CapitalistImperialistPig

The Nineteenth Century was the century of European hegemony. Europe and it's colonies dominated the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. The old powers of Islam and China were diminished and crumbling. Europe itself had mostly been at peace for nearly 100 years, with only localized wars. The First World War was not only an immense catastrophe in itself, but a crucial trigger of the further cataclysms that followed: the Communist Revolution and the Second World War. At the end of the war, three empires had been swept away and all of Europe was devastated in ways from which it would never recover. Margaret Macmillan's The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 traces the origins of that war in the circumstances, power politics and human folly that led to it. What if is the question that marks the beginning of practically every intellectual inquiry, and history is a wonderful source of such. There can hardly be any doubt that the war itself was a colossal blunder. Na...

After the assassination of the heir to the throne in Sarajevo by Serbian extremists, the Austrian hawks had the excuse for war that they had been clamoring for. As in the case of the 9/11 attack almost a century later, the Austrians had abetted the attackers by their reckless disregard of clear warnings. The depth of the Austrian folly can be grasped in the reaction of the chief of the general staff and principal Austrian warmonger. Conrad, who as chief of the general staff had been clamoring for war ever since the Bosnian crisis in 1908, heard the news as he changed trains in Zagreb. He wrote immediately to his beloved Gina. Serbia was clearly behind the assassinations and Austria-Hungary should have dealt with it long since. The future of the Dual Monarchy now looked grim, he went on: Russia would probably support Serbia and Rumania would have to be counted as an enemy as well. Nevertheless, he told Gina, war there must be: “It will be a hopeless struggle, but it must be pursued, ...

MacMillan on the Serbian terrorists who lit the fuse: The act which was going to send Europe on the final leg of its journey towards the Great War was the work of fanatical Slav nationalists, the Young Bosnians, and their shadowy backers in Serbia. The assassins themselves and their immediate circle were mostly young Serb and Croat peasant boys who had left the countryside to study and work in the towns and cities of the Dual Monarchy and Serbia. While they had put on suits in place of their traditional dress and condemned the conservatism of their elders, they nevertheless found much in the modern world bewildering and disturbing. It is hard not to compare them to the extreme groups among Islamic fundamentalists such as Al Qaeda a century later. Like those later fanatics, the Young Bosnians were usually fiercely puritanical, despising such things as alcohol and sexual intercourse... ... The leader of the assassination plot was a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, the slight, introverte...

The death spasms of the ancient Ottoman Empire were a major factor in precipitating World War One. That empire was dying, and much of Europe wanted a piece. Britain had grabbed Egypt, France had gobbled up several North African territories, and Russia and Austria Hungary had major ambitions in Europe. Germany wanted a piece of the African action, and so did Italy, but the most fraught struggle was in the Balkans. The major powers were not the only ones engaged in trying to gnaw off pieces of the not yet dead Ottoman corpse. Various Balkan provinces had briefly united to throw off Ottoman rule, but promptly turned on each other afterwards, each trying to grab more of the common pie. Hundreds of years of imperial rule had shaken, stirred, and mixed the various ethnicities, but rising nationalist sentiment everywhere was undoing the mix. Then, as now, every tinpot imperialist could claim to be intervening to protect their fellow Christians, Catholics, Orthodox, fellow Slavs, Serbs...

A large and influential proportion of the military leaders just prior to World War I had embraced a fantasy version of war, one founded in the tactics and strategy of Napoleon but made utterly obsolete by the machine gun, the long range rifle, and rifled artillery. They imagined a war in which the offense, the infantry and cavalry charges would be quickly decisive. “It must be accepted as a principle,” said the 1907 British cavalry manual, “that the rifle, effective as it is, cannot replace the effect produced by the speed of the horse, the magnetism of the charge, and the terror of cold steel.” There was talk too of breeding stronger and faster horses to gallop quicker across the fire zone. Attack, battles, a war itself, all were to be fast and, crucially, short. “The first great battle,” an officer told the French parliament in 1912, “will decide the whole war, and wars will be short. The idea of offense must penetrate the spirit of our nation.” Macmillan, Margaret (2013-10-29)...

Organized movements to warn against war developed and grew in the decades before World War I. Prescient individuals from Alfred Nobel to the elder Field Marshall von Moltke foresaw the catastrophic effects of war with modern weapons. These movements were a counter current to the growing militarism of the age, and a reaction to arms race that gripped all of Europe and beyond. Their reach was not uniform, however. The German peace movement never had more than about 10,000 members, who were drawn mainly from the lower middle classes. Unlike Britain, for example, it did not attract eminent professors, leading businessmen or members of the aristocracy. Where senior clergy supported the British or American movements, in Germany the churches generally denounced it on the grounds that war was part of God’s plan for mankind. 25 Nor did liberals take the lead in supporting peace in Germany as they did in other countries such as Britain and France. Macmillan, Margaret (2013-10-29). The War ...

100 and some years ago. The last part of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth saw an upsurge in terrorism across Europe, especially in France, Russia and Spain, and in the United States. Often inspired by anarchism which saw all forms of social and political organization as tools of oppression, or simply by nihilism, terrorists set off explosions, hurled bombs, stabbed and shot, frequently with spectacular success. Between 1890 and 1914 they murdered, among others, Sadi Carnot, the President of France, two Prime Ministers of Spain, Antonio Cánovas in 1897 and José Canalejas in 1912, King Umberto of Italy, President McKinley in the United States (whose assassin was inspired by Umberto’s murder), Empress Elisabeth of Austria, the Russian statesman Stolypin and the Grand Duke Sergei, an uncle of the Tsar. Their victims were not only the powerful and the prominent: bombs dropped into the audience at a performance of William Tell in Barcelona killed twenty-nine and a bomb ...

It would be hard to think of any academic thinkers whose thought wrought greater destruction than Marx and Nietzsche (note that I leave out religious leaders and politicians). These words of Nietzsche, for example: In the coming century, there would be a “new party of life” which would take humanity to a higher level, “including the merciless destruction of everything that is degenerate and parasitical.” Life, he said, is “appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity …” Quoted by Macmillan, Margaret (2013-10-29). The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (Kindle Locations 4921-4923). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. MacMillan adds: The young Serbian nationalists who carried out the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and so precipitated the Great War were deeply impressed by Nietzsche’s views... ...Part of Nietzsche’s appeal was that it was easy to read a great deal into his work, and people including socialists, vegetarians...

After its crushing defeat of France in 1870, the newly united nation of Germany became the most important European power. It's long rival France, was now smaller, weaker and less economically dynamic and was not only beaten but profoundly isolated due to the long enmity with Britain and Russia, and Bismark made it his business to keep France weak and isolated. The other power, the Austro Hungarian Empire, was ally. Kaiser Wilhelm II fired Bismark, and made Alfred Tirpitz head of his navy. Together they embarked on an ambitious ship building program designed to be able to confront Britain on the high seas. This, together with some other slights and rivalries deeply angered the British, who countered with their own ship building program. Meanwhile, the Kaiser's new Chancellor let the old treaty with Russia expire. France exploited the moment to settle its differences with both Russia and Britain, forming the so-called Entente Cordial. [British Prime Minister] Lloyd Geor...

Where today the international community sees failed or failing states as a problem, in the age of imperialism the powers saw them as an opportunity. China, the Ottoman Empire, Persia, all were weak, divided, and apparently ready to be carved up. So was Morocco, which was becoming increasingly anarchic by 1900. The death of the strong and capable Sultan Hassan I in 1894 had left it in the hands of a teenager, Abdelaziz. “He is not bad looking, but podgy and puffy; good features and good clear eyes,” said Arthur Nicolson, stationed there as a British diplomat. “He didn’t look unhealthy, but like a boy who ate too much.” 50 Abdelaziz proved unable to keep control of his subjects. While his administration grew increasingly corrupt, powerful regional leaders asserted their independence, pirates attacked merchants along the coasts and bandits raided caravans in the interior and kidnapped the rich for ransom. Late in 1902 a rebellion threatened to topple the whole rickety regime. Macmillan, ...

The relatively new nation of Germany was eager to take its place among the colonial powers. What Weltpolitik actually meant in terms of concrete policies was another matter. As Field Marshal Count von Waldersee, who commanded the European forces suppressing the Boxer Rebellion, wrote in his diary when the idea first started to circulate widely: “We are supposed to pursue Weltpolitik. If I only knew what that is supposed to be; for the time being it is nothing but a slogan.” 30 It did seem, though, to imply that Germany acquire its fair share of colonies. [German historian and nationalistic prophet] Treitschke certainly argued so. “All nations in history,” he said in his lectures, “felt the urge to impress the stamp of their authority on barbaric countries while they felt strong enough to do so.” And Germany was now strong enough; its high birth rate was evidence of German vitality. Yet Germany was cutting a poor figure by comparison with Britain and other empires: “It is therefore a v...

The manifold blunders that led to World War I have filled many a book, but in Margaret McMillan's version, the Kaiser gets first place. He was apparently intelligent, even intellectual, but he was also a nitwit, utterly lacking in the character of a a good leader. He was lazy and impetuous, and lacked perspective, judgement, and self-restraint. Combine grandiosity with lack of common sense and many evils promptly follow.

I have been criticized, and indeed mocked, for suggesting that personal pique could play a major role in international affairs - in particular, Netanyahu's repeated disrespecting of the American President. Margaret MacMillan, in her examination of the causes of World War I, pays some attention to the human factors which led to the gradual deterioration of relations between Britain and Germany, including rude and angry letters between their respective sovereigns, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Queen Victoria (his grandmother). Official quarrels of little import became magnified by annoyed public opinion. Samoa, for example, was a crisis that need not have happened because no great national interests were at stake. Yet it proved unnecessarily difficult to resolve because of public agitation, especially in Germany. “For even though the great majority of our pothouse politicians did not know whether Samoa was a fish or a fowl or a foreign queen,” said Eckardstein, “they shouted all the more ...

Winston Churchill: We have engrossed to ourselves, in a time when other powerful nations were paralysed by barbarism or internal war, an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us. Macmillan, Margaret (2013-10-29). The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (Kindle Locations 1332-1336). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

It can be argued that modern European civilization reached its apex in the earliest years of the Twentieth Century. It was a high point of European power, confidence and culture. European science and technology had outstripped anything achieved by the other great civilizations. Most of the world had either been colonized or dominated by Europe. The only really important exception was Europe's overseas cousin in the thoroughly Europeanized United States. Technology and military power were not the only elements of its dominance. Europe proclaimed and probably mostly believed that its conquest of much of the rest of the world was bringing the benefits of their allegedly "higher" civilization to more benighted peoples everywhere. The industrial revolution of coal, steam, and their associated technology had propelled it to dominance, and new advances like electricity and the use of petroleum seemed certain to push progress farther and faster. Few Europeans probably kn...