Let's turn to another historical example a little more recent. And we've talked through this subject before, but it is certainly a fruitful one, and I wanted to approach it from another angle. To begin with, our wise pundits love to exclaim with wide eyes that the World Wars changed everything and that the modern world was built upon the aftermath of those earth-shattering events. This is the point at which you raise a salty eyebrow and say, "Mmhmm yes very interesting, but do please go on."
The claim is quite true in a basic sense. But many commentators like to dance about on the surface phenomena, to wring some interest from them and some entertainment, before quickly moving on to another surface topic without addressing the underlying movements that gave rise to those surface phenomena, and which, as it happens, continue to give rise to the phenomena we experience today, and more pointedly, are things we are still collectively responsible for and should be more directly concerned about and addressing.
We've talked here of the utter desperation of geopolitical relations in the course of WW1. Here I want to talk more about that desperation, what it led to, and the ensuing consequences, particularly in light of the destruction of the three major empires in that calamity: the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. I'll also touch on the economic destruction of Germany and some of those consequences, bleeding over into WWII.
In terms of the scope of this post, I'll focus less on conditions that led to the World Wars: in simplified brief, we had the usual extreme tensions built up by rapidly expanding imperial empires coming up against each others' boundaries and interests, coupled with the grinding abuse and destruction of their own respective populations and the populations they preyed upon, which made for a powder keg that was set off by the assassination of the Arch Duke, that explosion vastly amplified by the self-reinforcing entangling alliance system, which brought all of the manifold tensions and explosive dislocations in direct contact with each other and sustained against each other.
We've previously got into the desperate and apocalyptic process set in motion by that complex of catastrophes, so this time I want to get into the aftermath and the consequences of that process.
So much good work has been done on the origins of the post-war geopolitical structures of modernity, so I'll just summarize some of that here. We're well-acquainted with the carving up of the Ottoman Empire after WW1, and we have witnessed the consequences of drawing up artificial state lines over the agglomerations of the many ethnic and tribal groups in the region, consequences which have been crashing onto nightly news headlines for decades now, though the intensity of these conflicts have shifted to Eastern Europe for now, which we'll get to in a moment.
As ruling hegemon, Britain made all kinds of promises - many of them contradicting each other - to its various allies about future spoils from dismembering the weakened Ottoman Empire, which everyone knew was troubled, in order to hold together that fragile coalition during the desperate years of the war and drive wedges into the Ottoman Empire itself. For example, they made various conflicting promises to Arab nationalists, the French, and the Zionists about claims within that region.
And these were promises addressing the many harms inflicted by the colonial system: the French were promised fresh colonial spoils in the Levant after being taken through the ringer in the war. And then the Arab nationalists and Zionists were all clamoring for states of their own to protect themselves from the depredations wrought on minority and disfavored ethnic groups within their respective empires.
The free trade internationalists love to bellyache about the evils of a contagious and spreading nationalist fervor - which does pose very serious problems - while all the while exploiting to oblivion through arbitrage the many societies they straddle, bringing about the clamor for national representation in the first place. Like nuclear weaponry, nationalistic fervor can really take off after that first atom is split, especially when socio-political conditions are right.
All those different ethnic groups under duress: who is to be given the state and the power, given its tendency in localized concentration in the dominant ethnic groups of imperial powers? Well through horse-trading apparently, with the spoils going to whomever is invited to the table through the machinations of the reigning powers. Almost as bad as monarchical succession probably! But ah, democracy.
So what of the Russian Empire? The stress of the first World War stretched that nation to its breaking point, and reacting to that same stress, the Germans were all too willing to tip it right past that point, regardless of what consequences may transpire. Now, this is a vast oversimplification, but an all too delicious historical instance to point out to a contemporary German leadership who are willing to oversee their own industrial destruction to hold back the evil encroaching Russian hordes, who are still falsely believed by Germany and the rest of the West to be faithfully retrieving the torch of the fallen Soviet Union and soldiering on with it, ostensibly to roll right over and enslave them, achieving their revenge.
What historical instance am I referring to? None other than the desperate Germans' enthusiastic delivery of Lenin by train back to Russia so that he could foment revolution there and destabilize their enemy, resulting eventually in the rise of the eternal bogeyman of the collective West: the Soviet Union, a complex of antagonisms (both real and imagined) that is now driving the global crisis of realignment we witness today.
Finally we have the Austro Hungarian Empire, whose dismantling seeded the Balkan conflicts of recent history, and which continue to fester. In hopes of wrapping up the post, I'll have to give that particular dissolution short shrift and move on to Germany.
We know all too well that Germany was saddled heavily with war debt, destroying it economically and humiliating it politically, eventually leading to the rise of Hitler and commencement of round 2; a cautionary tale. Though the popular telling of the story was that much of this punishment was attributable to the spiteful French. To an extent, the French did have an axe to grind after their heavy losses on the Western Front, but there was more going on here of course.
Less covered territory has to do with the fact that part of Germany's destruction could be attributed to the global financial realignment taking place in favor of a rising US economic hegemony. The US had refused to the customary writing down of its allies' war debts during the war, and so the natural thing for the allies to do was to launder those debts through Germany, turning the loser of the war into the whipping boy to carry the water for them so to speak. At the same time, they sought to punish Germany further - and protect their own industrial recoveries alongside the protectionist US - by raising tariffs and engaging in protectionist policy, so that Germany was unable to properly repay the debts through trade, and so it was forced to print, leading to that hyperinflationary nightmare we are warned every 3 seconds about by the economic establishment, hopefully to stave off those thoughtcrimes that we harbor that perhaps...we could just print money for social spending and stimulate demand?
Here I can insert another instance of that monetary superstition we have talked about, the treatment of debt as sacred and the refusal of its negotiation, and the deep religious (or quasi-religious anyway) relationship to money that drives those arrangements, even in the face of the total destruction of a nation. And then the West, after having created its Frankenstein monster, could put it back in the ground and pat itself on the back for nearly a century afterward.
We can also tie back in that bleeding ulcer that continues to bedevil the modern world today: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yes, Hitler was a monster and deserves his toxic reputation as eternal archetypal Villain, and he and the Nazis were going to do what they were going to do given Nazi ideology, but it isn't much talked about that his Final Solution was named as such for good reason (as an aside, there was similar language of a "Final Solution" to the "Indian question" in the US after a series of catastrophic military failures and diplomatic relations with the indigenous people at the time).
Extreme hostility to the Jews was embedded in the Nazi DNA, but despite their harsh rhetoric from the beginning, a series of less extreme measures to expel the Jews from Europe was attempted, which was steadily ratcheted up as the war became more desperate, until plans for the Final Solution were drawn up alongside the plans for Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. Before the war, there were attempts carried out to emigrate large amounts of Jews to places like the United States, which refused a lot of them due to the harsh conditions of the Great Depression and the accompanying desperation and xenophobia there.
Things gradually escalated, with a particularly bizarre and cruel plan by the Nazis to expel the Jews to Madagascar where they would live under a police state run by the SS. That plan too fell through, and measures continued to escalate as WWII dragged on. Part of Operation Barbarossa was meant to establish the conquered Soviet Union as a place to relocate the Jews, and as that horrific invasion grinded on, mass exterminations were carried out by the marauding Nazis. The Final Solution culminated with a resort to the extermination camps within Nazi territory after the fighting with the Russians bogged down and grew ever more uncertain, foreclosing on the possibility of getting Jewish populations out of Nazi controlled regions.
Which consequently vastly intensified the desperation of the Zionists as they carried out their scorched earth campaigns to raze the Palestinian lands to the ground in order to reclaim them, which goes on today, as we are well aware of.
But ah, "never again," and "never forget." Stern words indeed. That image of the "greatest generation" rising to meet the unprecedented challenges of their time makes for good TV and cinema - and certainly some of it had some basis to it - only if the less attractive elements of that totality are left out, which isn't the best habit to go by at the moment, seeing as how we're still struggling within that very state of affairs.
