In Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s address to the White House Correspondents’ Association on March 15, 1941, he said, “Nazi forces are not seeking mere modifications in colonial maps or in minor European boundaries. They openly seek the destruction of all elective systems of government on every continent—including our own. . . . These men and their hypnotized followers call this a new order. It is not new. It is not order. . . . Humanity will never permanently accept a system imposed by conquest and based on slavery.” Nine months later, following the Pearl Harbor attack, he told the public: “Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger.” Hostilities exist. It was true then, and it is true everywhere, in all times, the sort of eternal verity that Rudyard Kipling wrote about in “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.”
When John Kerry remarked, upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, “You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion,” he revealed a profound weakness for wishful thinking. Human nature has never bothered to consult the calendar. As of this writing, ISIS has beheaded another civilian, the British aid worker Alan Henning. That is not particularly nineteenth-century behavior. It belongs to today, and to the eighteenth century and its guillotines, and to every century, reaching back into prehistory.
It will belong to tomorrow.
Few contemporary novelists write as convincingly as James Ellroy
