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talkpoliticsThe more that I've read about World War I, the more fascinated I've become by the pattern of approaches to the historical totalitarian states. Namely that absolutely none of them except the PRC, and debatably even there, would have shown up without World War I. I won't rehash the war itself in detail, but during that four-year span all the European states adopted war economies that controlled thought, word, deed, and the pocketbook.
These economies developed every trait of the historical totalitarian societies, including raising huge armies that went to war with their enemies in order to redraw maps to their benefit, and also including the totalitarian claims to universal aims for rather narrower, more pragmatic results.
Communism in particular came out of the ill-considered decisions of Hindenburg and Ludendorff to undermine the Tsarist Empire by giving immense sums of money to a minority of the Russian Social Revolutionary Party's left wing known as the Bolsheviks. The Germans devoted all that time and effort to create a Bolshevik revolution, got what they wanted, and wound up leaving the world with the Soviet Union that ultimately took over half of Europe in the second go-round. The emergence of Communism as a force at all owes itself directly to World War I, much moreso than in the case of fascism. But in any history or general approach to Communism it tends to be neglected that the first Communist regime in world history came about as a puppet regime to knock out one pillar of a coalition war, not from its own power.
Fascism similarly cannot be viewed outside the legacy of World War I. For four years European states would have battles where 10,000 men went in, maybe 2,000 walked out. Over and over again. People spent four years learning the fine art of killing each other with all the firepower and devastating force of scientific progress. Then when the war was over a bunch of disgruntled veterans decided that they really weren't able to leave that combat behind, and thus fascism emerged as the American Legion on crack. In all the reliance on Godwin's Law, the legacy of WWI in directly creating Fascism (including, ironically, subsidies by democracies of the Socialist Party newspaper editor Benito Mussolini to advocate for Italy's role in WWI) is neglected by everybody from Jonah "Mommy made my book" Goldberg to Naomi "Everyone is Hitler in Purgatory" Klein.
The totalitarians cannot be understood in either a historical or an abstract context without actually viewing them in the times they lived in, where they came from. It's impossible for people in the 21st Century, when large-scale wars haven't happened between Great Powers since the Korean War, to see why people would embrace either totalitarianism without remembering the four years that created both wings of the movement. To do so otherwise means that the brutality, venality, and horrors of very real and very evil movements becomes distorted for nothing more than cheap political points, whether it be by Alan Grayson, claiming that the present-day Republican Party is a genocidal movement, or whether it be by Newt Gingrich accusing the Democrats of wanting to recreate the Gulag. Or whether it's Armored Dinner Jacket denying the Holocaust or Israeli extremists using Holocaust drag to "prove" cheap points.
I for one think that the real and actual horrors of real, actual police states, and the much darker and nastier crimes done by the totalitarians are too serious to be used except in the most clear and present cases. And frankly put, it's disgusting and vulgar to trivialize the all-too-real crimes those movements committed so that one can identify one's political opponents with the forces of evil. At a certain level if your political arguments still rely on wars whose veterans are pretty much passing on into the history books and which occurred in a very different world, you've confessed to not being able to address 21st Century problems with arguments related to the 21st Century.
The 21st Century has its own issues: global climate change, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the emergence of a possible multi-polar world, and an ongoing credit crisis which has by all means no real solution at the present time. It has issues of poverty on scales that defy imagination, chronic pandemics of diseases that in some ways are trivially curable without actually being cured. It has issues of rivalries between states where military actions/expenses are increasingly white elephants that offer no solutions, only more problems. This is an era where communications and information technology means problems that were at one point distant and sometimes discovered decades after the fact are seen in real-time. It's also an era where the most powerful single empire in the world still clings in too many ways to obsolete ideas of empire and alliances and where it must change those to have meaningful effect in the world it now lives in, as opposed to perpetually seeking after chimeras of previous decades and different times.
I think that so long as the references to long-dead people on the losing side of a coalition war are made as though that is a clear and present danger now, the 21st Century's problems will continue to be less relevant than the distorted and warped view of the 1930s filtered through changes in later eras. Your thoughts?
These economies developed every trait of the historical totalitarian societies, including raising huge armies that went to war with their enemies in order to redraw maps to their benefit, and also including the totalitarian claims to universal aims for rather narrower, more pragmatic results.
Communism in particular came out of the ill-considered decisions of Hindenburg and Ludendorff to undermine the Tsarist Empire by giving immense sums of money to a minority of the Russian Social Revolutionary Party's left wing known as the Bolsheviks. The Germans devoted all that time and effort to create a Bolshevik revolution, got what they wanted, and wound up leaving the world with the Soviet Union that ultimately took over half of Europe in the second go-round. The emergence of Communism as a force at all owes itself directly to World War I, much moreso than in the case of fascism. But in any history or general approach to Communism it tends to be neglected that the first Communist regime in world history came about as a puppet regime to knock out one pillar of a coalition war, not from its own power.
Fascism similarly cannot be viewed outside the legacy of World War I. For four years European states would have battles where 10,000 men went in, maybe 2,000 walked out. Over and over again. People spent four years learning the fine art of killing each other with all the firepower and devastating force of scientific progress. Then when the war was over a bunch of disgruntled veterans decided that they really weren't able to leave that combat behind, and thus fascism emerged as the American Legion on crack. In all the reliance on Godwin's Law, the legacy of WWI in directly creating Fascism (including, ironically, subsidies by democracies of the Socialist Party newspaper editor Benito Mussolini to advocate for Italy's role in WWI) is neglected by everybody from Jonah "Mommy made my book" Goldberg to Naomi "Everyone is Hitler in Purgatory" Klein.
The totalitarians cannot be understood in either a historical or an abstract context without actually viewing them in the times they lived in, where they came from. It's impossible for people in the 21st Century, when large-scale wars haven't happened between Great Powers since the Korean War, to see why people would embrace either totalitarianism without remembering the four years that created both wings of the movement. To do so otherwise means that the brutality, venality, and horrors of very real and very evil movements becomes distorted for nothing more than cheap political points, whether it be by Alan Grayson, claiming that the present-day Republican Party is a genocidal movement, or whether it be by Newt Gingrich accusing the Democrats of wanting to recreate the Gulag. Or whether it's Armored Dinner Jacket denying the Holocaust or Israeli extremists using Holocaust drag to "prove" cheap points.
I for one think that the real and actual horrors of real, actual police states, and the much darker and nastier crimes done by the totalitarians are too serious to be used except in the most clear and present cases. And frankly put, it's disgusting and vulgar to trivialize the all-too-real crimes those movements committed so that one can identify one's political opponents with the forces of evil. At a certain level if your political arguments still rely on wars whose veterans are pretty much passing on into the history books and which occurred in a very different world, you've confessed to not being able to address 21st Century problems with arguments related to the 21st Century.
The 21st Century has its own issues: global climate change, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the emergence of a possible multi-polar world, and an ongoing credit crisis which has by all means no real solution at the present time. It has issues of poverty on scales that defy imagination, chronic pandemics of diseases that in some ways are trivially curable without actually being cured. It has issues of rivalries between states where military actions/expenses are increasingly white elephants that offer no solutions, only more problems. This is an era where communications and information technology means problems that were at one point distant and sometimes discovered decades after the fact are seen in real-time. It's also an era where the most powerful single empire in the world still clings in too many ways to obsolete ideas of empire and alliances and where it must change those to have meaningful effect in the world it now lives in, as opposed to perpetually seeking after chimeras of previous decades and different times.
I think that so long as the references to long-dead people on the losing side of a coalition war are made as though that is a clear and present danger now, the 21st Century's problems will continue to be less relevant than the distorted and warped view of the 1930s filtered through changes in later eras. Your thoughts?
