Wars we know
I’ve decided to read up on the World Wars recently. I don’t know much about World War I & II aside from what I’ve seen on The History Channel and some books I read in elementary school. I’ve read The Pity Of War: Explaining World War I and The First World War, and am almost finished with A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II. I’m struck by the fact though I’ve learned many details of interest about World War I, almost everything I’ve read about World War II so far in A World at Arms (which is ~1,000 pages) is totally unsurprising. To me that emphasizes how much World War II still looms in our popular culture, while the Great War is an ignored prologue. Some of this is surely time, there are fewer than 10 World War I veterans alive today. But another factor is that you couldn’t invent evil on the scale of the German regime plausibly. The banal barbarity of the Second Reich pales in comparison. If one could find someone totally unfamiliar with World War II and lay out the course of events and the nature of the insane dictators (Hitler and Stalin), I suspect their initial response would be that it was implausible science fiction or alternative history, and you need to go to a writer’s workshop to brush up on the craft. In contrast the First World War I exhibited a human-scaled level of folly and hubris.
Labels: History
There are some who claim that the Holocaust narratives seem too much the stuff of myth to be real (sort of like Koenraad Elst on Jesus). Crowell’s “Gas Chambers of Sherlock Holmes” (which I’m supposed to be checking for errors, but without a deadline and with other things to do, that could be a while) is an example. Precisely because I don’t think there was anything uniquely evil about it, I find it more plausible. Didn’t we already have various “Scourges of God” in the past, and the atrocities the War Nerd covers in the modern era? I don’t need to put any great confidence on one specific mechanism of death (I find it odd that so many revisionists are obsessed with stuff like Zyklon B), but mass murder is a common occurrence.
UPDATE: Since the comments are closed here I created a post at my own blog where those who wish may continue the jabber.
tggp, i’m not just talking about the holocaust really. the whole package of the range of systematic atrocities & intents, combined with decisions aimed to realize these at the cost of overall military effectiveness. efficacy serving evil, instead of evil serving efficacy, is the stuff of bad fantasy literature.
“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”
- Tom Clancy
I know this is off topic razib, but how deeply do you plan to delve into the history of the World Wars, and how are you going to decide which books seem to be worth reading, as you are not very familiar with them? I’m just a kid and have been wondering how people like you read to educate yourselves…
and how are you going to decide which books seem to be worth reading, as you are not very familiar with them?
friend recs + reviews. i generally tend to avoid works which are too obviously popular (i like foot/endnotes), and will avoid a book if i catch too many errors in a casual skim. i don’t plan on reading much about world war ii since i don’t feel there’s much marginal return on more unless there’s a specific interest i have. might read more on world war i since i feel there’s a lot new i might run into if i dig deeper. history books that are popular are world war ii, civil war, cultural histories of the 1960s, etc., but i’m pretty sure people aren’t gaining new insights because these epochs are well integrated into the cultural background. OTOH, reading a book on the revolutions of 1848 in europe tends to illuminate a lot more of the “dark network” of contingent historical facts.
@Don McArthur, said…
“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”
- Tom ClancyI think it is a big disservice to perpetuate that most the things the Nazis did didn’t make sense.
And it’s not to justify what they did. But it makes sense in the same way that it makes sense that a mugger might murder his victim to make it so the victim can’t tell anyone about it. (I.e., it’s still immoral, but it does make sense.)
For the problem with trivializing their motives is to make it more difficult, if not impossible, to learn from that history which could make it more likely that such events could happen again. (After all, if you don’t understand it the what was really going on how will you be able to recognize it if it happens again?)
But it makes sense in the same way that it makes sense that a mugger might murder his victim to make it so the victim can’t tell anyone about it. (I.e., it’s still immoral, but it does make sense.)
if someone sees the murder then you’re on the hook for murder instead of robbery. so it doesn’t *necessarily* make rational sense. so in the case of the germans vs. the russians, in world war i the russian army collapsed. in world war ii mass executions & starvations by the germans of prisoners of war, and guaranteed liquidation of officers, meant of course that the red army had no option but victory.
similarly, the assyrians and the persians both had empires based on military force. but in hindsight one could make that the more thorough organized terror and brutality which characterized the assyrian order made their polity more brittle to an exogenous shock. not only did the persian empire last longer, but it managed to survive conquest and reemerge a second time in the form of the parthians & sassanids.
in the eastern front the germans in world war ii lacked the full portfolio of choices available to expanding powers, in particular co-option and assimilation as the “carrot” to the “stick” of extermination. extermination wasn’t the stick, it was the whole point of the game. a modus vivendi such as brest-litovsk was impossible because of the ends aimed for (evident in the rejection of truces which the soviets offered), which naturally reduced the likelihood of success when you look at the topline population & raw material data which would be relevant to a war of attrition/extermination. killing tens of millions of slavs in a war of extermination *or* a german empire to the urals might be possible, but the combination of the two is probably not likely.
Funny enough, I just finished Benson Bobrick’s East of the Sun, in which I found several errors on casual reading and enjoyed anyway.
I thought the Germans actually DID co-opt many slavs, particularly prisoners of war, into serving with them against Russia. My impression was that while they wanted to dramatically reduce the Slav population (which in large part would happen after victory) they would still exist as a sort of slave-class. Jews and Bolsheviks were a direct threat that had to be exterminated before then.
I didn’t know about the rejected Soviet truces. Stalin did seem to expect/desire peace with Germany before the invasion, so it would make sense those were offered.
Charles Iliya Krempeaux,
If I were to ‘really make sense’ of the Holocaust, Stalin’s murder, Pol Pot, sub-Saharan African genocides, etc., I would devote my life to convincing the h.spaiens to kill itself, root and branch.
Alas, I am left with make believe.
slag,
In medical bio, where you mostly read papers not books, I slowly got oriented via attention to cites and bibliographies. You start to see the same names and realize who is on whose “side” in various controversies, who influenced whom, who is respected even by “opponents”, and who impeccably argues with non-strawmen and thus deserves your time – things just sort of gel. Eventually, within subfields of particular interest, I would often come to a numbered footnote and pretty much know what paper was being cited without even looking down.
I desire more history myself, and obviously I want to think for myself and all, not just follow Razib or anyone else. But I doubt it would be terribly distortive to start off with 20 or 30 books recommended by Razib and TGGP or whatever. If you are a fiercely independent thinker, and always spend time studying those who oppose whatever you instinctively lean towards, and always home in on the most primary sources and check evidence – then you will pretty likely wind up “in the right place” no matter where you start out. If it’s anything like medical bio, anyway.
I have this undergrad-ish history of pre-modern Europe on its way in the mail – got it for a cent:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0618102124/ref=ox_ya_oh_product
From a course I took, I have the modern history volume by the same authors, and I plan to re-read that as well. It was quite noticably readable. It too is cheap, at least for old editions. Are they the best books? I have no clue, but it doesn’t matter hugely at this point. They are so readable I can easily read them two or three times each – then I will at least have a permanent grasp on the basic order stuff happened in.
Farewell to Alms also seems quite good. Seems to me quite important to understand that kind of thing. After all, the most important basics of power and conflict flow from economic facts.
For WWII I strongly recommend Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and Rubinstein’s The Myth of Rescue.
I thought the Germans actually DID co-opt many slavs, particularly prisoners of war, into serving with them against Russia.
later in the war when they got desperate. initial suggestions to do this thoroughly were rejected. to some extent detailed knowledge isn’t necessary; what sort of regime would actually motivate people to fight on behalf of stalin???
Farewell to Alms also seems quite good.
yeah, it is the theoretical/broad brush frame necessary to make sense of details.
If I were to ‘really make sense’ of the Holocaust, Stalin’s murder, Pol Pot, sub-Saharan African genocides, etc., I would devote my life to convincing the h.spaiens to kill itself, root and branch.
again, to reiterate, i don’t think what i think re: the german regime because of the genocides. alas, that’s not uncommon. rather, i’m taking about the total worldview and actions due to that worldview which mitigated against the sort of post-war modus vivendi which was imaginable after the first world war. to some extent i think the aims, reasons, etc. behind world war i were dumb (we can make that judgement after witnessing the shambles it left europe). the total worldview of the german regime in 1940 just seems kind of out of this world, in particular what they expected the *more numerous* slavs would be willing to tolerate. as noted before on this weblog, it is pretty evident that the german ‘drive to the east’ which resulted in the expansion of the german language to prussia and beyond involved a lot of assimilation of the native slavic stock.
Razib, I have the same reaction reading about Nazi Germany. If you haven’t read William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Thrid Reich, I recommend that, too. He has a chapter called, “The New Order”, that not only discusses the Holocaust, but also talks about what the Nazis were planning to do after they won the war. Basically, they planned to enslave and sterilize the rest of humanity. It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how bad one’s opinion of the Nazis is, they were actually worse.
I had heard that when the Germans were starting to crack down on the Jews, most Jewish leaders said things like, “We contribute so much to the economy of Germany, the Nazis would have to be complete fools to kill us. It would greatly weaken the country.” I guess they were right.
chemdue, i agree in the generality with your response. the issue is one of numbers though for me; slavs outnumbered germans, and they had a national identities. the project of germans being herrenvolk over the slavs had a historical precedent, but it was done in a very different way, as evidenced by the slavic ancestry of many prussians. the persecution of jews had a historical precedent, but it occurred via the assimilation of the german jewish upper and upper middle classes as occurred in the 19th century. the german regime had a totally different model in mind, which simply didn’t engage the reality that in a war of attrition they were going to be outgunned, and a war of attrition is what they were going to have on their hands if they wanted to exterminate the slavs in the interests of lebensraum.
yeah, i plan on rereading some of the books about germany during this period at some point.
The trouble, razib, is that you were born with a hardball bat and you’re using it to play softball. Of course, if you read the standard histories of WWII, you’re not going to learn anything surprising! Unless you’re ignorant or stupid, which you’re not.
If you want surprising, you need to go off road. In my experience a good rule of thumb is: the older the work, the more likely it is to surprise you. Old secondary sources are more interesting than current secondary sources. Primary sources are (far) more interesting than either.
Of course, you can’t trust any of them. But can you trust your standard histories? Except in a few unusual cases (eg, Pearl Harbor crypto intercepts), all legitimate differences are of interpretation, not fact. As usual in history. If all you’ve seen is the standard interpretation, it may not be easy to understand how anyone could disagree.
Here are some authors I’ve found helpful in coming to my own conclusions on the era:
Generals’ memoirs: Wedemeyer (US); Slim (Britain); Manstein, Kesselring (Germany).
Diaries: Victor Klemperer (Germany) – see also his Language of the Third Reich; Harold Nicolson (Britain); Francis Neilson (Britain/US – very hard to find).
Nazism: Ernst von Salomon, Ernst Juenger (German nationalists, not Nazis); Otto Skorzeny, Leon Degrelle (good token Nazis).
Stalinism: Vasily Grossman (Life and Fate, semiautobiographical novel).
Democratism: Walter Lippmann (US Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, 1943; Carlton Hayes (Wartime Mission to Spain, 1945).
Historians (old, revisionist): Charles Tansill, Charles Beard, Frederic Sanborn.
Historians (new, revisionist): Thomas Mahl, Alfred de Zayas, George Victor.
@Razib, you said…
________________________ ______________
if someone sees the murder then you’re on the hook for murder instead of robbery. so it doesn’t *necessarily* make rational sense.
Perhaps I did a poor job of expressing what I was trying to express, but by “make sense” I didn’t mean rational[1]. I just meant you could understand their reasoning, without necessarily justifying it or necessarily sharing their assumptions, and without (necessarily) expecting an optimal choice.
Based on reading your blog for a while, I believe you also believe that people, in general, aren’t rational.
However, even despite this I think there is some “method to their madness” (even if it is not optimal).
And given this, I think there is value in trying to understand the “Nazi reasoning”, even if you don’t agree with it, and not just trivialize it. (Not saying you were doing that Razib. But that was part of what my original comment was about.)
so in the case of the germans vs. the russians, in world war i the russian army collapsed. in world war ii mass executions & starvations by the germans of prisoners of war, and guaranteed liquidation of officers, meant of course that the red army had no option but victory.
similarly, the assyrians and the persians both had empires based on military force. but in hindsight one could make that the more thorough organized terror and brutality which characterized the assyrian order made their polity more brittle to an exogenous shock. not only did the persian empire last longer, but it managed to survive conquest and reemerge a second time in the form of the parthians & sassanids.
in the eastern front the germans in world war ii lacked the full portfolio of choices available to expanding powers, in particular co-option and assimilation as the “carrot” to the “stick” of extermination. extermination wasn’t the stick, it was the whole point of the game. a modus vivendi such as brest-litovsk was impossible because of the ends aimed for (evident in the rejection of truces which the soviets offered), which naturally reduced the likelihood of success when you look at the topline population & raw material data which would be relevant to a war of attrition/extermination. killing tens of millions of slavs in a war of extermination *or* a german empire to the urals might be possible, but the combination of the two is probably not likely.
I’d agree that given the environment the Nazis were in, that there probably wasn’t an optimal solution, given their two goals.[2]
____________
[1] Because I’ve found that different people seem to mean something different by the word “rational” than others, I’ll point out that I am assuming you mean “rational” in the sense of an objectively most optimal decision. (And thus my comments reflect this assumption.)
[2] I get the impression you’re probably a better judge of this than me, given you seem to have a more in-depth understanding of that history than me.
charles, yeah, i agree with what you’re saying. by analogy, transnational islamic radicals have batshit premises (in fact, their premises are based on false assumptions about the past), but some of their bizarre behavior is intelligible through those premises.
If you haven’t read William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Thrid Reich, I recommend that, too. He has a chapter called, “The New Order”, that not only discusses the Holocaust, but also talks about what the Nazis were planning to do after they won the war. Basically, they planned to enslave and sterilize the rest of humanity. It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how bad one’s opinion of the Nazis is, they were actually worse.
Shirer is a better writer than most American/British journalists of the period, but still extremely untrustworthy. I would avoid this sort of material until you have acquired a very strong independent understanding of the period.
Actual evidence of Nazi plans for world domination, as opposed to domination of Central and Eastern Europe, is almost nonexistent. Hitler’s geopolitical strategy was to become a European land-power equivalent of the British Empire, which he admired and adored for obvious reasons. As for America, he didn’t give a fsck about it. (If you want to meet the real Hitler, read his Table Talk – uncensored and not intended for publication.)
Of course, once the whole world went to war with Nazi Germany, it probably was a question of whether America and Russia or Germany and Japan would rule the world – or, at least, Eurasia and Africa. (Fascination with the Nazi menace to South America is very typical of America propaganda of the period.)
But it was Britain and France who chose war with Germany, not vice versa; and even this is best attributed to Roosevelt’s encouragement behind the scenes. As it was the British establishment came very close to accepting Hitler’s project, which would have stripped Britain of the Continental supervision it had enjoyed since 1815 – but left it with, um, that Empire thing. Which they considered rather valuable at the time.
I have not read Shirer in ages and I forget what “evidence” he cites, but I imagine it’s either a British Security Coordination forgery or some stray remark by a nut like Rosenberg or Streicher. (Who even Hitler considered nuts.)
extermination wasn’t the stick, it was the whole point of the game.
No – stealing land was the whole point of the game. What Hitler wanted was a Judenrein Eastern Europe. He wouldn’t have minded the Slavs as helots, but he could have done without them as well. His concern was the interests of Germans and Germany, without regard to others – precisely as advertised.
If FDR in 1939 had told Hitler that he would take all the Jews that Germany could cram into boats, there would be a whole lot more Jews in the world today. Instead, FDR did the exact opposite. Whatever the Allied side of WWII was, it was most certainly not a war to save the Jews – either in intent, or in effect.
After America formally entered the war, all deportation alternatives (such as the Madagascar plan) became impossible. Hitler’s order for the Final Solution was probably set in December 1941; the Wannsee Conference was in January 1942. You do the math.
Do I endorse stealing land? I do not. On the other hand, considering the geographical robberies that the Allies engaged in after both world wars, it’s awfully difficult to single out Hitler on this point. And when you consider pointless mass murders of enemy civilians, “strategic bombing” will do about as well as cyanide.
There is certainly something exceptionally creepy about the Holocaust. But the moral difference between the Allies and the Axis is by no means as obvious as it appears. There is also a way in which the barbarism of the Nazis is more morally appealing, because it was expressed and celebrated openly – not coated with nauseating platitudes of peace, love and humanity.
speaking of bizarre premises, some readers might find Master Plan, The: Himmler’s Scholars and the Holocaust, which outlines SS sponsorship of the quest to discover thor’s hammer and recruit finnish wizards.
A primary source missing from my above list is Freda Utley’s High Cost of Vengeance (1946), which is online.
I consider Utley extremely reliable. She provides a good illustration of the psychotic Morgenthau Plan mentality, which was not quite as crazy as Hitler’s plans for the East – but surely in the same general department. (Note that the Morgenthau Plan probably was a product of Morgenthau’s chief aide, KGB agent Harry Dexter White – so its ruthlessness is not terribly surprising.)
There is no doubt that artificial famine was an important component of Allied policy after WWII, just as after WWI. Here is an unpublished online memoir, by an American officer, that contains a good description of the “Morgenthau boys” and their activities. It includes a good sample of how the OWI propaganda crowd, of which Shirer was a part, and which is ancestral to our own dear MSM, behaved. The scruples of Allied war journalism left Goebbels little to brag about.
A. But the moral difference between the Allies and the Axis is by no means as obvious as it appears.
B. There is also a way in which the barbarism of the Nazis is more morally appealing, because it was expressed and celebrated openly – not coated with nauseating platitudes of peace, love and humanity.
This is why I tend to avoid Moldbug, despite our considerable agreement on social science theory and other points. I basically think that A. is pretty much false, and B. is disgusting (though not original).
I don’t think that WWI and WWII should be lumped. They were events of entirely different kinds, with players of entirely different kinds. However, I also think that WWI, though less horrible than WWII, was the real turning point of history, and that WWII was a late effect, or the spasms of a system unhinged by WWI. WWI may have been inevitable, and its outcomes unforeseeable, but in retrospect you still have to ask what it was that made such civilized, rational people behave with such useless and barbarous stupidity.
In the US WWI was never popular and it was resisted to the bitter end. Most Americans supported neutrality and a considerable minority had German sympathies at some level. Anglophobia was still a major factor in American life at that time. Very severe measures had to be taken to intimidate war opponents. (“The Politics of War” by Walter Karp is fascinating, though over-the-top).
Trivia: Charles Lindbergh I (a Congressman) was an important opponent of WWI, and Charles Lindbergh II (the aviator) was an important opponent of WWII, but there was little continuity between the two. The aviator, to all evidence, was a sort of elitist mystic and totally hated his father’s populist/progressive politics. The Congressman hated bankers, and the aviator married the daughter of a J. P. Morgan partner.
lindbergh ii was also an environmentalist later in life.
I don’t think that WWI and WWII should be lumped. They were events of entirely different kinds, with players of entirely different kinds. However, I also think that WWI, though less horrible than WWII, was the real turning point of history, and that WWII was a late effect, or the spasms of a system unhinged by WWI.
This is why I like to read John Emerson – while marred by his weakness for democratic dogma and his refusal to consider other perspectives, his intuitive historical judgment tends to be excellent.
WWI may have been inevitable, and its outcomes unforeseeable, but in retrospect you still have to ask what it was that made such civilized, rational people behave with such useless and barbarous stupidity.
There’s an obvious answer: democracy. Hitler and Stalin were unimaginable in the 19th century. What was new in the 20th? Democracy.
If you add a mysterious chemical to a fishtank and the fish start dying, it’s possible that it’s just a coincidence and the fish are dying of something else. On the other hand, it’s possible that the chemical is fish poison. Occam would certainly want you to consider the possibility.
Both Hitler and Stalin are easily seen as epiphenomena of democracy, in that their regimes (unlike that of, say, Frederick the Great) were single-party propaganda states existentially dependent on mass indoctrination. In other words, they were sovereign cults. It is rather difficult to organize a cult around sanity.
The democratic roots of Stalin are easy to see because Stalin was a progressive, just like FDR and Barack Obama. It is much harder to see the democratic roots of Hitler, because progressive democracy has scoured everything anything like Hitler from the earth – the closest thing left is Fox News, which is not a lot like Hitler. (But you’ll note that Europe has no Fox News. There is a reason for this.)
The historian, however, will note that quite a lot of proto-Nazi phenomena are visible in Wilhelmine Germany. This is consistent with the standard democratic interpretation of history, but that doesn’t make it untrue. The reason: the Kaiser’s regime was actually a democracy – not that the Kaiser was elected, but nor is our civil service or Supreme Court. The Reichstag was, and the Reichstag mattered.
As a result, the leaders of the “Second Reich” had to play to the crowd, just as Hitler did. Despite despising the spirit of democracy, they could exist only in the context of the mechanism. As in many other countries, the attempt by anti-democratic forces to play the game of politics resulted in the well-known phenomenon of jingoism. No democracy – no jingoism. Hence: no democracy, no “useless and barbarous stupidity.”
Moreover, if we ask where this phenomenon of barbarous nationalism came from in the first place, our eyes are immediately drawn to the “good” 19th-century nationalisms of Greece, Italy, Poland, Hungary, etc – most notably seen in the Revolutions of 1848. Indeed, until the rise of one-worldism, democracy without nationalism made as little sense as a cheeseburger without cheese.
The basic distinction between “good” nationalism (Garibaldi, Kossuth, etc) and “bad” nationalism (Hitler) is that “good” nationalists sought to create governments ruled according to the English spirit of democracy, whereas “bad” nationalists were just, um, nationalists. In more practical terms, “good” nationalists wound up creating British client states, whereas “bad” nationalists created states which sought to break free of Britain’s post-1815 hegemony.
Generally the only really effective way for these rebels to demonstrate genuine sovereignty was to demonstrate their military independence, ie, by invading their British-client neighbors. Thus the pattern of 1939 is seen not only in 1914, but also in 1870.
Thus, those Englishmen who wished to support democracy on the Continent were in practice – intentionally or not – extending hegemony, and not just creating an inevitable rebellious backlash, but also propagating the political tools which made that backlash so deadly. When America ceased to resist the temptation to play this game in the 20th century, the stakes increased and so did the bloodshed.
Had it not been for democratic evangelism, there would never have been an Entente or a WWI. France would not have been a British client; Russia would not have been a French and British client; Serbia would not have been a Russian client, and would not have felt free to assassinate her neighbors’ princes. Earlier, the Northern Courts, under Metternich’s inspired leadership, would have stably restored order and monarchy on the Continent, returning the Bourbons to power in Spain and recovering her American colonies.
And there would be a lot more Jews in the world. This is the bottom line on democracy: it’s been bad for the Jews. I’m aware that others have other criteria, but this is mine and I like it just fine.
Charles Lindbergh II (the aviator) was an important opponent of WWII, but there was little continuity between the two. The aviator, to all evidence, was a sort of elitist mystic and totally hated his father’s populist/progressive politics. The Congressman hated bankers, and the aviator married the daughter of a J. P. Morgan partner.
Lindbergh (the aviator), like most WWII opponents, was sui generis – the internationalists came in swarms, the isolationists were one-offs. (As was his wife – your average J.P. Morgan partner was an Anglophile to the marrow.) In other words, Lindbergh and Morrow can be understood only as individuals, not party hacks. They had no party, other than sanity.
It is a little rich to call Lindbergh, an extremely practical man, a “mystic” in the age of Henry Wallace. (Just think – if Harry Truman had turned down the VP slot in ’44, America wouldn’t have had to wait another 54 years for its first true “progressive” president.)
razib,
I’ve actually read the Pringle book. I found it, um, fluffy. Not that I’m a sexist or anything, but writers named “Heather” may just not be a good fit for Hitler Studies.
There’s certainly an interesting parallel to be drawn between the Ahnenerbe and the Boasians – say, Margaret Mead. Ie: here we have two schools of what might be called result-oriented anthropology. Both producing a mix of genuine scholarship and absurd balderdash. The progressives go out looking for the noble savage; the Nazis go out looking for the Aryan Inca.
By the standards of the 19th century, both schools seem equally sinister and mendacious. But in the 21st, only one still exists and retains political relevance. It ain’t Herman Wirth’s. So which should we worry more about?
The most interesting thing I found about WW I (and I did get this from the History Channel) was that the German Naval officers and sailors sank the German navy at the end of the war. Psychologically speaking, I find that one of the most fascinating events of the whole war.
This is why I tend to avoid Moldbug
there should be a page-down button on your computer. i use it copiously to deal with this problem ;-)
there should be a page-down button on your computer. i use it copiously to deal with this problem ;-)
Yet strangely enough, you’re capable of reading 1000-page books. At least if you already agree with them! Ah, the eternal sunshine of the open mind.
Now, if you’d already answered these points, you’d have a case. Emerson has a case – he finds my perspective morally repugnant. He’s entitled. He also doesn’t call himself “David Hume.” Did Hume have a page-down button?
To me that emphasizes how much World War II still looms in our popular culture, while the Great War is an ignored prologue.
Also, this reflects the fact that the US were much more involved in WWII than in WWI.
In France, WWI is still the the archetype of the horrors, the madness, and the general imbecillity of war, rather than WWII (the Holocaust and Nazi policies being separated from the war itself). High and local command ordering mindless charges of infantry against machine-gun fire, hundreds of thousands dying to gain just a couple hundred meters, “lunarisation” of the terrain – the encounter of mankind with industrial war had a long-lasting effect on the Western European psyche.
Also, Western Europeans in general are rather oblivious to the fact that the Soviets won much of WWII for them, essentially by massively out-dying the Germans. The horrors of the Eastern Front are rather abstract for them (us).
Also, at the risk of getting some flak, I found Wikipedia surprisingly useful and informative for WWII. In particular, I was aware of most of the details mentioned in the comments above (the Nazi plans for the East, how the Wannsee conference actually went on, the allied Morgenthau plan, etc.), basically from reading about them on Wikipedia.
Hitler was extremely cocky. He expected the West to stand aside as he conquered the East, and Russia to lay down and die as soon as it was invaded. He was wrong, but the idea was not totally crazy if you look at their past behavior.
As for his plans, I think he intended to do something in between England’s colonization of India as an elite minority and the Anglo-Saxon colonization of North America through genocide. This might just be because there simply weren’t enough Germans to plausibly colonize all of Russia, so there would be nothing to gain from exterminating them all right away.
Here’s a quote from his Table Talk that sheds some light on his plans for Russia:
The German colonist ought to live on handsome, spacious
farms. The German services will be lodged in marvellous
buildings, the governors in palaces. Beneath the shelter of the
administrative services, we shall gradually organise all that is
indispensable to the maintenance of a certain standard of
living. Around the city, to a depth of thirty to forty kilometres,
we shall have a belt of handsome villages connected by the best
roads. What exists beyond that will be another world, in which
we mean to let the Russians live as they like. It is merely
necessary that we should rule them. In the event of a revolu-
tion, we shall only have to drop a few bombs on their cities, and
the affair will be liquidated. Once a year we shall lead a troop
of Kirghizes through the capital of the Reich, in order to strike
their imaginations with the size of our monuments.
Lots of mystics were extremely practical. Look at Swedenborg, the mining engineer and crystallographer. Lindbergh had a real aversion to human actuality.
If Mencius had named the modern state as his one-size-fits-all cause of all world problems, we could talk. But WWI started as a fight between Austro-Hungary and Russia, two extraordinarily archaic and undemocratic regimes. And a system in which Hitler, Stalin, and Kaiser Wilhelm count as examples of democracy, and Boas is as sinister as Himmler, is a contorted one.
Psychologically speaking, I find that one of the most fascinating events of the whole war.
I assume you’re talking about the mass scuttling at Scappa Flow? Although it was large in scale, it didn’t seem psychologically interesting to me – the ships were going to be split up among the victors, and sinking ships to avoid this problem was not at all unusual. Some of the British had expected as much.
For a perspective on American society during WWI, I recommend John Barry’s The Great Influenza.
The book has three interwoven parts.
(i) A snapshot of the (impressive) state of American academic medicine c. 1917, centered on Johns Hopkins Hospital,
(ii) A view of wartime America, including the pro-Kaiser sympathies of many German immigrants, the Wilson Administration’s mobilization efforts, and the Red Scare, and
(iii) The geography, demographics, politics, epidemiology, and medicine of the Spanish Flu pandemic.
Razib,
For something different on WWII try “The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy” by Adam Tooze. It’s a brilliant book – one of the few books that allows you to really understand the material and economic rationale for Nazi decision making without being in any way sympathetic to the Nazis. He also makes a good case for a number of revisionist historical positions such as a) the Germans never really had a chance against the industrial might of the UK, the USSR and the US and only very good luck got them as far as they did get in 1941 b) Hitler really launched the war out of economic desperation – the Nazi economic model never worked very well in peacetime, and Germany was falling rapidly behind Britain and France c) the extent to which the Holocaust was driven by basic material considerations, i.e. the first thing to understand is that there simply was not enough food in occupied Europe for everyone (which was Germany’s fault of course – the war in 1939-40 had destroyed Polish and French agriculture), so as the Germans saw it, the “lesser” races needed to go so that Germany could have enough d) Albert Speer was actually a war criminal of the first rank, and a poor manager, not the managerial genius even many Western Historians believed. You don’t have to agree with everything Tooze says, but it will make you think
But another factor is that you couldn’t invent evil on the scale of the German regime plausibly.
Unfortunately I don’t believe this is true. It’s just technology and more importantly the fact that Hitler was trying to do it to us. Hitler’s basic plan was very simple – empty out Central and Eastern Europe of its Slavic and Jewish population and refill it with Germans. Is that really so different from the intent of what the US did to the Indians? Supposedly that’s where Hitler got the idea in the first place – reading those old Karl May novels. When the Belgians do it in the Congo or the Brazilians do it in the Amazon rain forest, we call it evil but summarily forget about it – when Hitler does the same thing to white people it becomes “implausibly evil” and discussed incessantly for the next 100 years. There’s a sense in which Hitler was really the last gasp of 19th century imperialism.
I know you’re not focusing on the Holocaust but genocides have not been unusual in history. I remember one book on WWII where the protaganist was traveling in Central Asia–Afghanistan I think, and came across the place where Tamerlane supposedly built a tower comprised of the skulls of those slain–numbering about a million. That would have made a dent in the world’s total population in those days and he didn’t seem to have any better reason for slaughtering a bunch of non-combattants than did the Nazis and Communists. The Nazis employed a more efficient technology but what is really shocking is that such things had become “history” in Europe for several centuries. That’s why some people just couldn’t believe it and why even the Nazis had to encourage themselves with allusions to the Armenian genocide by Turks in the early 20th century. Germany was the country that had recently introduced kindergarten and child psychology, not to mention a lot Jewish and Gentile scientists and progressive leaders. It had a rep for being progressive. I always thought the ultimate truth-is-stranger-than-fiction element to the WWII story was the US invitation to German scientists, ala Operation Paperclip. Some of the scientists claimed not to have had an inner-nazi, but who knows? Who cared? They wanted them scientists. I sort of wonder why? Probably because they had proved their function in war and they were themselves “WMD” to be confiscated and used. The race to outer space had not yet officially begun and Americans were on their own way to the Atom Bomb with Oppenheimer and crew. Why Uncle Sam’s urgency to sign them on? And on and on. Von Braun was still working in my neck of the woods (outside D.C., in the 270 Tech Corridor) in the 1980s. And Uncle Joe for that matter. Some scientists went to Russia. When Sputnik went up, surprise and trepidation ensued in the Pentagon. It was known there that “our Germans were better than the Russians’ Germans.” I don’t like moldbug’s repulsive opinion that honesty about hate and slaughter has its merits, but he’s right in the first and earliest sources and reports are often the best and truest. That is true in most news stories and why the spin-masters step in so quickly, so often, so that the truth becomes an enigma wrapped in a riddle, as Prouty would say.
Moldbug,
Thanks for the Freda Utley reference. I was just looking at her stuff and it is fascinating.
http://www.fredautley.com/
See link below for more recommendations, including the war diary A Woman in Berlin:
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/12/defeat-is-bitter.html
Why would anyone not read moldbug? He’s certainly interesting, has a perspective you won’t come across elsewhere, and the man can flat out write.
Also, how can you not appreciate sentences like this:
“Not that I’m a sexist or anything, but writers named “Heather” may just not be a good fit for Hitler Studies.”
Come on, that’s funny.
Vanya wrote: “… Hitler’s basic plan was very simple – empty out Central and Eastern Europe of its Slavic and Jewish population and refill it with Germans. Is that really so different from the intent of what the US did to the Indians? Supposedly that’s where Hitler got the idea in the first place – reading those old Karl May novels. When the Belgians do it in the Congo or the Brazilians do it in the Amazon rain forest, we call it evil but summarily forget about it – when Hitler does the same thing to white people it becomes “implausibly evil” and discussed incessantly for the next 100 years. There’s a sense in which Hitler was really the last gasp of 19th century imperialism.”
I agree completely.
If you read Mein Kampf it’s amazing how obvious the parallels are between Germans “settling” the east and what happened in the Americas. What makes it “singular evil” is that he wants to do it to other Europeans. Since he didn’t succeed (although central Europe is now mostly free of Jews), the victims’ narrative is accessible to subsequent generations.
To quote the War Nerd:
“I don’t live this double life, benefiting from the fact that my house is built on some other tribe’s land and then pretending to regret that. I’ll always remember having to study Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and everyone sobbing for the poor Indians, but nobody’s gonna give them the land back. I mean, one way or the f*#king other: either you give them the land back, or you admit you’re a predator and you eat meat.”
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2008/07/war-nerd-interview.html
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2009/05/conquest-david-day.html
I assume you’re talking about the mass scuttling at Scappa Flow?
bbartlog,
I am not sure, I will have to look at it again. I thought it was the Kiel mutiny. Are these the same events? I didn’t think so.
http://www.kurkuhl.de/english/november/time-line.html
interesting comments. i won’t say much since i haven’t followed all the links. i am going to be offline much of this week, so i’m closing comments on this thread since i won’t have time to moderate.