The greatest of crimes

‘How could men like these continue grinding their populations through years of pointless slaughter, and what led people to follow them?’

A question which you need to ask yourself is rather: once the war had begun, did the people oblige the politicians to continue fighting the war? Certainly there was no major curtailment of dissent within Great Britain in the Great War (Catholic Ireland, with approximately one-twelfth of the UK’s population, was repressed only after an armed rebellion- Redmond and his Nationalist Party had supported the war). Conscription was only introduced in 1916 and most British soldiers were actually volunteers right until the end of the war. British electors were free to vote in 1918 for those who had opposed the war (approximately 20 out of 40 Labour MPs, a few Asquithian or old Radical Liberals, the odd High Tory) or to stand themselves- and yet the 1918 election was a crushing victory for the most bellicose politicians in Britain, the Lloyd George-led, largely Tory coalition. The Asquithian Liberals were turned out of office not for opposing the war (they supported it strongly) but for being seen as insufficiently ready to intervene in business and introduce measures like co-ordination of industry, or conscription. The point is even clearer in an Australian context: all Australian soldiers were volunteers, without a single exception. Again, the Australians kept on fighting despite four years of awful casualties, and the clear majority of the Australian electorate backed this.

I think that we do all like to imagine that evil- and the First World War was evil in its course and in its consequences- is always largely the result of powerful men telling the rest of us what to do, lying to us and inciting our worst passions.

Certainly there was plenty of lying and incitement in the First World War. But when I read the history of Britain’s part in the First World War, it strikes me that this evil was at least as much the result of the freely-expressed will of the people. Whipped up by propaganda, hemmed in by a certain amount of censorship, yes- but that can’t account for the apparent determination of the British people to go on fighting through four unprecedentedly bloody years. Analogously, Daniel Ellsberg has always said that he thinks one of the main reasons that every US President from Truman on supported some form of war in Vietnam was that they didn’t want to be the man who ‘lost’ Vietnam- the popular backlash would have been as bad as that which met the ‘loss’ of China. We have met the enemy, and sometimes he is ourselves.

Another point is that the ‘no annexations or indemnities’ offers never came from governments themselves, but from the likes of the Vatican, second-rank Budapest politicians, Lord Lansdowne (a third or fourth rank British High Tory), the UDC, etc. All official peace offers from one side or the other involved the confiscation of land or materials or both, which wouuld have seriously weakened the other side in the likely event of a resumption of hostilities. So when we ask why no government ever offered peace on the basis of ‘no annexations or indemnities’, I’m afraid we go back to looking at the influence of popular opinion on the politicians.

Of course I agree that we should only go to war as a last resort, but you’re preaching to the converted on this site. I suggest you mail this advice to Norman Geras and the chickenhawk chorus at Harry’s Place…

It has always been relatively easy to start the machinery of war, but in this century with the industrialization & marketting involved it has become practically impossible to stop the machinery.

I’d add that at one of the European belligerents, Russia, was an autocracy very little restrained by a small, largely powerless, restricted-franchise Duma; and that another belligerent, Austria-Hungary, had a lively Hungarian Parliament and whose other provinces were ruled in manners varying from the semi-Parliamentary to the outright dictatorial. These two countries (excluding tiny Serbia, a monarchy where the war was seen as a matter of national survival) were the first to suffer military collapse.

But- noting the almost complete absence of female suffrage outside the Antipodes- Britain was a parliamentary democracy with some property qualifications on the franchise; France was a democratic republic; Italy had a middle-class franchise, a strong Parliament and a weak monarchy; Germany had a slightly weird system of imperial and national parliaments, but also had a more-or-less democratic franchise and parliamentary control of fiscal policy, plus immensely strong trade unions. Australia was pretty much the kind of democracy we recognise as such today. All these countries were dependent on huge numbers of citizen-soldiers, and on the massive transfer of labour into war-related industries. If there had been a majority, or even a large minority, in any major belligerent in favour of peace, the war could not have been continued for long.

‘the problem was just the way the conflict turned out – lots of participants at a time when war technology was gridlocked. If the war had been fought perhaps 10 years earlier or 10 years later, it may have been quicker, less bloody…’

I’ve heard this before, but I’m dubious about it: yes, the Franco-Prussian war ended quicker, as did Bismarck’s earlier attacks on the Danes and Austrians, but the French had no great industrial base in 1870 and were not able to mobilise any particular weight of weapons to oppose the Prussians. The American Civil War, 1861-65 had far more primitive technology than the First World War, but had almost exactly the same duration, and actually killed a higher proportion of the combatants’ populations. Basically, any time after 1890- with serious economic growth and capital accumulation occurring in France and Russia and a consequent reduction of Germany’s crushing military superiority- you were looking at the likelihood of any European war being long and bloody.

> the problem was just the way the
> conflict turned out – lots of
> participants at a time when war
> technology was gridlocked. If the
> war had been fought perhaps 10
> years earlier or 10 years later, it
> may have been quicker, less bloody
> and the peace fairer.

The final year of the US Civil War gave all the clues that were necessary to understand what would happen when WWI broke out, technologically speaking. The Russo-Japanese war added in heavy use of the machine gun (only introduced at the very end of the Civil War in the West) and long-range artillary. But the facts were there for knowledgable people to see. They chose not to.

Sort of like an administration I know of…

Cranky

Catholic Ireland, with approximately one-twelfth of the UK’s population, was repressed only after an armed rebellion

I don’t know about that, Dan; catholic Ireland (not to mention protestant Ireland) was pretty well repressed in those days even before armed rebellion.

Mind you, the aul Gaels might have been a swingin’ lot (Brehon law allowed divorce, after all, so clearly they were all wife-swapping sodomites). But that’s going pretty far back.

Reading literary accounts of the prewar period, you have to be struck by the number of talented and learned people from all nations who welcomed war for some reason they weren’t able to explain. Bertrand Russell went around asking people for reasons and then opposed the war because he couldn’t find any. Quite an eccentric!

I have had bitter disputes with an old friend (an American, now an expatriate) who frames his opposition to the American militarism in terms of the superiority of European culture to American. WWI and WWII are my counterarguments; the US is unlikely to do anything worse than that.

I think that WWI especially points to there being something missing or defective in high bourgeois culture. Theories abound as to what that might have been, and I have my own, but (unless it is decided that war is just a fated, inescapable universal, like gravity, metabolism and air) but it’s hard to refrain from concluding that something was terribly wrong.

following up on zizka’s comment, it’s certainly odd to read Proust and have the Great War materialize out of this nebulous haze of military posturing that is half-ignored by society at large. ditto the end of The Magic Mountain. wait, does he get blown up, or what?

‘This would be the French who went to war with a considerably superior rifle, and the world’s first operational machine gun, right?’

This would be the French who went to war with 400,000 troops as opposed to 1.2million Prussians plus allies, right. This would be the French that would be incapable of supplying their troops and moving them to enemy territory as quickly as the Prussians, despite fighting on home territory and having only one third as many men to supply, right. It would be the French who went to war with the world’s first operational machine gun that was deployed so badly that it had no effect on the outcome of any battle, right. It would be the French whose artillery ‘was equipped with somewhat less modern muzzle-loading bronze 4-pounder cannons little changed from Napoleonic times’ as Wikipedia puts it, whilst the Prussians fired ‘6-pounder breech-loading cannons’ with hugely superior explosive charges and 4,500 metre range, right. It would be the French who failed to make effective use of railway and telegraph networks and the Germans who incorporated these and other forms of modern capital good into their war planning, right.

Sir Michael Howard’s book on the Franco-Prussian war is still the best place to start, right. And let’s face it, if you’re going to pronounce on something, it’s as well to have done a little reading first, right.

> It’s not that there’s something
> intrinsically superior about Europe
> and Europeans, rather it’s that
> having already made these bloody
> stupid mistakes we are much less
> likely to do so again.

If so, it took a long time to learn that lesson – Napolionic Wars through WWII. Plus the unknown efficacy of MAD and the Force de Frappe.

That doesn’t give me a lot of comfort, truthfully.

Cranky

As it happens, I have read Michael Howard’s book. What I took from it was that the French army’s main weakness wasn’t so much technological, but social. An army well capable of fighting the small wars of peace on the cheap disintegrating under the pressure of full-scale mobilisation; a hideously flawed system of conscription; the absence of any proper general staff; and a penny-pinching government.

On the pandemic, I think there are direct links between the demobilization and transport of troops at war’s end — with the attendant crowding and poor sanitation — and the spread of the virus. But that’s a side note to this interesting comment thread.

I think there’s something to the argument about the European nations knowing a bit about the destruction of war that is missing in US policy thinking. It came up during the early stages of the current war that you only had to walk down the streets of Berlin or Dresden or Paris to see the aftermath of urban warfare and that understanding, in the bones of the people, informed their opinions on the war in Iraq.

Yes, good point; although being able to revamp artillery for an army over a million strong in *four years* is the kind of policy available only to a rich country with a helluva lot of engineering capacity.

Matt McGrattan — I don’t disagree. My disagreement with my friend isn’t about the American imperial plan, it’s just his interpretation of it in anti-American cultural terms — he reads his rejection of the American war policy back into XIXc American literature, which he also rejects. When people talk about anti-Americanism in Europe, they may mean him.

Bush’s reelection has actually made me reconsider the argument. You end up asking if the cheerful activism, openmindedness, and optimism of Emerson, Whitman, or William James might have led to this. (Melville is safe, though).

Here’s my tuppence-worth:

The reason that we have so much difficulty in understanding the 1914 mindset is that WW1 did actually change the way we think about war in most of Europe – and in most of the US as well. Now we think of war as a price to be paid. War is fought for an end in view – whatever the end (we must retain French Indochina! we must defeat Communism in Greece! we must retake the Falklands!) it is generally judged to be worth the price in terms of war. Of course, you can have arguments about whether it was or not – but we all agree that this is the right sort of argument to be having. Maybe I don’t think that, say, the Falklands were worth 253 British lives, and you do; or you think that retaking the Falklands was a worthy aim, but one that could have been achieved diplomatically – the point is that, almost everywhere, we think that war is a costly means to an end.

I don’t think most people thought like that in 1914 Europe. For them, war was a means to an end – we must defend Belgian neutrality! – but it was also an end in itself, a way of renewing national spirit. In a sense, the worse the war got, the better, because it allowed the nation to demonstrate its moral superiority by enduring. That, I would argue, is why the war continued to attract public support for so long. And it’s this attitude, which is, fortunately, completely alien to most of us, that makes WW1 so difficult to understand.

Och, Dan, relax now. My comment meant to do nothing more than play on your word ‘repressed’.

Though if it makes you feel better, I have no tolerance for MOPEry myself, and less than none for republicanism. (American readers, please note the small ‘r’. Context is everything.)

Ajay — unfortunately, at this moment, I think that too many Americans think of war as having an improving quality.

I agree, sadly.

I think a good fraction of ‘irrational’ conduct in war generally and of WWI in particular comes back to the concept of honor. Even when a war’s potential benefits seem far in excess of potential costs (e.g. Falklands), wars are often fought for honor. I think this is also a reason why warring nations are so reluctant to recognize that there is a stalemate and everyone should go back to the status quo. Honor does not believe the sunk-cost fallacy is a fallacy. Victory must be attained so the previous sacrifices were not in vain, etc.

Now, in one way, this is a bunch of macho BS. But in another way, it’s very rational. Diplomatic protests are ‘cheap talk’ in game theory terms. War is a costly signal. Standing up for one’s honor can be rational for the fact that it maintains future reputation, even when the cost-benefit analysis of the moment indicates that a war is stupid. It can be rational to seem crazy, even if one has to hurt oneself to send the signal. It deters future aggression.

As a sidebar: Interestingly, the American South has had the most experience suffering the devastation (in both human, property, and humilitation terms) of war of any US region. It does not seem to have kept the South from being the most pro-military region in the US. I suspect this has to do with the southern culture of honor.

_Haven’t you ever been to those dinky towns, in either France or Germany, where the memorial statue to the dead of the Great War seems to list more names than possible, given the current population of the town? It’s almost like every French and German town has a little Vietnam memorial at its center._

In Italy too. Lots of memorials, statues to the unknown soldier. Not just in the small towns.

Some years ago I visited the scenes of WWI battles in the Dolomites, between Austrians and Italians, there’s an entire area with signs of warfare still visible, holes in the rocks from cannons, caves and tunnels. Rather high up too, you had to climb with some effort, it was hard to imagine battles taking place there, in winter, to boot. Then the cemeteries and memorials. One of which was a large solitary bulding on two floors whose walls consisted entirely of marble plaques with names and dates of the fallen soldiers, most of them no older than 18. It was surreal and very real at the same time, impossible not to be affected.

I don’t think it’s a matter of superiority, it’s just a fact that Europeans have that recent history whose traces are still there, and it does tend to make most people natural pacifists, in a sense. It’s something apart from the question of whether a war’s motives and purposes were/are right or wrong, or even debates and political positions, past and present. It’s the reality of something that you’d like to think of as exceptional and not the rule. Something that should only be a very very last resort for clearly defensive purposes, and not a matter of policy. Anyway. I never thought it would become controversial even just to say that war is a horrible thing.

Sure Germany may have been piqued but why? Population may be the answer.

Well in 1820 is population was 24 million to France’s 31 million – it was thus about 75% of the size of France and therefore clearly the junior partener in Europe– especially given that its GDP per capita was also about 15% lower. But the 1800’s were a time of great expansion For Germany – by 1914 its population was 64 million to France’s 41 million and its GDP per capita was $3600 to France’s 3400. This massive expansion in Germany population and economy is probably the route cause for it to throw its weight around and attempt to overturn the old order of Europe.

Interestingly the coming 50 years will see similar changes in the relative sizes of many European countries with some, such as Germany and Italy shrinking considerably. Maybe its Frances or one of the other less slowly shrinking countries turn to do the aggressing this time?

“Haven’t you ever been to those dinky towns, in either France or Germany, where the memorial statue to the dead of the Great War seems to list more names than possible, given the current population of the town? It’s almost like every French and German town has a little Vietnam memorial at its center.”

And have you ever been to New England? In my home town (Northampton) they built an entire building, still standing next to the Town Hall, to commemorate the dead of the Civil War. From that you would conclude what about the present mindset of New Englanders -? Hopefully nothing, because nothing follows.

My point was this: the devastation of WWI does not explain the current attitude of Europeans towards war. There was, for one thing, WWII and the Cold War in between. For another WWI was – I guess I have to state the obvious – a very long time ago. It’s as if, in the middle of the Korean War, someone brought up the Civil War. Sorry, it just doesn’t work. .

Maybe, Scott Fitzgerald got it right about WW1 in ‘Tender As the Night’. WW1 was, Dick Diver thought, “a war of middle class love.”

And the volunteer thing? Hard to work out. My Irish-generated, Xavier boy, maternal grandfather, a fierce Mannix (“a trade war”) man, rushed off to Gallipoli, of which he could never bring himself to speak, backed up, more understandably, for WW2, and persuaded his essentially timid, only son, to sign up for New Guinea.

And in 1965, as a beardless youth, a fraction too old for the draft, (thank you mum and dad) I put the tape together of the first draft’s views of what was happening.

I led with a kid, at Site 17 Seymour, saying: “It’ll make a nice change from the bank.”

Which bank? Any bank. Perhaps it is innate. Sad to think.

The Great War was a massively dislocating event in European culture, the consequences of which can readily be seen to this day. In cultural terms, it had a more profound effect than the Second World War, despite the greater loss of life in the latter conflict. The profound and lasting effect the Great War had on Europe – and continues to have, ninety years later – can only be belittled by people who have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about.

If you want to get a handle on how I feel about Americans who dismiss the lasting effects of the Great War on my society, just imagine if I wrote some fatuous post about how the Vietnam war was a long time ago, lots of stuff has happened in the meantime, and there’s no way it can have anything much to do with how Americans view warfare. It’s not that Europeans have longer memories than Americans: it’s that these major cultural shocks don’t happen very often, and their lasting effect depends on all kinds of contingent factors, not just the raw bodycount.

Mr. Morgenthau, unfortunately, had a view of Germans not totally unlike certain Germans’ view of Jews, assigning them “incurable” national traits. This perception led to his proposal of the Morgenthau plan, which, after World War II, would have broken Germany into a handful of agricultural mini-states. I read the memoirs of such men with a shaker of salt at the ready.

Perhaps Morgenthau’s negative views of Germany had ossified to that point by 1944 (and if so, then I am certain he was in that respect, though clearly mistaken, nevertheless also far from alone in his error). But writing in 1918, he shows every indication of being entirely able to distinguish between a ruthlessly aggressive German imperial regime and the German national character, which he appears to consider quite mutable indeed. From the first chapter of his memoir, in which he describes the German ambassador in Constantinople, Baron von Wangenheim:

When I was a boy in Germany, the Fatherland was usually symbolized as a beautiful and powerful woman—a kind of dazzling Valkyrie; when I think of modern Germany, however, the massive, burly figure of Wangenheim naturally presents itself to my mind. He was six feet two inches tall; his huge, solid frame, his Gibraltarlike shoulders, erect and impregnable, his bold, defiant head, his piercing eyes, his whole physical structure constantly pulsating with life and activity—there stands, I would say, not the Germany which I had known, but the Germany whose limitless ambitions had transformed the world into a place of horror. And Wangenheim’s every act and every word typified this new and dreadful portent among the nations. Pan-Germany filled all his waking hours and directed his every action. The deification of his emperor was the only religious instinct which impelled him. That aristocratic and autocratic organization of German society which represents the Prussian system was, in Wangenheim’s eyes, something to be venerated and worshipped; with this as the groundwork, Germany was inevitably destined, he believed, to rule the world. The great land-owning Junker represented the perfection of mankind. “I would despise myself,” his closest associate once told me, and this represented Wangenheim’s attitude as well, “if I had been born in a city.” Wangenheim divided mankind into two classes, the governing and the governed; and he ridiculed the idea that the upper could ever be recruited from the lower. I recall with what unction and enthusiasm he used to describe the Emperor’s caste organization of German estates; how he had made them non-transferable, and had even arranged it so that the possessors, or the prospective possessors, could not marry without the imperial consent. “In this way,” Wangenheim would say, “we keep our governing classes pure, unmixed of blood.”

You can judge for yourself whether this description bespeaks distaste for its subject’s ethnic or political characteristics.

“If you want to get a handle on how I feel about Americans who dismiss the lasting effects of the Great War on my society, just imagine if I wrote some fatuous post about how the Vietnam war was a long time ago…”

There are many people alive who fought in the Vietnam War, many more who lost loved ones, and many more still who remember living through that period. It’s forty years against ninety, which makes a big difference, given the human life span.

“The consequences of which can readily be seen to this day…” Certainly there are consequences. There are also consequences of the Roman Empire. That wasn’t the point. The point was whether the Great War explains Europe’s so-called pacifist outlook, because Europeans “learned” while Americans did not.

“What does WWI have to do with the Civil War? Why not compare it to the Napoleonic wars then?”

Why not indeed?

Andrew:

[Everything Iain Coleman said and…]

The point isn’t just whether people personally remember some event but whether the event resulted in a radical shift in an entire culture.

That can be through personal memories and experiences but also through education and the wider artistic, social and political culture. We, in the UK, are brought up reading the ‘war poets’ in our English literature classes, learning about the scale of destruction at Ypres, Verdun, the Somme and Paschendale in our history classes, etc. to take a couple of minor examples. It’s continually emphasised that millions of our young men died in that war.

Further, it’s really NOT the case that there are no personal connections with the Great War. I’m a child of the 1970s but 3 of my grandparents remembered the end of the Great War and all of them had relatives who fought in it. People older than me are bound to have more direct links.

Furthermore, the claim isn’t that the Great War (in isolation) led to less militaristic attitudes but rather the combination of the Great War and WWII. And you can hardly claim there are no current personal connections to that.

Both of my grandfathers (one deceased but one very much hale and hearty) fought in it — as I imagine did many US reader’s parents and grandparents. My wife’s grandfather was taken to Germany to work as a forced labourer in a labour camp, etc. The Pinkasova synagogue in Prague lists the names of at least 3 jewish people — people her grandparents knew — from her village who died in the Holocaust, etc. etc.

There’s probably not a family alive in Europe that doesn’t have some connection to WWII and not just in the sense of something that happened over there and where the menfolk went off to fight in it. But also very much in the sense of “this village right here is where hundreds of people were killed”. There’s nothing bloody remote about it.

dan: what “dolorous consequences”, exactly, would have ensued for Europe had Germany won WWI? The Germans of that time were, a few grandstanding Junkers aside, quite civilized and not at all tyrannical. There were a lot more Social Democrats among them than Prussian aristocrats. Moreover, a German victory then would have meant no Nazism and not nearly as much, if any, Communism. Sounds like a good deal to me.

If the Germans’ actions in WWI showed them to be motivated by militaristic jingoism and a lust to rule, so too do the US’s actions in the Iraq war. Their rationale for attack was a preventive one, same as ours. Look, they said, our enemies haven’t attacked us *yet*, but they’re clearly building up capabilities they could use to do so in the future. We’ve fought them before and we know their intentions are hostile; to wait too long to respond could be catastrophic. Better to strike now and beat them once and for all before they can do us real damage.

The main difference is that the Germans’ fears were much more justified. (And surely for every Baron von Wangenheim you can find a General Boykin).

All this “the war didn’t work because we didn’t beat them hard enough” stuff strikes me as the mirror image of the Leftist tendency to claim that, whenever a social program fails to achieve its intended objective and/or causes a bunch of unintended consequences in its train, the cause can’t be that the program was a dumb idea to begin with, but must be that not enough money was spent on it to do it properly. To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, it’s self-congratulation as a basis for foreign policy.

“Because most people I know (whether from the continental part of Europe or the UK) think of the UK as being part of Europe.”

Well the French I know don’t consider the UK part of Europe. Which continentals consider the UK part of Europe ?

“My point in this context was just that even here in the UK the destruction and devastation of the 1st World War is something that is continually emphasised to us growing up and both world wars are something to which we, like other Europeans, have a direct and often personal connection.”

“The only thing, and it’s hardly a huge or controversial point, I wanted to say was that direct experiences of military conflict that are present in Europe but absent in the US may partly explain differing attitudes to militarism.”

Well your first paragraph diminishes the point in the second. The UK had the direct connection, yet the UK has largely the same views towards war as America.

reply wrote:

“Well the French I know don’t consider the UK part of Europe. Which continentals consider the UK part of Europe ?”

Well, most people I know who aren’t French. :-) There may be Euro-sceptic politicians in the UK who wish we weren’t part of Europe but I don’t think that there is any doubt that we are — historically, politically, socially and culturally — even if we ignore political questions about the nature and future of the EU.

reply wrote:
“The UK had the direct connection, yet the UK has largely the same views towards war as America.”

Indeed, why is why i wrote:

“Of course there are loads of contingent factors and ‘Europe’ and the ‘US’ are hardly homogenous places and generalisations like that will have exceptions.”

and

“The UK suffers from the partly mistaken view that it ‘won’ the world wars and as a result probably is inclined to be less anti-militarist than some of the continental European countries.”

Giles:

I think you are confusing two senses of European here.

One sense refers to Europe in it’s broad socio-geographical sense and in this sense is what I have had in mind in most of my comments above. In this sense I think the UK always has been European.

The other sense refers to integration into a particular political and economic project i.e the European Union and the single currency.

In the UK there are lots of people quite happy with the former sense of ‘Europe’ but not with the latter.

Phrases like “put Britain at the heart of Europe” intentionally play with the equivocation between these two sense of Europe and European. By associating one with the other politicians hope to persuade people that part of being European (in the socio-cultural sense) involves necessarily being European (in the political union sense).

Eurosceptic is just a term invented by the press to label a particular political school of though – i.e. those who are sceptical about the process of further political integration. Europhobe is usually used to refer to those who not only want to halt further unification but actively want to roll back the amount of unification that has taken place before.

[For what it’s worth I’m on the Europhile side of the fence… I like the idea of closer political and economic ties with the other countries in the EU – but that’s irrelevant here.]

Most European countries contain politicians who are of a broadly ‘Eurosceptical’ political outlook. Even France. I wouldn’t read too much of significance into the labels themselves.

sure matt but as you say the labels “intentionally play with the equivocation” – so there is some equivocation out there to be played with – in other words there are enough British people who do not consider the UK to be part of Europe to make the word play worthwhile.

what “dolorous consequences”, exactly, would have ensued for Europe had Germany won WWI? The Germans of that time were, a few grandstanding Junkers aside, quite civilized and not at all tyrannical. There were a lot more Social Democrats among them than Prussian aristocrats. Moreover, a German victory then would have meant no Nazism and not nearly as much, if any, Communism. Sounds like a good deal to me.

No doubt there were many social democrats in Germany in 1914–but then, if I’m not mistaken, there was no shortage of them in 1933, either. The problem was that Wilhelmine imperialists, not social democrats, ruled Germany during World War I. (Otherwise, World War I might never have started in the first place.) And the plans of the “grandstanding Junkers” for the countries they intended to defeat in battle were far from benign.

If the Germans’ actions in WWI showed them to be motivated by militaristic jingoism and a lust to rule, so too do the US’s actions in the Iraq war.

And the Saddam Hussein of 1914 was….who? Rene Viviani? Herbert Asquith? Even Kaiser Wilhelm’s regime was a far cry from Saddam’s–but it was certainly less peaceful and democratic than those of Britain or France (to say nothing of that of Belgium–arguably the Kuwait of 1914).

All this “the war didn’t work because we didn’t beat them hard enough” stuff strikes me as…..self-congratulation as a basis for foreign policy.

Actually, all I suggested was that the disarmament provisions of the Versailles treaty, had they been enforced, would most likely have prevented World War II. It’s not even clear that Nazism could have survived the elimination of the crucial “world conquest” plank of its platform. And even had it ravaged Germany for many years, the rest of the continent would have been spared.

Of course, the means to keep Germany disarmed were there, as was the justification, in the form of the treaty of Versailles. They were not used only because the allies learned the same lesson from World War I that John Quiggin appears to draw from it–that war is “always a crime” (and treaties presumably not worth honoring, if doing so requires actual fighting). On the other hand, if the Entente had learned John’s lesson even earlier–as he apparently would have preferred–and made unconditional peace, then there would have been no obstacles whatsoever to German rearmament, and the opportunity to avert the horrors of World War II would never even have existed.

Nor, I should note, do you need to be some sort of lefty pacifist to think pre-WWI Germany relatively benign. George Kennan, for example, said that:

“Today if one were offered the chance of having back again the Germany of 1913 — a Germany run by conservative but relatively moderate people, no Nazis and no Communists — a vigorous Germany, full of energy and confidence, able to play a part again in the balancing-off of Russian power in Europe, in many ways it would not sound so bad.”