas chambers underground, where prisoners would be forced to “shower”. The chambers would be sealed and then filled with carbon monoxide. By the end of 1941 the Nazis had found the most effective way of exterminating their prisoners was Zyklon B, a chemical previously used for fumigation, according to the USHMM. This technique was used in all death camps under the Nazis for the rest of the war. The first concentration camps were not liberated until 1944. However the Allies knew about the events of the Holocaust as early as 1942 when they “issued a proclamation condemning the ‘extermination’ of the Jewish people” (Ridley). Even before the official message, which was obtained from the Chilean government, major United States newspapers had headlines on the Night of Broken Glass, which was Nazi-sponsored terror on the Jewish population, and Hitler’s 1939 prediction that “a new world war would mean the extermination of the Jewish ‘race’”(USHMM) made headlines across the country. Clearly there was knowledge of what was happening, or at least an indication that many people would die. Yet nothing was done till years later, when entire bloodlines were wiped away due to convenience and American anti-semitism.

While the modern use of chemical weapons does not nearly contest the inhumane and “perfected” method of killing in World War II, the Syrian government allegedly began to attack their citizens in late 2012 and there was a significant attack in 2013 with sarin, a nerve agent. According to the CDC, sarin causes symptoms such as a runny nose, blurred vision, and confusion in small doses. In large doses sarin can result in paralysis, respiratory failure, convulsions, and loss of consciousness. In reports during the 2013 attack victims symptoms such as “disorientation, runny nose, eye irritation, blurred vision, nausea, vomiting, general weakness, and eventual loss of consciousness” (“Syria Chemical Attack”). The Syrian government continuously denied that these attacks occurred and that they were involved in them, mirroring the Nazi, and the general public, denial of the Holocaust until the death toll was much too high. In modern times, when the first chemical attack happened, the United States found it convenient to leave it alone, as in most other cases during the Arab Spring, the political situations had worked themselves out without any outside involvement. However, all the governments that had peacefully stepped down did so right away and the countries that had governmental retaliation resulted in a complete breakdown in the functioning of the country. During the Egyptian uprising, in 2011, President Hosni Mubarak was forced to step down and “convicted of complicity in the deaths of 846 people killed during the uprising” (“Arab Uprising”). While Mubarak had been a political ally to the United States, the US government was “offering support to pro-democracy activists in Egypt while publicly praising Mr Mubarak” (Ross). The Egypt uprising ended terribly for both the rebels and the government, with close to a thousand deaths. The United States was aware of the consequences of government retaliation from roles in previous uprisings, but still did not get involved when the Syrian government killed their own citizens with chemical weapons. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross “the use of chemical weapons is prohibited… in both international and non-international armed conflicts” and nearly all participating countries chose to ignore the usage of chemical weapons by the Syrian government until the attacks in April 2017. Chemical weapons were prohibited after World War One due to their “unique methods of killing”, “their ‘indiscriminate’ impact”, and “fear of an unknown future” (Heineman). The laws against chemical weapons were broken during World War II when they were used to kill in concentration camps and the laws were broken in Syria when they were used to kill Syrian citizens. In 2013 there was a “global... debate about whether to deploy forces against Syria for its use of sarin gas on civilians” (Heineman), which seemed to have ended as another chemical attack in April 2017 elicited a meeting in the United Nations, which led to the United States officially bombing the site where the chemical gas was likely released from. Knowing what happened in the past likely played a role in the official attack on the Syrian government, as the United States realized that hesitating when human lives were at stake resulted in more suffering than needed.

Another factor connecting the two wars is religion. While equally prevalent in both situations, the bias of the Nazi regime in World War II is more obvious. During the economic depression in Germany, many Jewish people had jobs in banking, store owning, and other occupations that brought money to their families. Germans, who had held middle-class positions and jobs before the debt of the first World War hit, saw the Jewish people of Germany as threats to their own social standing. After the economy collapsed in 1929 and the Nazi party began to promote anti-semitism, it was easy to get the people of Germany to agree with their ideals. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum says, “To justify the murder of the Jews… the Nazis used not only racist arguments but also arguments derived from older negative stereotypes, including Jews as communist subversives, as war profiteers and hoarders, and as a danger to internal security because of their inherent disloyalty and opposition to Germany.” Nazi propaganda advertised such things openly, persuading the German people that Jewish people were dangerous to society and needed to be overtaken and eradicated, leading to the takeover of Jewish-dominant countries, most notably Poland.

This open denouncement of a faith inversely mirrors the situation in the Syrian War. Despite its obvious roots in the flawed government system, many people do not understand why the Syrian War began. To understand that, one must understand the basic religion of most Middle Easterners. There are many branches of Islam, but the two main beliefs, Sunni and Shia, conflict greatly. The Sunnis “emphasize God’s power in the material world, sometimes including the public and political realm, while Shia value in martyrdom and sacrifice” (Harney). The majority of the Syrian population is Sunni and the president is a Shiite. With such different religious values in a country devoted to religion, it was impossible to keep peace. This was one of the toppling factors for al-Assad, and his father, when they ruled the country. Due to the religious conflicts, many people saw the ruling in their country as oppressive to their religion and protested for a democratic government in order to pick leaders with their values. The first protests began after “the arrest and torture of some teenagers who painted revolutionary slogans on a school wall” (“Syria: The Story of the Conflict”) and the demonstrations were quickly and violently shut down with tanks and guns. Citizens took arms against the government and the Free Syrian Army, as well as many other pro-democracy militias, began.

Along with the rise of politically motivated armies, radical jihadist groups, such as Al Qaeda and ISIS, had infiltrated unstable cities and towns, beginning their takeover of Syrian territory. The Islamic State has “capitalized on the chaos” and involved the globe in a “war within a war” (“Syria: The Story of the Conflict”), terrorizing Western countries. ISIS has used the anger of the Syrian citizens and the of Islam from Western ideologies to recruit people into their organization to terrorize the world. The Nazi did something similar during World War II, preying on angry and poor individuals with the promise of a better world. In the forties that better world was with the Nazis taking the whole world and now it is jihadists taking the whole world.  The religious differences, coupled with economic unrest and political instability, allowed radical groups to rise in these countries.

These parallels do not only hold true within Nazi Germany and war-torn Syria, but the reactions of outside countries to the civil war resemble the reactions during World War II. The start of involvement from other countries during World War II was tentative. While Great Britain and France were allied with Poland, and promised to defend the country by declaring war on Germany, there was little movement to make good on their alliance. Both countries hoped that the threat of their armies would motivate the Germans to overthrow Hitler, according to Max Hastings’ book Inferno: The World at War 1939-1945. France and Britain did not begin to move troops until 1940, a year after their official call of defense. Though President Roosevelt quickly stopped trade with the Axis nations, the United States did not officially enter the war till the end of 1941.

By the same token, when the Syrian war broke out and countries backed either the government or the rebels, countries allied with the rebels were hesitant to begin the fight. Only after several months did the United States issue an official statement about their thoughts on the crisis in Syria. President Barack Obama said, in a written statement, that “for the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” The United States quickly froze Syrian government assets and barred America to do business with the Syrian government, according to a Washington Post article by Scott Wilson and Joby Warrick. While many countries backed President Obama’s statement, few actually turned to help the Syrian rebels. Many leaders may have hoped for the Syrian uprising to go as other revolutions had gone during the Arab Spring, with Assad stepping down or the rebels overthrowing him quickly. In Tunisia the president was forced to step down and flee when the army refused to mobilize on rebels, and in Morocco, where the king peacefully stepped away to allow a clean transition. However, in Syria this was not the case and Al-Assad continued to attack his citizens with chemical weapons and the Syrian army. Yet it was not until 2013 that the United States began to oppose the Syrian government, while before they had only been backing the rebels with non-lethal military aid. The movement of operatives and weapons did not start until a year after the official backing of the rebel army, which is parallel to what Great Britain and France did during World War II. In both cases, the countries avoiding war were ones that had recently been at war in the area, America in Iraq and the allies in World War II.  Hesitation in the second world war, due to World War I, gave Germany a foothold in Eastern Europe and the USSR a chance to gain territories, which would later cause problems in the Cold War. By waiting when action could have been taken, the Allies allowed the fall of Poland and all that was lost from the hostile takeover by the Nazis. Now, delays to peace talks and intervention have allowed the city of Aleppo, which was filled with displaced Syrian citizens, to become war zones. Waiting any longer could cause thousands more to die in that city alone. Waiting to see if the turmoil would settle naturally has cost millions of lives and procrastination happened in both wars, showing a clear similarity in the mindsets of outside governments.

By far the most prominent similarity between the two wars are the refugee counts. The Syrian Refugee Crisis has been a number one priority when the number of displaced citizens grew large enough to be the highest refugee count since World War II, at 13.5 million people both internally and externally displaced in 2016. That 13.5 million accounts for 65 percent of the Syrian population. During World War II, 17.2 million Poles were displaced (“Displaced Persons-Poland”) of 31.9 million Polish citizens. While this only accounts for around 54% of the population it does not include all those displaced within the country or those killed, either in concentration camps or in the streets. While the numbers are likely substantially higher from World War II, both have ranked very high on the worst humanitarian crisis in modern times. Countries accepting refugees, however, have been very different this time around. In World War II nearly all of Europe was a war zone, leaving very few places to accept refugees. The United States agreed to let some people into the country, but “out of fear that the Nazis could smuggle spies and saboteurs in with refugees, immigration officials tightened visa policies for immigrants and non-immigrants” (USHMM). Presently the fears of Islam in Western countries stem from the same assumption, that members of radical groups could pass as refugees and legal citizens to infiltrate first world countries. President Trump’s travel ban highlighted some of these fears in American society, as Presidential Proclamation 2525 did in World War II. The two executive orders had similar weight in the country, as many want to help those in dire situations while others worry about their country. The American acceptance of refugees was a topic of discussion during both the 2016 election and the elections of 1940 and 1944.

The movements of refugees during the war can be tracked around Europe, into South America, North America, and the Middle East. In fact, during World War II, nearly a million refugees stayed in modern war torn countries in the Middle East, with over one thousand temporarily residing in Aleppo, which, at the moment, is one of the most dangerous parts of Syria. In World War II camps, refugees were screened and passed into makeshift dwellings. They were checked by a doctor then officially moved into the camp. People worked, cooked, and were educated once settled in, according to an article by Evan Taparata. The article includes a side by side of the camps in Syria during World War II and the camps currently set up across Syria and in bordering countries such as Lebanon and Jordan. The resemblances are striking, showing white housing facilities, young girls cleaning their clothes, and refugee children being educated. These photos show how far humanity has gone, and it does not seem to be very far.

Countries that have accepted refugees from Syria recently include several European countries, the United States, and, although forced, Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. As shown in the movement of Jewish refugees during World War II, there is a great irony in the Syrian refugee movement, as Germany has accepted over four hundred thousand Syrians. Despite the change in Germany, America has not quite made an adjustment their beliefs. Due to the attacks in San Bernadino, California and Orlando, Florida, the United States has been hesitant to let in refugees from Syria. The fear of ISIS, just as the fear of the Nazi’s during World War II, plays a role in the minds of American citizens, although the shooters in both attacks were American citizens. Attacks in Brussels, London, and France have made several countries falter in their acceptance of refugees and many are beginning to question the safety of their citizens. ISIS is the main cause for alarm, as were the Nazis during World War II. The parallels make it difficult to ignore how this war is being fought on repeat.

Of course not everything about the wars are similar. During World War II the leading power of Germany was the Nazis, who managed to convince most of the German populus, and many others worldwide, that their cause would bring a better tomorrow regardless of how many lives it would cost. Conversely, ISIS is not the leading power in Syria, it is just one of many groups converting and training enraged citizens. In reality, the Islamic State is only one of three major influences in the country. The other leading powers being the pro-democracy, Syrian rebels, backed by the United States and its allies, and the third being the Syrian government, backed by the Russian government. Recently President al-Assad used chemical weapons to silence problematic rebel groups, “accidentally” killing civilians. The Syrian use was unlike the Nazis use, which occurred with the intention to systematically kill every person who did not fit the Nazi mold. This included Jewish citizens, who were globally discriminated against for no reason other than their supposed threat upon money. Now the fear of terror attacks is what prompts the hatred of Muslims everywhere. The Syrians are fighting an internal problem that unintentionally became a global issue, but in the past the Nazis pushed their aggression into the spotlight to start a war with the intention for the dispute to ravage the whole world. Yet neither argument is better than the other. Justifying killing because of political opinion is no better than justifying killing based on race. Hating a religion based on what its people may be able to do is no worse than discriminating against 1.7 billion humans because of what a handful of people from a radicalized version their religion did. Rationalizing either side is admitting to human failure to stop what could have been and can still be prevented.

High school students sit teary eyed watching Schindler’s List and reading Night by Elie Weisel, being told by teachers that they should not allow the same thing to happen in the future. Yet the same thing is happening in Syria. The “Survival War” is repeating itself, and that is clear due to the rise of a radical group, political crisis, the use of chemical weapons to kill, global and internal religious sentiments, and external refugee responses. Knowing how the two wars are similar can help show us what to do to avoid the atrocities that occurred during World War II. Millions of deaths can be avoided if we look back on what we should have done then and apply it to our response now.

Works Cited

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