Fra:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lind/lind103.html
A bright young man who served on a panel with me at an
intelligence conference earlier this year said during a break,
"A lot of us read your On War columns, but there are two
things we don?t get. We don?t get your dislike of technology
and we don?t get the Prussian monarchy stuff." Readers
interested in the former may turn to my piece in an early
issue of The American Conservative. But with the shadow of
1914 looming ever larger over us, I thought this might be a
good time to explain "the Prussian monarchy stuff."
Of course, like all real conservatives, I am a monarchist. The
universe is not a republic. My specific attachment to the
House of Hohenzollern grew as I began to comprehend the
Prussian/German way of war, and its vast difference from the
Franco/American approach. Maneuver warfare, aka Third
Generation war, was created and developed under the Prussian
monarchy; it was conceptually complete by 1918. That is not a
mere accident of history. The Prussian monarchy was willing to
trust its officer corps, and allow officers who were difficult
subordinates to rise, to a far greater degree than most other
governments. It understood that Prussia, a poor country,
needed to be rich intellectually, including in ideas about
war. There was an intimate connection between the Prussian
virtues, which have vanished from the Brave New Federal
Republic, and the evolution of maneuver warfare. Old Kaiser
Wilhelm I represented those virtues well; though Emperor of
Germany, when he wanted to go somewhere, he went down to the
railway station and bought a ticket.
Given the centrality of maneuver warfare to my work, this
might be explanation enough. But there is more. As both a
cultural conservative and an historian, I realize that the
last chance of survival our Western, Christian civilization
may have had was a victory by the Central Powers in World War
I.
To most non-historians, World War I is a vague and distant
memory, faded photographs of guys in tin hats standing around
in mud-filled trenches. In fact, it was one of two cataclysmic
disasters of Western civilization in the Modern period (the
other was the French Revolution). In 1914, the West put a gun
to its collective head and blew its brains out. No, it wasn?t
the fault of Kaiser Wilhelm II, whom history has treated most
unfairly. As Colonel House wrote to President Woodrow Wilson
after meeting with the Kaiser in 1915, it is clear he neither
expected not wanted war. A World War became inevitable when
Tsar Nicholas II, not Kaiser Wilhelm, very reluctantly yielded
to the demands of his War and Foreign Ministers and declared
general mobilization instead of mobilization against Austria
alone.
Once war occurred, and the failure of the Schlieffen Plan
guaranteed it would be a long war, a disaster for Western
civilization was inevitable. Still, had the Central Powers won
in the end, the civilization destruction might not have been
so complete. There would have been no Communism, nor a
republic in Russia; a victorious Germany would have never
tolerated it, and unlike the Western Allies, Germany was
positioned geographically to do something about it. Hitler
would have remained a non-entity. Prior to World War I, the
best major European countries in which to be Jewish were
Germany and Austria; Kaiser Wilhelm would never have allowed a
Dreyfus Affair in Germany. The vast Jewish communities of
Central and Eastern Europe would have held their traditional
places in multi-nation-empires, instead of becoming aliens in
new nation-states. It should not surprise us that in World War
I, American Jews attempted to raise a regiment to fight for
Germany.
Even more importantly, the Christian conservatism ? more
accurately, perhaps, traditionalism ? represented by the
Central Powers would have been greatly strengthened by their
victory. Instead, the fall of the German, Austro-Hungarian and
Russian monarchies let the poisons of the French Revolution
loose unchecked upon the West, and upon the world. The Marxist
historian Arno Mayer is correct in arguing that in 1914, the
United States represented (as a republic, with France) the
international left, while by 1919 it was organizing the
international right. America had not changed; the spectrum had
shifted around it.
Thus, when Americans and Europeans wonder today how and why
the West lost its historic culture, morals and religion, the
ultimate answer is the Allied victory in 1918. Again, the fact
that World War I occurred is the greatest disaster. But once
that had happened, the last chance the West had of retaining
its traditional culture was a victory by the Central Powers.
The question should not be why I, as a cultural conservative,
remain loyal to the two Kaisers, Wilhelm II and Franz Josef,
but how a real conservative could do anything else.
Nor is this all quite history. Just as the defeat of the
Central Powers in 1918 marked the tipping point downward of
Western civilization and the real beginning of the murderous
Twentieth Century, so events in the Middle East today may mark
the beginnings of the 21st Century and, not so much the death
of the West, which has already occurred, but its burial. The
shadows of 1914, and of 1918, are long indeed, and they end in
Old Night.
Note: In response to an earlier column, a reader asked for
recommendations of some books on the fin de siecle and Kaiser
Wilhelm II. From the military perspective, the two best works
on the former are Barbara Tuchman?s The Guns of August and
Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn?s August 1914. The most balanced
biography in English of Kaiser Wilhelm II is The Last Kaiser:
The Life of Wilhelm II by Giles MacDonogh.
--
If you want to make someone angry, tell him a lie; if you want
to make him furious, tell him the truth.