World War II scholars need to be careful

Actually all historians and scholars need to be careful to be accurate, obviously, and to speculate responsibly. However the fascination and horror regarding Hitler, Pearl Harbor and the entire World War II events, especially the Holocaust, has particular temptations to be less than logical or factual.

This is on my mind because I heard a brief interview with Pat Buchanan on CNN about his controversial new book that speculates about how World War II could have been avoided. I think it is always useful to look at historical events from different perspectives and engage in responsible "what if" thinking. In this case Mr. Buchanan was focused on England's actions in committing to protecting Poland due to a treaty. Now, I've not read the book, obviously, and I'm not likely to since I tend not to read most political or speculative history books; they just aren't my thing. So I'm not going to jump to any conclusions about what Mr. Buchanan says on the whole. But I want to teach, as part of my series on logical thinking and tools for better scholarship, people how to engage in the most productive scholarship, such as book writing, and being a "consumer," such as reading such a book.

One thing you have to remember that most of those who lived during the times that led up to World War II are long dead. But I grew up and was educated in school when many average citizens had first hand knowledge and experience of the times that led up to the war. These insights have been preserved and taught. But there is a temptation to be "revisionist" in history in the course of pursuing valid attempts at "new insights." You need to be careful to build your "new insights" on top of the solid scholarship and first hand testimony of what happened, however, not as a substitute.

It is common knowledge that World War II happened in large part because of the damage and hard feelings that resulted from World War I. Responsible history classes cover this in great detail, but I can't be sure what they are teaching in the schools today though *sigh.* So here is some general but first hand information that everyone needs to understand when either producing or enjoying written or visual works about World War II.

World War I was "the first" in many ways. It wasn't just the first world war, the definition of which is a war that pulls in many countries into active conflict, rather that being between two combatants. It was the first war that used "attrition" as a strategy, which is to kill off as many of each other as possible. Before then battles took place as individual strategies and wars were conducted based on conquering and defeating individual units of military or population centers. People planned to conquer city X or defeat army unit B. In World War I the armies dug into land that had no significance at all and then slaughtered each other for days on end, piling up bodies by the thousands. This had never been seen before in human history. An entire generation of British men died in World War I, as did many Germans and French. So World War I brought the idea of a war of attrition (who kills the others the most) into reality.

The second way that WWI was a "first" is that technology became a tool for conducting this attrition. While guns and artillery existed before then, they became more predominant, the advantage of airplanes started to emerge but most of all, war stopped being between "gentlemen" or "officers" and ethics went out the window with the introduction of poison gas. There used to be an ethics of war. But with the concept of the war of attrition, atrocities such as poison gas became vehicles for conducting slaughter. Men were horribly killed and maimed and feelings were very hard and angry as a result, understandably. Germans thought they were "leveling the field" by using poison gas to make up for having less artillery and other resources. It was a horrible mistake.

The third way that WWI was a "first" was that it was the first war to be fought for no reason. It erupted after an assassination of a minor noble because many countries had a complex set of treaties that forced each other to come to the aid of someone somewhere in the food chain if an event occurred. So this ridiculous and horrible war erupted for no reason whatsoever; not to conduct a national strategy (like go after oil), or because of ethnic/racial tensions, or because of a border conflict, or as a land grab, or to overthrow a dictator... there was no reason whatsoever.

The fourth way that WWI was a "first" was that feelings were so high and the indignation so fierce that when Germany was defeated and surrendered it was punished on a scale that had also never been seen in modern warfare. The terms of surrender were deliberately humiliating and made to crush with financial burden the average citizen of Germany, right down to the peasantry. So not only was the country defeated but the entire populace was punished. This is all documented and factual and has been covered in books, the classroom and even PBS types of programming. I'm not giving a great insight here but teaching those who have never had a chance to learn about this in the classroom. Germans were humiliated and crushed under "war reparations" and punishment so that the average citizen suffered enormously, even though they had nothing to do with this stupid war in the first place. A terrible inflation took place in the 1930's and I have members of my family that told me what it was like. The money was totally worthless. It would take a wheelbarrow of money to buy one loaf of bread (and that's literally, not a figure of speech). No one could afford toilet paper so they used the money bills as sheets of toilet paper. They could not afford wallpaper so they pasted money to the walls when they had to patch an area. I have in storage a few of these like "million marks" bills that my family had kept from those times. The defeated citizens of Germany suffered and seethed.

It is those reasons that led to people listening to the dangerous bum Hitler who never would have listened to him otherwise. Hitler tapped into the suffering of the people and their zero self-esteem in order to build them up in this Teutonic superhero image. It's much like what kids do today when they pretend to be superheroes in video games except Hitler convinced an entire people that they too were meant to be superheroes, and not the humiliated and degraded conquered people that they were as a result of their defeat in World War I. This is a well known fact and was taught in many classrooms, including those I attended as a child and later as a college student, and it was taught as a cautionary tale about what happens if you humiliate a defeated people. You better be careful because they will come back with a vengeance and look for someone to blame and kick back in return for the kicking that they have received.

Carl Jung found a way to describe this in his psychoanalytical and mythological terms. Jung argued that the people self hypnotized themselves into being "possessed" by the Norse god Wotan. This is a perfectly valid, though not terribly useful, way to view how the defeated German brains were receptive to Hitler's mental video game of the Teutonic superhero. I say it is not helpful because it does not inform public policy matters in a practical way. We don't really need to know just what brain circuits and emotional buttons Hitler pressed. Those circuits and buttons would not have been there if the factors I listed above that preceded Hitler in World War I had not happened: a war of attrition of millions of deaths, poison gas and the abandonment of wartime ethics, going to war without a cause due to mindlessly following alliances and treaties, and punishing the populace after the defeat of their government and military.

So any "analysis" of the "cause" of Hitler and World War II would be totally inaccurate if it is not building on top of the facts that I have explained above. It's not like there was a decision or an event that was a sliding door about World War II and the Holocaust, "yes" or "no." World War II was a direct continuation of the breakdown of military ethos that took place in World War I. The concept of being "a gentleman" and "battlefield ethics" and "justifiable war" fell completely apart in World War I. Once there was "no holds barred" warfare, as in World War I, that laid the field for the exponential horrors of World War II with one difference. The battlefield in World War II cleaned up (no poison gas, no slaughters as military strategy) in Europe, but it was Japan's turn to have a breakdown of their military ethos, causing the horrors that they perpetrated in the Pacific theater of World War II. So basically Japan had the mental breakdown of military ethics in World War II that Europe had in World War I. In Europe the breakdown of the military ethos became a breakdown of civilian ethos, where Hitler tapped the humiliated and bankrupt people of German to turn on each other and their neighboring countries. So for Europe World War I broke the military "code of conduct" and World War II was "revenge upon the innocent" and therefore the breakdown of civilization "code of conduct." So you can see Germany obeying Geneva conventions and having military POW camps while at the same time tearing all sense of decency apart through the invasion and oppression of other countries for "elbow room" as they called it and the internal and external Holocaust.

Remember that Hitler killed the weak and disabled (both mentally and physically) first. People who lose their moral balance and are trying to "uplift" themselves tend to do it by feeling "superior" by raising themselves up and pushing "someone else" down. That's human nature, where someone with issues will tend to pull down someone around them in order to feel better than themselves. But this was on a monstrous scale because as I explained World War I broke the military ethos and code of conduct, which then allowed the breakdown of "gentlemanly" or "civilized" behavior. Remember that Hitler sneered at civilization, as he turned the country away from the bastions of civilizations (church and code of conduct) and toward the past, which is paganistic beliefs. Pagans killed the weak in sacrifice too. So Hitler started by killing the weak, the "flawed" (physically disabled, mentally disabled, and 'undesirables' such as homosexuals) and the religious. So he killed Catholics and Jews alike. Hitler leveraged prejudice but in a way that was designed to raise the German psyche up from the mud and become some sort of purified pagan superhero. Jews were persecuted in a large part because they were part of the fabric of civilization. Jews were "cultured" pious and venerated learning, even if they were of the peasantry. Hitler sought to smash all vestiges of "civilization" just as World War I had done so on the battlefield. He felt that he could turn the dial back to a "purer" time, but what he was doing was going to a pre-civilization time of paganistic "values." This is why it is so VERY dangerous to think that because something is "older" or to put it in haughty language "more ancient" that it is better. People who want to do that for "spiritual" reasons are usually doing so so that they can throw off some sort of civilized boundary that is chaffing them. Hitler very successfully promoted and enforced a national delusion as a result that had very real and terrible consequences. Whenever someone asks "Why did this happen to the Jews?" they are asking the wrong question. Remember that he closed down Catholic schools, seminaries and churches too, and killed the priests in their own concentration camp area. If Buddhists were there he would have done it to them too. Hitler was seeking a pre-ethos and pre-civilized time, thinking that the nation could tap into it as a vengeful way to strike back as superheros against those who had defeated them in World War I.

Well, I hope this helps. I really wonder what the schools actually ARE teaching students nowadays, but that's a different subject. This has been a problem for a long time. I remember that my niece who graduated from high school in the 1980's asked me and my ex-husband "what a Jew is." She honestly did not know what they were. She managed to graduate from high school without knowing that a Jew is a follower of the religion of Judaism. Yes, the answer was as simple as that. She did not know that "Jewish" is a "religion." So I guess in some ways what they are teaching today must be better than the 1980's except that where they have the facts and international exposure better nowadays, people are teaching who have no understanding of the development of human civilization and probably view it as a whole politically incorrect topic anyway. What a mess.