COMMENSAL ISSUE 89


The Newsletter of the Philosophical Discussion Group
Of British Mensa

Number 89 : November 1997

ARTICLES
1st October 1997 : Rick Street

ADDENDUM ON WAR AND EMPIRE

After recently watching part of The Nazis - A Warning From History, I came to perceive Nazi Germany in a whole new light which fits in very nicely with my opening remarks about morality as a social construct and the problems of identifying the boundaries of a society. Allow me to elaborate ...

In this modern world of international communications, package holidays, United Nations Peace Keeping Forces and space travel, people generally consider the idea of one country trying to conquer the world to be utterly abhorrent and cite Hitler as the very personification of evil. However from a historical point of view this is extremely hypocritical. The British spent 300 years building an empire which we still possessed much of, at the time when Germany began to follow suit. Likewise the French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish... Even the Jews, who were so victimised by the Nazis, openly admit to having conquered the land of Canaan and renamed it Israel. The point is that perceiving the whole human race as one society is a very new idea and one which has only happened because of recent technological advances. Nazi Germany was simply the last nation to attempt to do exactly what every other nation had done previously.

So why is our judgement of Nazi Germany so harsh? I think the key is in the technological developments of the twentieth century. Once upon a time wars were fought by soldiers and soldiers wanted to fight. But now when a nation goes to war it does so as a whole. Guns need ammunition, tanks and planes need fuel and spare parts, coded radio communications need to be decoded, and all these support components of the modern war machine are valid military targets. And now the weapons exist to annihilate those targets utterly. All of a sudden war has become dangerous. At the start of the First World War this was not fully appreciated by anyone. The idea of a German Empire was born of an age old tradition that had worked fine for thousands of years. It is only with hindsight and obliviousness to historical context that this idea now seems so utterly abhorrent. Technology made war a bad thing and from 1914 to 1945 Germany proved it to us all.

Rick Street


Rick: You make some interesting points, but I’m not sure all of it’s historically accurate. The real problem with the Nazis was that their "philosophy" was consciously archaic - for instance, looking back to the Teutonic Knights for inspiration. The enigma was how could such barbarism have arisen in one of the most cultured countries in Europe, rather than say in Russia or China which had never known democracy. Professional armies playing war games hasn’t always been the case. OK, the Romans were good at it, but they were defeated by population movements - populations at war - the Huns putting pressure on the Goths putting pressure on the Vandals (or something like that !). I think war has mostly been dangerous to the losers - what with all the rape and pillage, whole populations annihilated or sold into slavery. The Nazis weren’t just the last Europeans to try this on, they did so centuries after the rules had changed (at least in Europe for Europeans). As such, Goebels’ "Total War" speech signalled the final descent into barbarism, however stirring and galvanising it might have been. Technology merely made things worse in that it was possible for a gang of lunatics to cause more damage to more people than hitherto. Our objection isn’t so much against the German army (the Wehrmacht, that is, rather than the Waffen SS). There’s a degree of respect accorded the Rommels & U-boat commanders, for the skill with which Blitzkrieg was conducted as against the mindless trench warfare of WW1; even for the stoicism of the armies bogged down in the Russian mud and ice. The outrage is against the Nazis’ oppression & liquidation of peaceful and unarmed people.

Theo