Addendum on Classifying the Second World War

Saturday

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In What kind of war was the Second World War? I made this observation:

Knowledge inevitably involves imposing a template on the messiness of actuality in order to organize our experience rationally and coherently, so that the more systematic our organization of experience, the more knowledge we could be said to possess of this experience. Taxonomies of war seek to systematically organize our experience of war into knowledge of war, and from knowledge of war comes efficacy in waging war.

How exactly does this play out? Isn’t this a rather abstract claim to make about the messy reality of war? How does classification contribute to knowledge of war, and how does knowledge of war contribute to efficacy in waging war?

I can think of a couple of ways to argue this point, one a rather long digression through epistemology, and the other a rather shorter route through more familiar territory. I think I’ll save my epistemic exposition for another time, and at present only discuss the obvious way of cashing out this apparently abstract claim.

In brief, if we classify a war (or an operation, or a battle, or a skirmish) incorrectly, then we have located this event in a particular epistemic space, with relations to other related events and actions, and these other events and actions might bear some kind of relationship to the event in question, but these relations all will be a little off, misleading, and perhaps fatally misleading. If, on the other hand, we get the classification of the event correct, then our knowledge of that event will be reliable and not misleading. We will be able to act with confidence that are actions are based in the reality of the situation.

If you believe yourself to be fighting a war of national liberation, but you are actually allowing your nation-state to be used as a proxy war in great power competition, then you are going to be fighting the wrong war as long as you hold this erroneous belief, and the likelihood of your ultimately realizing your war aim of national liberation is rather poor. Contrariwise, if you believe yourself to be without agency, a mere pawn of external forces, whereas you are really engaged in a struggle of national liberation, or if you have a histrionic belief in being a great power engaged in a great power competition whereas in fact you are engaged in a petty struggle for the limited spoils of a banana republic, again, you will be fighting the wrong war, and you are not likely to successfully secure your war aims.

Self-deception plays a large role in this. Self-deception as it relates to warfare is relevant when political and military leaders deceive themselves, or when the masses are caught up in some madness of crowds (like the August Madness). While there is little that can be done about the madness of crowds, other than to wait for it so exhaust itself, the madness of political and military leaders is other matter. Deluded leaders can do far more harm than deluded masses, but it is also easier either to replace a deluded politician or general, or for this deluded individual to find their way back to reality.

The problem of deluded military and political leaders was presumably the motive for this advice from Sun Tzu:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

This is the Socratic imperative to know thyself, displaced into war. It is equally necessary to disillusion oneself, and to inspire delusion in the enemy, which brings us to another Sun Tzu quote that speaks to the disconnect between reality and war aims that characterizes deception:

“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must appear inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.”

All warfare is based on deception, yes, but there are two aspects of deception: not being deceived oneself, and deceiving the enemy. In the western tradition, these two ideas are incorporated into most lists of the principles of war in the form of surprise and security. Surprise is when you have successfully deceived the enemy and you are able to take the offensive to achieve your objective with the enemy on his back foot, as it were. Security is the need to take precautions so that when you have been surprised (i.e., deceived) the result is not disastrous and you can recover your position, or limit the damage in defeat. Surprise is what you get when your enemy incorrectly classifies the war (operation, battle) they are fighting, and security is what you need when you have misclassified the conflict you are in.

The history of war is filled with telling examples of delusion and deception. For an example of delusion, after the experience of trench warfare during the First World War, France responded to the threat of another German incursion by building the Maginot Line, which has subsequently become a synonym for inefficacy. But the French had simply observed the nature of the bulk of the First World War, and projected another war in the future that would also be a stagnant conflict in which defense had the advantage over offense. While the French were building the Maginot Line, the Germans were pressing forward with both the theory and practice of mobile armor. To skirt the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, the Germans actually made a deal to train tank crews in Russia, where Heinz Guderian spent some time on maneuvers.

The French spent about three billion Francs on the Maginot Line. This could have purchased about 5,000 Renault R35 tanks in 1936 currency. The French could have quadrupled their tank force, with money left over to buy copies of Guderian’s Achtung — Panzer! as well as training for French tank crews. This would have served France better than spending the money on the Maginot Line, but the French were not expecting a war of rapid maneuver in which an armored spearhead penetrating a defensive line at its weakest spot would be the key to victory.

For an example of deception, prior to the Normandy landing the Allies conducted an extensive campaign of deception that involved dummy tanks and airplanes to fool German observers.The Germans knew that an assault was coming, but they did not know where exactly. We know from records obtained after the fact that in the lead up to the Allied landing that the Germans re-deployed some of their forces away from the actual landing zone to an area suggested by the deception, so that the deception was at least partially successful.

Before this, in the lead up the invasion of Sicily, one of the more elaborate deceptions of the Second World War, Operation Mincemeat, involved dropping a body with a fabricated backstory and diplomatic documents off the coast of Huelva, Spain, so that the body would wash up on the beach. It is not known if this deception ultimately contributed to the Allied victory in Sicily, but the elaborate ruse did come off as planned. For anyone who wants an introduction to espionage at its best, it is worthwhile to study the British secret services during the Second World War, as their achievements were remarkable (e.g., every German spy in England was turned by the end of the war), and Operation Mincemeat was truly inspirational, whether or not it contributed to Allied victory.

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What kind of war was the Second World War?

Thursday

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Azerbaijani legionnaire from the 804th Azerbaijani infantry battalion

The Second World War will be studied by historians as long as human civilization endures, since the scope and scale of the conflict puts it in a class by itself, but what kind of war was it? What kind of war was the Second World War? It is a deceptively simple question, since it implies that there is some kind of taxonomy of warfare, and that the Second World War neatly fits into some taxon. Thus the question implicitly appeals to theories of war that remain unstated in the question. One could relativize the inquiry with some formulation like, “According to a Marxist perspective, what kind of war was the Second World War?” This would at least make our theoretical framework explicit, and would narrow the inquiry to a manageable scope. I’m going to tackle the subject in an open-ended way, without doing this.

A North African soldier from the Free Arabian Legion and a Cossack volunteer.

Some years ago I formulated a taxonomy of war (largely building on the ideas of Anatol Rapoport) that schematically distinguished between political war (human agency), eschatological war (non-human agency), catastrophic war (human non-agency), and naturalistic war (non-human non-agency) — I didn’t systematically develop this schema in relation to war to the point of writing a post on each kind of war, but cf. More on Clausewitz, Three Conceptions of History, The Naturalistic Conception of History, Revolution and Human Agency, and Cosmic War: An Eschatological Conception (every conception of history implies a conception of war, and vice versa; moreover, every conception of war implies a conception of civilization, and vice versa). While this schematism possesses an enviable neatness (when systematically laid out), in retrospect it appears to me as being a bit too neat, and therefore not always helpfully reflective of the messiness of the actual world. And war is perhaps the messiest manifestation of the actual world.

Soldiers of the Free Indian Legion of the German Army, with a Luftwaffe Member, 1944.

If we abandon the attempt to explicitly formulate a taxonomy, we can distinguish wars of conquest, imperialist wars, resource wars, geostrategic wars, ideological wars, genocidal wars or wars of extermination, and so on. This grab bag of classifications is not unlike our classifications of science — empirical science, natural science, physical science, social science, historical science, and so on — in so far as there is no overarching conception that systematically relates the parts to each other and to the whole. For a messy world, there is a certain inevitability to messy systems of classification, but our taxonomies of classification should be no more messy than is absolutely necessary. Knowledge inevitably involves imposing a template on the messiness of actuality in order to organize our experience rationally and coherently, so that the more systematic our organization of experience, the more knowledge we could be said to possess of this experience. Taxonomies of war seek to systematically organize our experience of war into knowledge of war, and from knowledge of war comes efficacy in waging war.

The Clausewitzean approach is to define war and then to refine and elaborate the definition in order to illuminate the nature of war, rather than to converge upon a taxonomy of kinds of war. In Book Two, Chapter One of On War, Clausewitz does discuss the classification of war, and Clausewitz did note some kinds of war, for example, his distinction between absolute and real war. In Book Eight of On War Clausewitz comes to focus on the outcomes of war as persistently as he focused on the definition of war in Book One, and in focusing on outcomes Clausewitz distinguished between real war and absolute war, which latter is often assimilated to Erich Ludendorff’s conception of “totale Krieg”. (An interesting discussion of this can be found in “The Idea of Total War: From Clausewitz to Ludendorff” by Jan Willem Honig; also cf. “Controversy: Total War” by Daniel Marc Segesser.)

Bundesarchiv Bild 101I-295-1560-22, Nordfrankreich, Turkmenische Freiwillige, photograph by Karl Müller

Real war, for Clausewitz (and in contradistinction to absolute war), is what we today would call limited war, but absolute war is the paradigm of war and the criterion against which any other conception must be measured, here expressed in the context of Clausewitz’s political conception of war: “If war belongs to policy, it will naturally take its character from thence. If policy is grand and powerful, so will also be the war, and this may be carried to the point at which war attains to its absolute form.” (Book Eight, Chapter 6, B) However, no great emphasis is given to the classification of war in Clausewitz. This has left taxonomies of war underdeveloped in the post-Clausewitzean literature. If Carnap was correct that scientific concepts develop from taxonomic (classificatory), through comparative, to quantitative concepts (though we are under no obligation to accept this schema of scientific development, but at least it offers a framework), then the underdevelopment of taxonomic concepts for warfare represents a failure in the development of a truly scientific understanding of war.

We can adopt the Clausewitzean approach and begin with a definition of war, which then defines the class of all wars, and then we can decompose the class of all wars into subclasses that define kinds of war. Any good taxonomy (by which I mean any taxonomy useful and fruitful for research) will involve a schematization of a complex and ambiguous reality that results in simplification. One of the most difficult aspects of scientific abstraction is finding the “just right” point between too much fidelity to empirical fact, which makes schematization impossible, and over-simplification, which falsifies empirical reality to an unhelpful extent. Ideally we would want a principled classification that decomposes all wars into a finite number of classes, each of which is mutually exclusive of the others, and each of which exemplifies an unambiguous idea. The ideal of classification is rarely realized, so we are often thrown back on a classification based on contingent properties. There are several contingent properties that characterize the Second World War and so furnish us with the most familiar, even if not rigorous, classifications. These contingent properties do not result in mutually-exclusive, non-overlapping classes, which means that there is overlap among kinds of wars. The Second World War was an industrialized war, but the Russo-Japanese War and the First World War were also industrialized wars. It was a planetary-scale war, but The Seven Years’ War and the First World War were also both planetary-scale wars. From the Second World War being a planetary-scale war it follows that it was a war fought on multiple fronts and in multiple theaters among a wide variety of combatants drawn from many nation-states. The Second World War was more a war of maneuver than attrition, more about offense and initiative than defense and stagnation. In this it differs significantly from the First World War, but resembles the Napoleonic Wars.

Beyond a haphazard classification of war by overlapping contingent properties, there are reflective taxonomies that seek to organize our knowledge of war around principles of war, but which embody no overarching conception that unifies the principles employed. This is the status of Anatol Rapoport’s distinction among political, eschatological, and cataclysmic philosophies of war, mentioned above (but which I developed in accordance with an overarching conception of agency). Another example can be found in Ian Clark’s Waging War: A Philosophical Introduction (pp. 19-23), which distinguishes six concepts of war, as follows (the headings below are Clark’s, but the explanations and commentaries that follow each heading are mine), and which I will examine in relation to planetary-scale warfare:

● War as instinctive violence — This could be called the evolutionary or biological conception of war. As Freud once wrote, “…men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attack; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.” This was written long before evolutionary psychology had been formulated, but further work in evolution, biology, and psychology has underlined Freud’s assertion with voluminous evidence, including something like war fought among chimpanzees in the wild. If human beings are instinctively violent, then it should not be surprising that human beings organized by civilization should engage in organized violence on a scale proportional to their organization, and this is what was exhibited in the global industrialized wars of the twentieth century.

● War as divination or legal trial — We could also call this “war as a decision procedure.” In so far as the decision procedure of war invokes divine sanction on its side, it also becomes an eschatological war, but it is at least arguable that its eschatological character is epiphenomenal in the context of war as a decision procedure. The point is to settle a dispute, and in so far as war has a decisive outcome (which is not always the case), the dispute is settled and the procedure of war has yielded a decision. In the case of a planetary-scale war of multiple theaters, there are multiple decisions simultaneously in pursuit of decision, and it cannot be expected that all of these outcomes will be decisive. This implies that planetary-scale war rarely if ever achieves an outcome that largely decides outstanding issues, hence the Second World War was followed by the Cold War.

● War as disease — This closely corresponds to what Anatol Rapoport called the cataclysmic philosophy of war, but Clark makes a distinction between war as disease and war as cataclysm: a disease can be cured, whereas a cataclysm usually cannot be prevented, so that mitigation efforts focus instead on limiting the damage and cleaning up after the fact. War as disease suggests a cure, and is therefore an abolitionist conception, but it also suggests the possibility of pandemic. If human beings, or human societies, are infected with the disease of war, then war will be spread like a disease, and at times that disease will take on the properties of a pandemic. War understood as a pandemic is planetary-scale war of planetary-scale civilization.

● War and social change — Clark glosses war as social change as war being either a measure or a means of social change. Although Clark mentions Comte and Schumpeter (focusing on economic development), this is essentially a Hegelian conception (or, if you prefer, a Marxist conception), since it is conflict that pushes the social dialectic forward; we cannot make social change without fulfilling all of the steps of the dialectic. If we look how far we have come, driven by conflict, it appears as a metric of that development; if look forward to social change yet to come, conflict appears as the means by which such change can be brought about. If we look forward to a planetary civilization, then only a planetary-scale dialectic, which involves planetary-scale war, can secure that end. This was once made very clear in some varieties of Marxism, which insisted that the peace of the communist millennium could come only after the world entire had experienced proletarian revolution and the planet entire has been unified on communist economic principles.

● War as a political instrument of the state — This conception perfectly embodies the political philosophy of war, which we usually identify with the work of Clausewitz. For the political conception of war to culminate in a planetary-scale war, the political framework must be planetary, and this planetary-scale political framework has been taking shape since the Age of Discovery, with the industrial revolution providing the technological means for effectively acting on a planetary scale at human time scales. It could be argued that it was only the twentieth century that this framework and its means came to maturity, and as soon as this maturity was achieved, planetary-scale wars were waged. This argument, however, minimizes the role of human agency (it makes war look as inevitable as a violent instinct), which agency is one of the key features of the conception of war as a political instrument. In other words, there is an interesting overlap between the most agency-centered conception of war and the least agent-centered conceptions of war.

● War as regulator of the international system — This might also be called war as the invisible hand, as the parties waging war are, by waging war, performing a function that restores the balance of power, though through no intention or plan of the parties to the conflict (Clark does not make this connection). If war is waged as the action of the invisible hand of the international system to maintain its own viability and stability, then we would also expect instances of “market failure” in which the invisible hand ceased to function. In cases of political failure (say, the failure of conception of war as a political instrument, above), the wars waged in the wake of political failure would fail to restore balance of power and confer viability and stability on the international system, cascading into planetary-scale war now free of the mechanisms that had once governed its scale and conduct (being much like the concept of war as a disease).

In the above taxonomy, there is no obvious place for what Rapoport called the eschatological philosophy of war, except as briefly mentioned under war as divination, where the eschatological aspect is epiphenomenal. We could place eschatological war under instinct or divination or elsewhere; the point isn’t to find a place for it, but to point out how haphazard taxonomies usually miss something important and fail to fully clarify that which they exhibit as central. Still, some attempt to give order to our experience is better than no attempt at all. Sometimes the only way to proceed is to work with a haphazard framework, revising and refining it with further experience and evidence, until either it converges on an effective taxonomy, or the additional experience and evidence forces a model crisis and a paradigm shift, with a new taxonomy emerging from the paradigm shift.

As the largest war of human history in scope and scale, the Second World War was also the messiest war, and therefore the most difficult to classify, but in hindsight (because of its salience in our consciousness of war) it has become a war understood in schematic terms in which the messiness is progressively erased from historical memory. Even the Cold War, in all its complexity, was simpler than the Second World War, because of the planetary-scale division between the US and the USSR was, at its basis, an us-against-them conflict, and could be reduced to this schematic dyad. The Second World War cannot be reduced to a dyad; it was a war with many fronts, many theaters, many belligerents, and many motivations for participation. When Nazi Germany set its war machine in motion and it was evident to all that this was a formidable force, there was probably a strong sense of inevitability about ultimate German victory in the war. When Poland and France had fallen and the British had retreated at Dunkirk without any means of striking the Germans except for their long-ranger bombers, and with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact keeping the Soviet Union out of the war, “Fortress Europe” looked secure, and the burden fell upon those on the outside Fortress Europe to penetrate its defenses. When the Allies did begin to penetrate the defenses of Fortress Europe, and the Soviet Union entered the war after Operation Barbarossa, the Germans had to seek more manpower for their armies.

Bosnian soldiers of the 13th Waffen Mountain Division of the SS “Handschar”

It was a relatively straight-forward matter to recruit from Soviet and Soviet bloc POWs, as many of them were passionately anti-Bolshevik and had no love for the Soviet Union. Promised the opportunity to fight for the freedom their native homelands from Soviet tyranny, many joined. These volunteers were opportunistic, not ideological. The volunteers from western European nation-states, by contrast, were more ideologically driven, though not always in the way one might guess. There were two Waffen-SS divisions of Scandinavian volunteers, the 5^th Wiking and the 11^th Nordland, and the different circumstances of the Scandinavian nation-states, which were very different indeed, influenced the character of the volunteers for Germany. The Finns fought the Russians in the Winter War of 1939, and thousands of Swedes volunteered to fight in Finland against the Russians, so when Hitler violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and went to war with the Russians, Finland became an ally of Germany (until the Moscow Armistice of 19 September 1944), one of the Axis powers, and Finland then became a “pipeline” for fighters to join the Axis cause. Sweden remained resolutely neutral throughout the war, but Norway was occupied up until the very end, and occupied Norway was governed by Vidkun Quisling, whose name has become synonymous with treachery. Quisling was an interesting figure, as he was not an opportunistic fascist nor even an anti-Semitic fascist; Quisling belonged more to ideological fascism, and even to the mystical and esoteric side of Nazism; one suspects he would have been much more comfortable with Heidegger than with Hitler or Himmler.

Soldiers of the Turkestan Legion.

The German use of foreign legions was no doubt utterly cynical, which is to say, it was pragmatic; it was equally cynical (i.e., equally opportunistic) on the part of those who sought to hitch their wagon to a star by jumping on the bandwagon of what seemed to be the most powerful military force on the planet. The Origins of the Second World War by A. J. P. Taylor, argued that Hitler himself was an opportunist, not driven by fanaticism or an insane lust for destruction, but was responding to geopolitical imperatives to which any German politician would have had to answer. Taylor’s book was controversial in the extreme (the response to it was not unlike the intensity of the response to Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem), and only time will tell its eventual reputation. Taylor’s arguments aside, we should question the idea that any war — and most especially a war as large and as complex as the Second World World — must be pigeon-holed as one and only one kind of conflict. There is the possibility that a war might be one kind of war for one of the combatants, and another kind of war entirely for another of the combatants. This is most obviously the case when a war of extermination on the part of one party to a conflict is a war of survival for the other party; those fighting only to survive need not exterminate their rivals, though they may well come to desire this end. However, it also can be the case that, when an ideological war is being fought by two or more parties of the conflict, other parties join the conflict for opportunistic reasons. This was manifestly the case during the Cold War, when the US and the USSR were locked in an ideological struggle, but third world proxy wars which the great powers attempted to contain within ideological bounds inevitably became mired both in local struggles as well as opportunistic conflicts.

Chiang Wei-kuo, adopted son of Chiang Kai-shek, attended a German military academy and commanded a Panzer unit during the Austrian Anschluss in 1938.

Because of the diversity and multiplicity of war, there is no unity and clarity of purpose at the largest scales. For a fire team of soldiers caught in a skirmish, there is perfect unity and clarity of purpose, but this purpose doesn’t scale beyond a certain limit. The grand strategies of nation-states, kingdoms, and other political agents, constitute clarity of purpose in so far as the grand strategies themselves are clear, and impose a measure of clarity on those wars that have their origins in grand strategy, but, once a war has started, the grand strategy of any one of the parties to the conflict cannot contain the conflict within the grand strategy parameters of the originating party. The grand strategy can continue to guide developments in a war as it progresses, and so can confer a rough directionality on the conflict, but even this directionality can evaporate if the political agent attempting to pursue its grand strategy begins to lose the conflict. Precisely this occurred in the Second World War. The ideological aims of the Nazi party were rendered ambiguous by the growing scale of the conflict, and eventually become meaningless. Whether the ideological aims of political parties were ever causes of events, or whether they were, rather, responses to events — symptoms of a disease, as it were — may be a chicken-and-egg problem.

Original caption: “Treu der Kosaken-Tradition Oberfeldwebel Nicolas Balanowski, kämpft wie viele seiner Landsleute, in den Reihen der landeseigenen Verbände gegen seine früheren Unterdrücker, den Bolschewisten. Getreu der alten Kosakentradition, trägt er noch immer die Kosaken-Mütze.” In English: “True to the Cossack tradition, Sergeant Nicolas Balanowski, like many of his compatriots, fights in the ranks of the state’s associations against his former oppressors, the Bolsheviks. True to the old Cossack tradition, he still wears the Cossack hat.”

The Second World War was many wars — Theodore Ropp wrote that, “The Second World War consisted of four related major wars, each presenting separate military-political problems.” (War in the Modern World, New York: Collier, 1971, p. 314) — and these many wars of the Second World war each had a distinctive character, hence even more diversity and multiplicity than are typically to be found in smaller conflicts. On the western front, it was a straight-forward political war of the kind that had repeatedly erupted between Germany and France; on the eastern front it was a war of extermination, not unlike the German campaign in German Southwest Africa or the British campaign against the Boers during the Boer War. On the northern front, it was a static war of occupation in Norway, while on the North African front it was a mobile war of mechanized armor against mechanized armor, and in the Pacific Theater further complexities were added by the multiplicity of colonial powers and their subject peoples who were involved.

One useful distinction that can be made among kinds of war is that between methods of war on the one hand, and, on the other hand, kinds of war based on causes and objectives (which, for purposes of brevity, I will call causal taxonomies). In my post Hybrid Warfare I included a list of seventeen distinct forms of warfare recognized by the US DOD and NATO — Antisubmarine Warfare, Biological Warfare, Chemical Warfare, Directed-Energy Warfare, Electronic Warfare, Guerrilla Warfare, Irregular Warfare, Mine Warfare (also called Land Mine Warfare), Multinational Warfare, Naval Coastal Warfare, Naval Expeditionary Warfare, Naval Special Warfare, Nuclear Warfare (also called Atomic Warfare), Surface Warfare, Unconventional Warfare, and Under Sea Warfare — all of which are methods of warfare, constituting a methodological taxonomy. Needless to say, the US DOD and NATO do not recognize wars of extermination as a distinct mode of warfare, but it could be conceived as such. More importantly, these methods of war tell us very little about causal taxonomies of war, even when methods and outcomes are mutually implicated (as in genocidal wars of extermination). The taxonomy of war employed by Ian Clark, discussed above, clearly draws a connection between methodological taxonomies and causal taxonomies, as each kind of war suggests methods of waging war, or methods of mitigating war, but for Clark, as I read him, it is the causal taxonomies that are fundamental, and the methods of waging war follow from these causal imperatives. Methodological taxonomies may satisfy war planners and unify soldiers and command structures, but they do not touch on the motivations of the mass societies of planetary civilization to wage war.

Planetary-scale war like the Second World War was not possible until there was planetary-scale civilization. The planetary-scale war that was the Second World War was both enabled by planetary-scale civilization and ultimately extended planetary-scale civilization (suggesting Clark’s war as social change), as became clear in the post-war period when there was a new impetus to create planetary institutions — the UN, the EU, and eventually the WTO and the World Criminal Court, inter alia. As I have argued on many occasions, our planetary-scale civilization is not politically or legally unified, although it is culturally, technologically, economically, and scientifically unified. Within a planetary-scale civilization, Huntington’s “clash of civilization” thesis is meaningless, and therefore stillborn. On a planet well on the way to integrating planetary-scale civilization there could be wars that break out between and among partially assimilated remnants of civilizations (formerly isolated regional civilization), which would constitute the trailing edge of Huntington’s clash of civilizations, and which latter could be said to have peaked in the 16^th or 17^th century. In this planetary context one can certainly imagine conflicts over control of Makinder’s world-island (“Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland. Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island. Who rules the World Island commands the World.”), which would be essentially planetary-scale wars with planetary-scale methods and objectives, but which were not wars breaking out along the fault lines of civilizations.

Another way to think about wars in terms of outcomes (causal taxonomies) is that at least part of what makes a war the kind of war that it is, is the kind of peace that is possible following upon the end of the war (the actual outcome in contradistinction to the envisioned outcome, i.e., the war aim). While a war may begin with clear war aims, the war itself may cloud these war aims or make their achievement impossible, so that the actual outcome of the war is no longer recognizably related to the war aims of any of the parties to the conflict at the initiation of hostilities. In the case of the Second World War, the peace that followed was itself a war: the Cold War. Planetary-scale peace at the end of planetary-scale war came at the cost of small-scale regional wars and an arms race on a planetary scale. The decisive defeat of the Axis Powers was an unambiguously achieved war aim, but it was achieved by allies that were as ideologically opposed to each other as they were opposed to the Axis Powers. This set the stage for the conflicts to follow. Peace and reconstruction was geographically regional (not on a planetary scale, like the war itself) and was ideologically driven to a much greater extent than the pragmatic conduct of the war itself. Before the war was over Ernst Jünger had written, “It may safely be said that this war has been humanity’s first joint effort. The peace that ends it must be the second.” (The Peace, Hinsdale: Henry Regnery, 1948, p. 19) This was not to be the case, though FDR and the US tried to realize this ideal.

Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt in Paris.

A familiar narrative (especially to Americans) is that the Second World War was “The Good War” that was fought by the “greatest generation” (i.e., it was a just war, to invoke an Augustinian conception). This propagandistic conception of the Second World War is, in a sense, the mirror image of the Second World War as a great ideological conflict between lofty ideals on the one hand, and, on the other hand, naked evil, belies the pragmatism with which the war was fought and alliances were made, in which the war was rather a conflict driven by geopolitical imperatives — admittedly, geopolitical concerns extrapolated to a planetary scale, but still a conflict more about the distribution of ocean basins and mountain ranges than about ideology. The narrative of the Second World War as “The Good War” that was fought by the “greatest generation” elides the catastrophic policy failures of both the First and Second World Wars, and the peace settlements that followed upon them, which were arguably invidious to the grand strategies of the western nation-states. The Cold War was necessitated by the failed outcome of the Second World War in the same way that the Second World War was necessitated by the failed outcome of the First World War. However, it is at least arguable that the Cold War was fought more effectively than the world wars of the first half of the twentieth century.

The General Assembly of the United Nations Convenes for the first time on 10 January 1946 in London.

The ability of human beings to conceptualize and to act upon planetary-scale ideals is noble and inspiring, but a failure to distinguish between ideals that can be brought into being at the present, and ideals that must wait for another time, when conditions are right for their realization, constitutes a failure of wisdom at least proportional to nobility of conceptualizing an unattainable ideal. When Wilson arrived in Paris in 1919, and when FDR traveled to Yalta in 1945, both American presidents were prepared to make major strategic concessions in order to bring robust international institutions into being, and this willingness to sacrifice US national interests to a larger vision for peace on a planetary scale, following upon war on a planetary scale, put the US at a disadvantage. The outcome could well have been better for all if these presidents had exclusively focused on US national interests and the national interests of US allies rather than upon a trans-national ideal. Other parties to the negotiations in Paris and Yalta cannot be blamed for taking advantage of US willingness to bargain away its interests, and the interests of its allies, in order to secure the future of international institutions, which no one else took seriously. Of course, it must also be noted that both Wilson and FDR believed that the successful implementation of these international institutions would be in the strategic interest of the US, and many would argue that the US, as the leading post-war international power, got at least part of what it bargained for in the form of international institutions.

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VE Day: Seventy Years

Friday

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General Jodl signs the instrument for the unconditional surrender of Germany; Jodl would later hang at Nuremberg.

In Seventy Years, posted on 01 September 2009, I acknowledged the seventieth anniversary of the beginning of open armed conflict that began the Second World War. In that post I wrote:

During the middle of the twentieth century civilization experienced a convulsion of apocalyptic proportions. The sky was filled with airplanes, the sea was filled with ships above and below, great cities were destroyed in a single night, entire populations were displaced, and millions upon millions of people were killed.

Now, more than five years later, it is time to commemorate the termination of that apocalyptic conflict, in so far as the war came to an end in Europe on VE Day (Victory Europe), Tuesday, 08 May 1945. A week earlier Hitler had committed suicide in his Berlin bunker. Most German cities had been reduced to rubble long before. In the week between Hitler’s suicide and VE Day, Joseph Goebbels, appointed Reich Chancellor by Hitler just before his suicide, committed suicide with his wife after killing their six children, Tito had triumphed in what would become Yugoslavia, the Soviets took Berlin, Rangoon was liberated from the Japanese, and Mauthausen concentration camp was liberated.

Nazi Germany formally surrendered unconditionally at the Western Allied Headquarters in Rheims, France, on Monday 07 May 1945, but the ceasefire took effect one minute after midnight on Tuesday 08 May 1945. Reich President Karl Dönitz ordered the surrender, and General Alfred Jodl signed for Germany. Later at Nuremberg where both were tried as major war criminals, Jodl was sentenced to death; Dönitz spent ten years in Spandau prison.

As though a portent of what was to come, on the same day, Tuesday, 08 May 1945, the Sétif massacre occurred, when a victory parade turned ugly. French police attempted to seize anti-colonial banners held by the crowd of about 5,000 Muslim marchers in Sétif and the scuffle turned into a firefight. (Similar events occurred in Guelma and Kherrata.) In the ensuing days, both sides took reprisals on the other. Thousands died (how many thousands is still in dispute).

The French held out in Algeria and Indochina even has the British surrendered control of India, the Jewel in the Crown, in 1947. Colonial conflicts and the consequent de-colonialization struggles became a proxy battleground of the Cold War, played out in the lives of impoverished peoples in Africa, Asia, and South America. Struggles for national liberation were transmuted into ideological conflicts in which Russia and China supplied arms to those who would self-identify as communists, and the US and Europe supplied arms to those who would identify as anti-communists. It is arguable that the legacy of this struggle has shaped the contemporary world more profoundly that the apocalyptic proportions of the Second World War, which, considered only in terms of open armed conflict, endured for less than six years.

The end of a catastrophic conventional war, in which regular armies numbering in the millions of soldiers, airmen, and sailors met in pitched battle on the ground, in the air, and on the sea, ending in definitive defeat and unconditional surrender for the Axis powers, marked the beginning of protracted, seemingly interminable unconventional conflicts between small numbers of irregular combatants who rarely met in battle, and whose wars almost never ended in definitive defeat or surrender. Thus the end of the Second World War was as much of a turning point as the war itself.

It remains an open question at the present time if our planet will ever return to the WWII paradigm of armed conflict, in which the planet entire is convulsed by a short, sharp, and definitive war (and, if so, if anyone would survive), or if the development of civilization has permanently rendered such conflicts antiquated. War, like civilization, may not disappear, but it does evolve, and the existential viability of war (if one can speak of such) is predicated upon the possibility of the essential nature of warfare changing.

It is possible that we have witnessed such a change with the change in armed conflict that followed the end of the Second World War. However, a further change in the essential nature of the civilizations engaging in warfare would drive further changes in the essential nature of war. This could take the form of returning to an earlier paradigm of armed conflict, or issuing in unprecedented forms of armed conflict. As I pointed out some years ago, civilization and war are locked in a co-evolutionary relationship.

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Commitment and Counterinsurgency

Friday

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In the film Apocalypse Now the protagonist, Captain Benjamin L. Willard, is sent up the Mekong to Cambodia to kill Colonel Kurtz, who has gone rogue and is leading a group of native combatants who follow him unquestioningly. There is a scene on the boat going upriver when Willard is reading Col. Kurtz’s dossier, including a report that Kurtz is supposed to have written to the Pentagon after an early tour in Vietnam. The report is called “Commitment and Counterinsurgency” and it includes the following:

“As long as our officers and troups (sic) perform tours of duty limited to one year, they will remain dilletantes in war and tourists in Vietnam. As long as cold beer, hot food, rock and roll and all the other amenities remain the expected norm, our conduct of the war will gain only impotence. The wholesale and indiscriminate use of firepower will only increase the effectiveness of the enemy and strengthen their resolve to prove the superiority of an agrarian culture against the world’s greatest technocracy… The central tragedy of our effort in this conflict has been the confusion of a sophisticated technology with human commitment. Our bombs may in time destroy the geography, but they will never win the war… We need fewer men, and better; if they were committed, this war could be won with a fourth of our present force…”

Everyone knows that Apocalypse now was loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I think it would probably be better to say that Apocalypse Now was inspired by Heart of Darkness — or we could use more contemporary terminology and say that Apocalypse Now is a re-imagining of Heart of Darkness.

Vietnam, Apocalypse Now, and counterinsurgency have all become eerily relevant again as the US seeks to disengage from Central Asia after a ground war that has stretched over more than a decade with no resolution consistent with original aims seeming to be in sight. I’ve written about counterinsurgency, or COIN, several times recently as a result of these all-too-familiar events.

Despite the firm intentions of both US military and civilian leadership that the US not be involved in another unwinnable counterinsurgency operation in a distant part of the world, this is exactly what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact that history repeated itself in this way, despite the conscious efforts of military and civilian leaders to avoid such a repetition, says much more about the international system and the imperatives of contemporary political organization than it says about the US.

I would argue that any global hegemon at the present moment in history — whether that global hegemon happened to be the US, Russia, China, Brazil, or the British Empire — would find itself more or less forced by circumstances to engage in counterinsurgency operations in widely disparate parts of the globe. Such interventions are systemic rather than opportunistic and episodic.

In the past week US and NATO efforts in Afghanistan have come under scrutiny again after the death toll of US soldiers passed 2,000 as widely-reported “insider attacks,” also called “green on blue” attacks, continue to take the lives of US soldiers.

We quantify wars in terms of deaths, injuries, damage, and dollars. It is a dissatisfying measure to all involved — to the families of dead soldiers a single digit in a statistic scarcely captures the loss, to the families of dead civilians, and those whose lives have been disrupted beyond salvaging, similar considerations hold, while for the war planner the commitment in blood and treasure to the fight does not accurately represent the ultimate effort that was made under adverse circumstances.

Nevertheless, there must be some measure, and certainly blood and treasure constitute the fundamental calculus of commitment in war, apart from that intangible commitment that the fictional Col. Kurtz attempted to communicate to his superiors. It may well be that this intangible commitment of — what? — is precisely that unmeasurable element of the equation that results in victory or defeat, but until we have a theory to account for it, and a language in which we can formulate it, we cannot say anything coherent about it.

It is admittedly difficult even to speak coherently of quantifiable measures like blood and treasure because estimates of death in war are always contested, and because they are contested the numbers employed are almost always the result of a political decision. Some will argue for higher numbers and other will argue for lower numbers. In a war like the Second World War, when entire cities were destroyed and millions were buried under the rubble, estimates on casualties may be off by millions, and at very least off by hundreds of thousands.

In long-term counterinsurgencies like the US in Vietnam, the USSR in Afghanistan, or the US in Afghanistan, estimating civilian deaths is difficult not so much for the absolute numbers involved but because in such conflict it will be inherently controversial who is and who is not a civilian, as it will be controversial as to who is blame for atrocities carried out far beyond the reach of investigating authorities, and for which each side blames the other.

Casualty counts, then, are inherently controversial, but estimates are made; each estimate represents a particular methodology, and each methodology embodies certain assumptions. Despite all the hazards involved, I am going to give some numbers comparing three different wars — World War Two, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. In all cases I have picked the high estimates, even when these estimates have been contested. Dates, and rates derived from dates, are also numbers that can be contested. So what follows is very rough, but still indicative of a trend.

The Second World War — not in any sense a counterinsurgency — lasted about six (6) years and resulted in about 25 million military deaths and 52 million civilian deaths. This occurred in a total global population of 2,300 million, so that the war consumed about 3.3 percent of world population. This isn’t much compared to a demographic event like the Black Death when it first swept across Europe in 1348-1349, but it is still a very high number for deaths from war. The military casualties of more than four (4) million per year work out to about 475 per hour for each hour of the war, while civilian casualties of more than eight (8) million per year work out to about 988 per hour for every hour of the war.

The involvement of the US in the Vietnam War, a classic counterinsurgency, lasted about ten (10) years from 1965 to 1975, with 58,220 US military deaths and as many as 2,500,000 civilian deaths spread across Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. This works out to 5,822 military deaths per year, or 0.055 US military deaths for every hour of the war, and 250,000 civilian deaths per year or 2.3766 civilian deaths every hour for the duration of the US involvement in Vietnam (I am here choosing not to include the ten years of French involvement from 1955-1965, although the civilian casualty numbers include at least part of this period — as I wrote above, I took high numbers, and the numbers themselves are inherently controversial).

The involvement of the US in Afghanistan, another counterinsurgency, has lasted almost eleven (11) years from 2001 to 2012 with 2,000 US military casualties. I found it rather difficult to come by estimates of civilian casualties, which varied widely, but, again, taking the high numbers, I found about 34,008 civilian casualties, or about 3,092 per year, which works out to 0.029 per hour for every hour of the war. US military deaths averaged 182 per year or 0.0017 per hour for every hour of the war.

It is interesting to note that during the Vietnam War global population increased by almost a billion persons from 3,345 million to 4,086 million, and during the Afghan War global population again grew by almost a billion, from roughly 6 billion to 7 billion. With these much higher total global population figures, and the far lower casualty totals, whether military or civilian or both, the war deaths from these protracted conflicts don’t even register as a demographic rounding error.

These “big picture” statistics of course hide a lot of details, but they are still the big picture and they tell us something. They tell us that both military and civilian casualties of war are at historic lows, which is something I wrote about in the early history of this blog in The Lethality Peak. Another way to look at the lethality peak is to understand it as societies investing far less in armed conflict than was the case even in the recent past, i.e., there is a lower level of commitment in terms of blood; a lot more statistical analysis would be required to reveal the relative expenditure of treasure.

Yet another way to interpret these numbers is that the great infringements upon human life and human society in our time do not come about from wars and from outright deaths caused by war, but from what I have called non-atrocites, that is to say, depredations upon human populations and human communities that are maintained below the threshold of atrocity.

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Weapons Systems in an Age of High Technology: Nothing is Hidden.

Tuesday

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Zeppelin-Staaken r.vi

Recently I have become fascinated by the development of early bombers during the First World War. Driven by the exigencies of the world’s first large-scale industrialized war (the Russo-Japanese War was an industrialized war, but not on the scale of the First World War), aircraft developed rapidly. I have focused on the same rapidity of technological development previously emphasizing the modernity of weapons systems during the Second World War. In The Dialectic of Stalemate I wrote:

“When the Second World War ended, there were operable jet fighters, ballistic missiles, electronic computers, and atomic weapons. None of these existed when the war began.”

True enough, but the essential ideas behind these weapons systems were already in play. An idea can be implemented in any number of ways (admittedly some more efficacious than others), and exactly how an idea is implemented is a matter of technology and engineering — in other words, implementation is an accident of history. As soon as the idea has its initial implementation, we are clever enough to usually see the implications of that idea rather quickly, and thus technology is driven to keep up with the intrinsic potentiality of the idea.

Once the proof of concept of heavier-than-air flight was realized, the rest fell into place like pieces of a puzzle. Aircraft would be armed; they would seek to destroy other aircraft, and prevent themselves from being destroyed; and they would seek to destroy targets on the ground. Hence the idea of aircraft in warfare rapidly moves to fighters and bombers. The pictures above are of the Zeppelin-Staaken r.vi — not the first enclosed bomber, but among the first (the Russians, I believe, made the first enclosed bomber, the Sikorsky Ilya Muromets).

The Zeppelin-Staaken r.vi was an enormous craft with a wingspan almost equal to that of a B-29 and a crew of many men. In fact, these early German bombers were called Riesenflugzeug (or R-planes) — gigantic aircraft. An early testimonial from a Zeppelin-Staaken r.vi crew member vividly conveys the sense of flying the R-planes:

“Inside the fuselage the pale glow of dim lights outlined the chart table, the wireless equipment, and the instrument panel. Under us, the black abyss.”

Trenches: Battleground WWI, episode 5, “Fight On, Fly On”

The technology and engineering of flight during the First World War was not sufficiently advanced to make a decisive strategic difference, but they had the idea of what was possible, and they attempted to put it into practice. The idea of bombers, coordinated by radio, executing a strategic precision airstrike was already present during the First World War.

During the Second World War, the technology had advanced to the point that strategic bombing was decisive, and, in fact, it was at one point the only possible war that the UK could wage against Germany. The evolutionary development continues to the present day. Contemporary precision munitions are finally beginning to converge on true precision air strikes that were first imagined (and attempted) during the First World War.

The point here is that, once the idea is in place, the rest is mere technology and engineering — in other words, implementation. The corollary of the essential idea coupled with with contingent implementation is the fact that the wars of industrial-technological civilization, there are no secrets.

William Langewiesche in his book Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor emphasized that the early atomic scientists knew that there were no “secrets” per se, because the atomic bomb was the result of science, and anyone who would engage in science, technology, and engineering on a sufficiently large scale can build a nuclear weapon.

This thesis should be generalized and extrapolated beyond the science of nuclear weapons. Precision munitions, aviation, targeting, and all the familiar line items of a current military budget are refined and perfected by science and technology. For all practical purposes, all war has become science, and science is no secret. Any sufficiently diligent and well-funded people can produce a body of scientific knowledge that could be put into practice building weapons systems.

One might suppose, from the regimes of state security that have become so prevalent, that secrecy is of the essence of technological warfare. While this impression is encouraged, it is false. Secrecy is no more central to competition in technological warfare than it is central to industrial competition. That is to say, secrecy has a role to play, but the role that secrecy plays is not quite the role that official secrecy claims might lead one to believe.

Wittgenstein in his later work — no less pregnantly aphoristic than the Tractatus — said that nothing is hidden. And so it is in the age of industrial-technological civilization: Nothing is hidden. Everything is, in principle, out in the open and available for public inspection. This is the very essence of science, for science progresses through the repeatability of its results. That is to say, science is essentially an iterative enterprise.

Wittgenstein also said in his later period that philosophy leaves the world as it is. That is to say, philosophy is is no sense revolutionary. And so too with the philosophy of war, which in its practical application is strategic doctrine: strategic doctrine leaves the world as it is.

The perennial verities of war remain. These are largely untouched by technology, because all parties to modern, scientific war have essentially the same technology, so that they fight on the same level. Military powers contending for victory seek technological advantages when and where they can get them, but these advantages are always marginal and temporary. Soon the adversary has the same science, and soon after that the same technology.

The true struggle is the struggle of ideas — the struggle of mind against mind, contending to formulate the decisive idea first. As I said above, once the idea is in place, everything else follows from the idea. But it is the idea that is the necessary condition of all that follows.

War, then, is simply the war of ideas.

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A Paradox of Humanitarianism

Friday

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Kenneth Clark, in his Civilisation: A Personal View, concludes his multi-hour documentary with a reflection on moral psychology, although he does not call it that. He particularly mentions the rise of humanitarianism. This sort of thing would not go over well today, some forty years later, as it would be seen as rather too credulous, and smacking of progressivism (which, we are given to understand, is a terrible thing). But listening to Clark it is obvious that it is already in his time becoming dangerous to say such things — dangerous, because one is liable to be thought a simpleton. Clark himself calls himself a “stick-in-the-mud.”

I do not disagree with Clark, and I am not so dismissive of progress as has become common today, but this is a point I will not argue here. I simply tell you my prejudices so you know that I agree with Clark on this point. This is significant because, even if we recognize the emergence of a humanitarian consciousness in the nineteenth century, we must recognize at the same time the earlier wisdom of Hamlet, viz. that we often discover that we must be cruel to be kind.

One might consider it a kindness that the First World War was ended by agreement with an armistice, and that this spared lives and property by not necessitating an invasion of Germany itself, but the very fact that the defeat of Germany was not made absolutely manifest on the home front in an age of popular sovereignty meant that the armistice did not settle the war. As Foch said, and was proved right, “it is not peace, but an armistice for twenty years.”

Would it have been a “kindness” to push on an defeat the Germans on German soil, taking the lives of more soldiers and destroying the infrastructure of Germany in the teens? This would possibly have changed subsequent history, and it might not have been necessary to level Germany twenty years later with a strategic bombing campaign. And it would have been primarily soldiers who were put at risk of life and limb. During the First World War, more soldiers died than civilians. During the Second World War, more civilians died than soldiers. This is a portent that says something truly horrific about our time.

Such horrific choices have faced us repeatedly throughout our history, and still face us today. Because these choices are hideous, the way that each of us comes down on one side of the question or the other is often used against us, when the most unflattering construction is placed on our preference. This is disingenuous, because either side can smear the other side with the unsavory and unavoidable corollaries of a forced choice. And history forces us to make such forced choices — or forces us to avoid making a choice and, as we say today, kicking the can further down the road — time and again. We should not conceal this from ourselves.

Here is a semi-contemporary example. I have read interviews with one of the scientists who was involved in the design of the neutron bomb. He had served as a solder in Korea, and he had seen the devastation wrought in Korea by conventional weapons. Many cities were annihilated, not unlike the German cities subject to strategic bombing during the Second World War. This vision of destruction on an apocalyptic scale was an inspiration to this scientist, and was part of his experience that contributed to the design of the neutron bomb. For this man, the neutron bomb was a more humanitarian weapon — not unlike the guillotine, which when first invented by a doctor, was conceived as a humane form of execution.

After it become possible to build a neutron bomb, and some nation-states considered adding it to their arsenals, the very idea of the neutron bomb was held up as something ghastly and ghoulish, as though it had been designed with the intent to killing people while “saving” their property, which latter might be expropriated by others who would simply move in to a depopulated urban area. Anti-neutron bomb activists put the worst possible construction on the intention of the neutron bomb. For them, it was apparently more “humanitarian” to keep war so horrible that it would remain unthinkable. From this point of view, mutually assured destruction is a good thing. And I certainly understand this argument, but at the same time as I understand the argument, I know that, for some people, mutually assured destruction is one of the great moral obscenities of our time, and our civilization should be ashamed of itself for having made such a conception possible, not to mention the very foundation of the international order during the Cold War.

What is more “humanitarian”: the threat of a nuclear genocide of a significant proportion of our species, or the threat of a lesser degree of destruction that might settle a war at a lower cost? I think that if you are honest with yourself, you will acknowledge that each alternative is a moral horror. That does not mean that I regard the argument between the two as indifferent. On the contrary, I believe that rational arguments can be made on both sides of the question. All I am saying here is that the irrational thing is to believe that moral horror is exclusively on one side or the other.

This is certainly not the only paradox of humanitarianism, but it is certainly one of them.

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The Stalin Doctrine

Saturday

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Uncle Joe

One of the most famous and most memorable passages in Clausewitz is his definition of war as being continuous with policy:

“We see, therefore, that War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means.”

Immediately before this Clausewitz elaborates on the theme that Anatol Rapoport called political war:

“…if we reflect that War has its root in a political object, then naturally this original motive which calls war into existence should also continue as the first and highest consideration in its conduct.”

On this, I can only agree partially with Clausewitz. While the political object continues as the highest consideration in the conduct of war, the political object is not the first consideration in the conduct of war. Political objects suddenly become distant once war has begun and more immediate needs take precedence.

It is the first business of war to define military objectives that will bring about the defeat of the enemy, and these military objectives are almost always distinct from the political objectives that were the cause of the war. The political objectives remain the highest objectives of the war, but the military objectives must be attained first, and they must be attained by military means, if the political objectives that could not be attained by political means are to be attained once the war has been won.

Once — and if — the war has been won, then political objectives, having been made possible by military means, again return to the fore. However, even having won a war, the victor may still encounter significant obstacles to imposing his political objectives on his former adversary. There are usually very good reasons that a people will resist the political impositions of another people, even to the point of fighting a war to resist this imposition. The winning of a war does not automatically make the defeated people more pliant and agreeable to one’s political aims. Indeed, the population may well be resentful, recalcitrant, and rebellious. Every conqueror must put down civil unrest, often brutally, in order to proceed with the imposition of a political settlement.

The radical solution is the root-and-branch reconstruction of the former adversary’s political society. Today this is called “nation building” (a term Burke and de Maistre would have found deeply ironic, as a nation can no more be “built” than a flower can be built; it is, or must be, organic), but it has always gone on under other names. I have previously observed in relation to the Peloponnesian War that wherever the Athenians triumphed, they imposed a democratic regime on their defeated foe, and where the Spartans won, they imposed aristocratic rule. The imposition of an entire social system upon a conquered people may be called The Stalin Doctrine. I mentioned this once previously in Promoting Democracy, where I wrote:

In a speech of April, 1945 (as quoted in Conversations with Stalin, 1963, by Milovan Djilas), this visionary attitude was given explicit formulation by Stalin:

“This war is not as in the past; whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can reach. It cannot be otherwise. If now there is not a communist government in Paris, the cause of this is Russia has no army that can reach Paris in 1945.”

We could call this principle cuius regio, eius credo, following the famous formulation that was the basis of the settlement of the Thirty Years War with the Treaty of Wesphalia, namely cuius regio, eius religio (also cf. my remarks on this in Descriptive Democracy and Revisionary Democracy). But in our time, credo has supplanted religio.

Taken to its logical conclusion, The Stalin Doctrine is even more comprehensive than cuius regio, eius religio or cuius regio, eius credo; The Stalin Doctrine is ultimately the imposition of a way of life and not merely a belief or set of beliefs, and in order to impose one way of life upon a people one must abolish the previous way of life. It is important to try to understand how radical this idea is. It represents the mirror image of the kind of radical annihilation that has been practiced throughout human history. I gave an example of this in The Great Souled Man in regard to the Melians during the Peloponnesian War. Upon defeat the Melians were dispossessed of their city-state, the men were killed, the women and children were sold into slavery, and the Athenians sent five hundred colonists to occupy the city as their own. There are also the examples of mass population transfers that I discussed in The Threshold of Atrocity. A scenario based on more recent military technology might involve the use of a neutron bomb to annihilate the inhabitants of a city or region, later to be occupied by a more cooperative population.

Stalin was good to his word and installed social systems based on the Soviet system as far as the Red Army could impose a settlement.

Under the Stalin Doctrine, a population remains intact and in place, but its life is altered beyond recognition. The people remain, the bare minimum of life is intact, but the way of life is transformed — that is, transformed if this radical imposition is successful, which is rarely the case. Because where these is life, there is hope, a people is never fully defeated as long as they are alive, and they will keep alive, even if only in secret, the way of life that was taken from them by conquest. And we have seen, after the end of the Soviet Union, the re-emergence of national identities throughout regions upon which the Russians sought to impose its social system.

GeneralPlan Ost: Salvic Europe as Lebensraum for the Germans.

Stalin’s own pronouncement specifies that the victor imposes his own social system, but this is not the only possibility. The victor in a war might well seek a root-and-branch reconstruction of the former adversary’s political society in order to impose a social system unlike that of the victor, but one believed desirable to the victor’s interests. This is particular pointed in the case of the Soviet Union, since this is exactly what Nazi Germany had planned for the Lebensraum that it would “liberate” for itself in formerly Slavic regions. The Nazi’s Generalplan Ost (GPO) was to exterminate all the leadership class from Slavic regions and reduce the remaining Slavic population to essentially serf status, working on the estates of German feudal landlords, who would move into the region to colonize it. There is no reason to suppose that the Germans would not have followed through with this plan had they been victorious. Indeed, they implemented this plan to the extent that they were able under wartime conditions.

The extent to which Germany was able to impose its Generalplan Ost by fiat of the Wehrmacht.

Less well known that the Generalplan Ost was the Morgenthau Plan for Germany, originally formulated by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., that called for the partition of Germany, the internationalization of highly industrialized areas like the Saar and the Ruhr and Upper Silesia, and the de-industrialization of the remainder of the country. This was a radical and a visionary plan. It is a loss to history, as a social experiment that would have been administered by the US, that it was not carried out. As we all know, it was the Marshall Plan, and not the Morganthau Plan, that was the basis for post-war German development.

Partition of Germany under the Morganthau Plan

Perhaps the reader finds it shocking that I would say that it is a loss to history that the Morganthau Plan was not acted upon. The reduction of Germany from an industrialized nation-state to agriculturalism and pastoralism would have removed it as a major Cold War asset that the Soviets would have wanted to possess for its industry, it would have addressed the perceived threat of German militarism feared by other Europeans, and it would have brought real peace to continental Europe. Moreover, the plan would have given the Germans what they themselves wanted, though as peasants rather than as feudal lords. Recall the Generalplan Ost mentioned above, which planned for similar agriculturalism and pastoralism in formerly Slavic lands. This was an essential part of the Nazi vision of the future. The Nazis sold their plans for Germany to the German people by promising them an ideal communal society without the ugly and repulsive features of industrialized society, in a word, Volksgemeinschaft. The Germans could have had this in their own country, on their own land, and enjoyed just as much Gemütlichkeit without Slavic serfs as with them.

Marshall Plan aid to Europe

Perhaps most importantly of all, the Morganthau Plan would have given the US an opportunity to administer a visionary social plan for another people. Whether this would have proved a success or a failure, it would have conformed to twentieth century norms of megalomaniacal utopian visions of the sort pursued by the Russians under Stalin, the Germans under Hitler, and the Chinese under Mao, except that it would have been the turn of the Americans to impose their vision of what would be good for another people. I for one would have found this fascinating. Would American pragmatism and efficiency have made it possible for the Morganthau Plan to be at least partly successful? How would success or failure of the plan be judged?

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The Atomic Age turns 65

Friday

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What we now usually call the Second World War was also the First Nuclear War. Today marks 65 years since the first atomic bomb was detonated as an airburst over Hiroshima, annihilating the city in one fell swoop and marking the advent of the Atomic Age. Three days later, on 09 August 1945, a second atomic bomb eliminated Nagasaki. We have not yet had a Second Nuclear War. This in itself is remarkable, and suggests the profundity of the impact of the use of atomic weapons to end the Second World War.

The principle behind the “Little Boy” bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was sufficiently straight-forward that the scientists didn’t even bother to test the design before its employment. This is quite remarkable in this history of munitions. With a technology so new and so difficult to master, those who designed it were so confident in the scientific principles of the design and its execution that they were willing to risk their careers that the “Little Boy” bomb would work. This demonstrates the degree to which even military technology came to be driven by pure scientific research.

The “Fat Man” bomb that destroyed Nagasaki three days later was more complex in execution, and the scientists wanted a test for this. The “gadget” device that was exploded as the “Trinity” test, the first ever atomic explosion on the earth, was essentially the same design as the Fat Man bomb. Again, technological sophistication was central to the design and execution. The Fat Man design became the basic design for nuclear weapons until the advent of the hydrogen bomb a few years later. This technology is still difficult to master. With the appropriate fissile materials, a Little Boy-type bomb is not terribly difficult to build, but even given the appropriate fissile materials (which are not easy to either produce or to steal), the precision needed to implode a plutonium sphere into a nearly perfect smaller sphere still remains a formidable engineering task that could not be managed by terrorists hidden in caves.

The technology is difficult, but has since been mastered by many industrialized nation-states; the moral issues posed are more difficult still, but we cannot simply adopt the nihilistic pose and say that these issues have not been mastered in the same way. The moral problems have not in fact been mastered, but they have not been neglected either. As noted above, there has been no Second Nuclear War — at least, not yet. As a species, we have made progress. We have had the means to destroy ourselves, and we did not do so. Given all the grim “might have beens” of the twentieth century, it ought to give us hope that the world remains largely intact.

The atomic bomb was, among other things, a philosophical problem. Not long after Hiroshima and then the first hydrogen bomb test in 1952, Karl Jaspers wrote an entire book about nuclear war, The Atom Bomb and the Future of Man (later published in English simply as The Future of Mankind). Jaspers struggled mightily — and honestly — with the new problem. Many more books have followed, few as good as Jasper’s tome. Philosophical thinking about nuclear weapons and nuclear warfare has actually suffered and become less sophisticated as it has become more ideologically driven. Philosophers have created categories of evil unique to nuclear weapons, as though in verbal escalation to demonstrate their disapproval of the very existence of nuclear weapons, but they have not explained why the sudden annihilation of Hiroshima or Nagasaki is ethically worse than the greater numbers who died in the firebombing of Tokyo or Dresden.

My fellow philosophers have failed in their analyses of nuclear war and nuclear weapons by allowing themselves to become politicized, and this failure will not be redeemed until a new generation of philosophers takes up the problem, however emotionally intense, in the spirit of pure theoretical interest. I think that this will happen as conventional munitions approach the yield of nuclear weapons, which is only now beginning to happen. Nuclear weapons, in this new technological context, will no longer be a terrifying exception; they will be one technology among many in a terrifying arsenal. If we allow ourselves to be terrified, we will end our days in panic; if we use our reason to illuminate a terrifying reality, we will take charge of our destiny and demonstrate our emotional maturity.

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Seventy Years

Tuesday

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Poles watch the first German planes over Warsaw.

During the middle of the twentieth century civilization experienced a convulsion of apocalyptic proportions. The sky was filled with airplanes, the sea was filled with ships above and below, great cities were destroyed in a single night, entire populations were displaced, and millions upon millions of people were killed.

Today marks seventy years since the spiraling tensions in Europe broke out into open war with the Nazi invasion of the Poland. Today marks seventy years since the outbreak of the most destructive and bloody war in human history. Today marks seventy years since the explicit and intentional use of Blitzkrieg as a tactic.

Western Europe fell with astonishing rapidity. Despite Churchill’s early confidence that the French would hold out, it should have surprised no one when they did not. While the French were on the winning side in World War One, the conflict essentially broke them. Near the end of the First World War, a mutiny in the French trenches left France open to attack; it was only the ignorance of the Germans on the other side of the line that did not turn the mutiny into a military debacle for France. After the mutiny was put down, the French put all their energies into simply surviving until the Americans would enter the war and take the burden from them. After this, the French had little fight left in them.

The British, on the other hand, had plenty of fight, and as an island nation saved time and again from the tumult of the continent by the English Channel, they were saved by the channel again, and miraculously evacuated an army across it. This war it was the turn of the British to wait and to hang on until the Americans entered the war against Hitler and the Nazis.

Once Hitler violated the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and moved his forces into the Soviet Union, the westernmost part of Russia fell with the same rapidity as western Europe. But Russia is vast. After Stalin recovered from the initial shock of betrayal, he presided over the reconstruction of the Soviet Union’s war machine in the Russian east. And as England has been saved through its history by the English channel, the Russians have been saved throughout their history by their vast steppe and the cruel Russian winter. The early German gains in Russia faltered as the Nazis moved east, and eventually came the rest, and came to grief, at Stalingrad.

The Second World War was epic in scope: larger than life in many senses. The suffering was epic as well. There were commemorations in Poland especially as the opening theatre of the war. Poland suffered much, from beginning to end, and still carries the scars of Nazi genocide: the most notorious extermination camps operated by the Nazis were located in Poland.

The world has changed much since those traumatic six years that began seventy years ago, but the war lives on in us, with us, and for us.

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The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact Anniversary

Sunday

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Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop

No one will be “celebrating” the 70^th anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but it is an anniversary to be noted. It has also been called the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Both names deserve to be remembered in infamy. Nazism and the Soviet Union both represent the worst forms of totalitarian dictatorship to emerge in the twentieth century; that the two should form a pact was certainly a deal made in Hell. Soviet foreign minister Molotov and Nazi foreign minister Ribbentrop moreover represented what was worst in two criminal regimes, Molotov fanatically anti-Western and Ribbentrop a fanatical Nazi at times more radical than Hitler himself.

Ribbentrop signing the treaty while Molotov and Stalin watch.

W. H. Auden, who is not generally thought of as a “political” poet, wrote a poem titled September 1, 1939, which he opened:

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was certainly one of the low points in a low dishonest decade. It is easy to see, upon reflection, how those who lived through the 1930s could have seen it as a low dishonest decade, with the Great Depression, the failure of the League of Nations, Italian incursions in Africa, Japanese incursions in Manchuria, Neville Chamberlain at Munich, and the horrific systems of Soviet communism and German fascism brought to the “heights” of their development like Fleurs du mal.

Stalin and Ribbentrop shaking hands.

Wikipedia has a good article on the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, with maps of the division of Soviet and Nazi spheres of influence as defined in the secret protocols of the treaty, and scans of the signature pages signed by Molotov and Ribbentrop. Lately the BBC has had a couple of good pieces commemorating the anniversary, Pact that set the scene for war and Viewpoint: The Nazi-Soviet Pact. While it won’t make headlines, the anniversary will not go unnoticed.

The so-called “secret protocols” of the treaty dividing up Europe between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, including the complete dismemberment and disappearance of Poland, is the most notorious part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. It does not shock us so much today, partly because of 20/20 hindsight, but partly also because of our experience of the Cold War the divided Europe with the Iron Curtain for the second half of the twentieth century.

It is not unusual for ideological enemies or mere strategic rivals to divide the world between them. For many non-Westerners, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 represented the height of Western imperialist hubris in dividing up the world according to the balance of power in Europe, creating nation-states by fiat and ignoring the interests of unrepresented nations and peoples. On even larger scale than this, the Inter caetera papal bull of 1493 granted to Spain all lands to the “west and south” of a pole-to-pole line 100 leagues west and south of any of the islands of the Azores or the Cape Verde Islands, with the understanding that what remained to be discovered on the other side of the line would go to Portugal. On a rather smaller scale, the Durand Line established a frontier between the British Empire in India and Amir Abdur Rahman Khan of Afghanistan, a line that now forms the border between contemporary Pakistan and Afghanistan.

At the time of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the growing power of Nazism and communism seemed to point to a future in which the two would have to coexist and agree to disagree on almost everything. Neither imperial dream proved to be sustainable, and what seemed to be in the case in 1939 seems outrageous in 2009. No doubt Molotov and Ribbentrop were as taken in by this triumphalism as Auden was in despair over it.

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