Posted on 04/03/2002 4:37:07 PM PST by Korth
Now that Taki has said it, perhaps it should be said again. The Western world could not have done worse, and might have done better, if the Central Powers had triumphed in World War One. The suspicion that I had really meant that when in some articles in the 1970s I had blamed both sides equally for the recklessness in 1914 leading into the Great War, produced a neocon hostility that has continued to grow.
Academics at Catholic University of America and their neocon confreres elsewhere, who had openly resented what they perceived as my insufficiently Germanophobic outlook, went after me in the late eighties. They browbeat the institution’s administration into turning down an appointment recommended on my behalf by the politics department. The issue at the time was not neoconservative anger over my views on Israel (which were not even known) but my criticism of German refugee historians who had read the Holocaust into the entire course of German history.
Allow me to explain what I think Taki and certainly I mean about World War One. Unlike Francis Fukuyama, we do not celebrate the war and its outcome as the turning point in the development of a global democratic society. I for one despise Fukuyama’s managerial imperialism, dressed up as free government, and believe it has nothing to do with the bourgeois liberal society that Fukuyama, his pals, and their historical icon, Woodrow Wilson, have helped to bury.
I also agree with English historian Niall Ferguson that the English, and particularly the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, did more to bring on the war than one is generally taught in the Anglo-American world. Churchill and other English military-political leaders in 1914 were long itching for a showdown with their German rival and were deploying the British fleet against Germany quite belligerently weeks before the war broke out.
Moreover, the English were in a position to stay out of the struggle without damaging their financial and naval power; while given its resources, wealth, and population, the United States would have emerged by the end of a European war as the strongest commercial and industrial nation, no matter which side won. The Anglo-American world would not have suffered by sitting out a continental war in 1914; and an Austro-German victory would have been something far less disastrous, contrary to what neocons and other Teutonophobes insist, than would have been a Nazi conquest of Europe in 1940. Needless to say, the second would not have been possible without the Allied victory and Allied peace achieved in 1918-19.
Taki is correct about the merits of the Austro-German world in 1914, which was highly civilized, politically far less centralized than the current version of "democracy," and in the case of the Austrian part of the Habsburg Empire, a model of bourgeois liberal economic policies. During the struggle, the German and Austrian empires allowed far more open criticism of the war than Wilson’s new democratic order. Those who protested the war in Germany sat unmolested in the Reichstag; in France and the US they were jailed and often the targets of government-incited violence.
No one is denying that there was a militaristic legacy in the German Empire and that the military, owing to the collapse of civilian government, had assumed too much control of the German state by 1916. On the other hand, it is not Wilhelmine Germany but the Third Reich that prefigured the global imperialist rhetoric that fills the editorial pages of the Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal, and other supposed advocates of American constitutional government. Not even Kaiser Wilhelm, in his most self-indulgent fantasies about "Germany’s place in the sun," sounded quite as whacked-out as the "new American nationalists" who have now captured the American Right. One could only imagine how American global democrats would react if their megalomania and self-righteousness were expressed by someone in a Prussian uniform.
What is being argued is not that an Austro-German victory in 1914 would have been the most desirable historical course. Rather, it would have been preferable to what did happen in 1918, the destruction of the imperial governments of Germany and Austria, a vindictive Allied peace, and the subsequent unleashing of totalitarian governments in Europe. This is not even to speak of the parlous state of civil liberties and the eruption of managerial tyranny in Wilsonian America, a condition thoroughly described by Murray Rothbard, Arthur Ekirch, Ralph Raico, and Robert Higgs.
In comparison to these conditions produced by a prolonged, costly war in which Europe tore itself apart and a peace that was simply a prelude to new war, a relatively early German victory in a continental war, as Bertrand Russell in a moment of geopolitical lucidity grasped, would have been a blessing.
A postwar policy that neocons are always recommending, which is that the US should have stayed in Europe after the Treaty of Versailles to hold down the Germans, was both unworkable and genuinely stupid. It would have turned the American military into a permanent accessory of the European winners in 1918—and committed to maintaining a Carthaginian peace settlement by force that most Americans by the twenties had no desire to uphold.
It is hard to see how the US, by entangling itself in military alliances directed at the continued subjugation of the Central Powers, would have been contributing to peace anywhere. What President Coolidge and Secretary Dawes did, while not the best policy for a total non-interventionist, had much to be said for it, namely helping to finance the recovery of Europe, while enjoying a favorable balance of trade, by lending money to the winning and losing sides both.
If the Depression had not struck in 1929, European recovery would have continued; and while the Germans would have pursued revision of the treaty by means short of war, as they had been doing in the twenties, the Nazis would not have taken power. Note that what is being given is not the happiest outcome that the Anglo-American world could have achieved in the postwar years. That would have been possible if the Americans and Brits had stayed out of the continental war that broke out in 1914.
France is, and has always been known as, a highly anti-Semitic society, as witness the willing co-operation with the SS in rounding up Jews during the occupation. The Dreyfuss Affair was still within living memory during WW I. On the other side of the continent, Russia has given us the very word pogrom. During the Russian Civil War, Ferguson reports that around 150,000 Jews are reported to have been murdered by both the Whites and the Reds.
Arrayed against these people, there are the Germans and Austro-Hungarians. It is universally acknowledged that Imperial Germany was the most philo-Semitic nation in Europe. And this is borne out by Jewish contributions to the Imperial war effort. It has been estimated that as many as 20,000 Jews found themselves in Kaiser Wilhelm's army, many as officers. Austria-Hungary was not far behind, either. Kaiser Franz-Josef arranged to have prayer shawls made at imperial expense and delivered to all Jewish soldiers serving at the front.
Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest routinely blamed the Jews for Germany's defeat in the Great War. Jewish groups (including veterans' associations) routinely replied by pointing out Jewish contributions to the war effort.
How is it, then, that many, perhaps even most, Jews do not appear to realise who were the Good Guys and who were the Bad Guys in the Great War -- at least judging from their comparative treatment of their Jewish populations?
And, I might add by way of post-script, the Arab states that currently menace Israel's existence are creatures of post-war French and English nation-building. The Turks (who had owned the land previously) bore no animosity towards Jews, and Turkey is currently Israel's only ally in the region. The Turks, of course, had been allies of Germany in the Great War.
The leverage of modern technology allows a small group of devoted maniacs to enslave, torture, and kill a much larger number of people than previously possible. I do not believe that the Germans were, as Goldhagen claims, Hitler's Willing Executioners, nor do I beleive that they are intrinsically anti-Semitic.
The people who were directly responsible for the Einsatzgruppen and Vernichtungslager were all volunteers, and constituted a small fraction of the SS, and (obviously) an even smaller fraction of the population at large. It is generally argued that the German people colluded with the Nazi administration in persecuting, rounding up, and ultimately exterminating the Jews. To an extent, this is true, but whether we have the moral right to say that they were "willing executioners" flies in the face of current American experience.
Take two examples: war of aggression and genocide.
In 1939, Germany attacked Poland, ostensibly as an act of retribution for Polish outrages against ethnic Germans and a (fictitious) incursion of Polish armed forces across the German border. The German people are counted guilty of this. Fast forward to the Clinton administration. The U.S. launched a war against Serbia, complete with the bombing of Belgrad, ostensibly because the Milosevic government was guilty of ongoing genocide against Albanian Kosovars. There were no uprisings among the Yankee citizenry. No attempt to remove or assassinate the culprits in Washington. To even suggest something like this would have caused you to be kicked off this forum, and would have earned you a visit from our own Secret State Police (trans.= GEheimes STAats POlizei). So are we "Clinton's Willing Executioners"? In fact, most Americans - when they take time off from their ballgames and Seinfeld reruns -- still appear to believe that Serbia was guilty of genocide.
By any stretch of the imagination, abortion counts as genocide. So far the number I have seen quoted is around 40,000,000. Hitler's count is (according to Prof. Rummel) at 11,000,000. The critics of German inactivity demand that the citizenry should have, retroactively, done something to impede the Final Solution, such as hide Jews, obstruct the deportation process, amd so forth. Fine. Then where are the Americans who will obstruct the machinery of death operating in virtually every American city and town under the guise of "choice"? Either in prison or on the lam. Because, you see, it is gegen das Gesetz to obstruct the abortion process. I once participated in a thread here dealing with the gent (Kopp ?) who allegedly terminated an abortionist (Dr. Slepian) with extreme prejudice. I almost got banned myself for suggesting that the Kopp's logic was impeccable: despite the fact that critics of German inactivity are all in favour of killing the guards and executioners of Auschwitz, killing an abortionist is very, very bad, because it is gegen das Gesetz.
But I do not mean to belittle the inactivity of Americans in the face of agression and genocide, so much as point out that the key to understanding Germany inactivity in the face of Nazi atrocities is not to be found in some deep systemic evil in the German personality. It is a function of living in a traditionally well-ordered, legalistic society, that is temporarily taken over by evil people. Once we shake the "it can't happen here" pre-conception, it is easier to understand, by analogy, how things work in other countries.
When the law has always (at least, within living memory) represented fairness and justice, a law-abiding people cannot easily adjust to the government's transformation into a tyranny. This also helps explain German Jewish reaction to Nazism. The Jews that Hitler comdemns in Mein Kampf were unassimilated and, most likely, from the East. When he wrote of their "foreignness", highly assimilated German Jews would probably have agreed, believing that "he can't possibly be referring to us." Absence of Jewish solidarity can even be seen in the U.S. at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the obvious class distinction between the well-off German Jews and the Russian "rag and bone merchants." This may help explain why the former tended towards capitalism and the latter towards communism. The same dynamic existed in Germany; some of Hitler's earlier contributors and supporters were Jewish businessmen.
And the German military reflected German society. I have recently seen reference to a book: Hitler's Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military by Bryan Mark Rigg, University Press of Kansas 2001. To extract from a review,
Contrary to conventional views, Rigg reveals that a startlingly large number of German military men were classified by the Nazis as Jews or "partial-Jews" (Mischlinge), in the wake of racial laws first enacted in the mid-1930s. Rigg demonstrates that the actual number was much higher than previously thought--perhaps as many as 150,000 men, including decorated veterans and high-ranking officers, even generals and admirals.This is high on my list of reading priorities because, as a student of the German military, I find the topic of absolutely vital interest, since I am still trying to figure out both the how and why of the Holocaust.
But, back to your question . . . It is undeniable that there was anti-Semitism during the Imperial period in both Germany and Austria-Hungary. Even such highly placed people as Kaiser Wilhelm's court chaplain and the mayor of Vienna were outspoken anti-Semites.
But they were considered rather fringe, the same way Dr. Pierce and the skinheads are in the U.S. Once civil order broke down in Germany, fringe elements of every variety were unleashed on a society that had been the most law-abiding in the world. One of those fringe elements was the Nazi Party whose brand of socialism retained just enough traditionalist window dressing to enlist the support of it natural enemies, the "Old Right" and the capitalists.
When Germany finally went to war, there were actually TWO wars being fought. One was for the fatherland and one was for racial supremacy. The 150,000 Jews were enlisted in the former, as was the overwhelming majority of the Wehrmacht, and -- I suspect -- the majority (although this is more controversial) of the Waffen-SS as well.
Unfortunately for all concerned, this war was ancillary to the "real" war to accomplish the racial agenda of the Nazi "inner circle." Usually, this other war was fought in the shadows, but it always trumped the war being waged by the Wehrmacht, even to the extent that precious assets were diverted from the "real" war effort to the extermination effort. Hitler's treatment of the captured Russians and of the civilian population in the East is the foremost example of this. The real possibility of triumph over Stalinism was sacrificed on the altar of Hitler's racial ideology. The realistation of this fact is what pushed some of the higher officers into the 20th July plot.
Germany apparently did have a consensus that viewed jews as humans deserving of legal protection and the rights of citizenship, prior to Hitler's election. These rights got reduced through the 30's, and everyone could see that. Finally the deportations to the "work camps", and out of sight, out of mind.
I can't imagine that very many imagined the deportees would arrive at death camps. The jews would fight to the death, the other Germans wouldn't stand for it, and it would turn the opinion tide against Germany in Britain and America.
But everyone, especially Germans, could see that Germany had at least the enslaved the jews in the camps. Quite a switch, from citizen to slave.
So I wonder what caused the switch. I've read a number reasons: (1) Germans blamed the "International Finance Jew" for manipulating the disastrous end of WW1. How exactly I don't recall. (2) The jews got blamed for communism, a real threat in post- Versailles Germany. (3) Germans blamed jews for a "decadence" in German culture, part of the reason for the failure of will to win WW1. (4) Related to #1, Germans blamed jews for the inflation of the 20's. (5) Also related to #1, Germans viewed jews as a foreign nation, indeed an enemy foreign nation in their midst. They saw deportation of the enemy as a valid wartime measure.
I wonder how you rank these reasons for the change.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.