Sunday 25 November 2012
Wednesday 21 November 2012
Top ten most f*cked up things about the Battle of Stalingrad
This was originally an idea of mine for a Cracked.com post, but for some reason it wasn't chosen for publication, partly to do with all its information coming from a history book instead of online sources apparently (God we're getting too reliant on the internet these days aren't we). It's inspired by what might just be my favourite ever book 'Stalingrad' by Antony Beevor. It's an amazing read, I can't recommend it highly enough. The nightmare that was the Battle of Stalingrad, the pivotal turning point of WW2, is a tale not told often enough.
You’ve probably heard of the Battle of Stalingrad, but you may not know that it claimed about ten times as many lives as the Normandy Invasion and was vastly more pivotal in deciding WW2. The fighting between the juggernaut that was the German 6th Army, the largest military formation in the world at the time, aided by the powerful German Luftwaffe against the outnumbered defenders of the Russian 62nd Army in the heart of the city reached a level of brutality perhaps never before witnessed in human history. The Soviet counter-offensive three months later, trapping and eventually annihilating the entire Sixth Army and dealing Hitler his most crushing defeat of the war, has gone down in history as quite possibly the most epic fail of all time. Ever wondered what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? Read on.
#10. Striving for intoxication
The Russian strategy in a nutshell
There may have been times when you’ve felt stressed and wanted nothing more than to get down to the pub and have a few beers after a long, hard day at work, but that’s NOTHING compared to the desperation of the soldiers fighting at Stalingrad. The Vodka ration, theoretically 100 grams a day, was often not delivered and was almost never enough anyway. Soldiers drank antifreeze, industrial and surgical alcohol and basically anything else that might intoxicate them to try and forget the living hell they were fighting in. Many soldiers were poisoned or blinded and some even died afterwards. Tobacco too was heavily valued with most Russian soldiers smoking constantly in battle.
Local civilians attempted to barter with soldiers from both sides with every kind of improvised alcohol imaginable, even a spirit made from milk. This proved quite dangerous for some however; on one occasion the Soviet NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs; i.e. the secret police) sentenced two women to ten years each in the Gulag for trading alcohol and tobacco to soldiers in exchange for parachute silk to make underclothes.
#9. Being in the 13th Guards Rifle Division
Pretty much how sh*t went down.
You may have heard of these guys if you’ve ever seen the film ‘Enemy at the Gates’ or played the Russian campaign in Call of Duty. Both start with a scene of utter epicness where a boatload of soldiers crosses the Volga River into the burning inferno that is Stalingrad, all the while under attack from German Stuka dive bombers and machine guns as a Soviet officer proudly proclaims the superiority of the Red Army over the Germans, saying they ‘can’t even bring us a proper fight’. Of the 10,000 men who began crossing the Volga on September 14th 1942, over half were dead within a few days and only about 300 survived the battle. Many went across with no training or ammunition.
That’s right, these poor f*ckers.
The saddest part though, is that what happened to the 13th Guards was hardly atypical. The average life expectancy of Russian soldiers fighting in Stalingrad often dropped below 24 hours. That’s right, as in your unit has 1000 men one day, and less than 500 the next. Thousands of soldiers died simply crossing the Volga into Stalingrad. One craft received 436 bullet and shell holes after a single crossing and on more than one occasion disembarking troops would land right in the middle of a minefield along the river’s banks, yet still the Russians held on. Makes Band of Brothers and Rambo look pretty goddamn tame doesn’t it?
#8. Kickass, killer women
What? You thought westerners just made sh*t like this up?
We’ve all seen M*A*S*H right? So we know the only role of women in warfare is as buxom nurses hanging out a few miles behind the front lines, assisting the brave male doctors at their leisure and just generally sounding kind and sitting pretty right? End of story?
WRONG. There’s some truth to the conventional wisdom that the western world always used to oppress women while empowering men. But in Soviet Russia, everyone was equally oppressed; meaning women could be sent in to do the dirtiest of work just as easily as men.
YOU FEEL LUCKY PUNK???
Take Zinaida Gavrielova, an eighteen-year-old medical student. What was she busy doing in 1942? If you guessed hanging around some fraternity in Moscow dating boys and fretting over what she should wear to the Prom, then you guessed wrong. She was head of the Russian 62nd Army’s hundred-strong ‘sanitary company’. Their job consisted of crawling forward under heavy fire to rescue wounded soldiers and dragging or carrying them back to the Volga bank to be sent across to field hospitals.
Or take Gulya Koroleva, a twenty year old, who left her baby son home in Moscow to volunteer as a nurse. During the Battle of Stalingrad she was credited with having ‘brought over a hundred wounded soldiers back from the front line and killed fifteen fascists herself’. She was awarded the Order of the Red Banner... posthumously.
Women served in many different roles in the battle on the Russian side, including as pilots, anti-aircraft gunners and surgeons. Basically any role that wasn’t a frontline infantryman, though the intensity of the fighting often rendered this distinction moot. However the Germans never utilized the ‘fairer sex’ in such a way, with women only working as nurses near the frontlines and only rarely working in German factories even though millions did in Russian factories. The bottom line is that sexism may actually have lost the Nazis WW2.
#7. The NKVD
How do you convince a million Russian peasants to fight and die against hopeless odds in a living hell like Stalingrad? With the Russian secret police of course.
The NKVD was like a second Soviet army, with 54 entire divisions by the end of the war. Their purpose was to maintain discipline, police occupied and rear-areas and basically shoot anyone the Communist party didn’t like, which during the epitome of paranoia that coincided with the fighting at Stalingrad could mean even looking at a superior the wrong way. The NKVD carried out a grand total of 13,500 executions, both summary and judicial, during the five months the fighting raged at Stalingrad. Some heinous crimes meriting execution included-
- Retreating without orders
- Self-inflicted wounds
- Corruption
- Desertion or crossing-over to the enemy
- Attempting to surrender
- Failing to shoot at any comrades trying to desert or surrender
- Being in command of any troops which had deserted
With friends like these…
The list of examples is endless. One senior Lieutenant captured by the Germans in August shortly before the Battle of Stalingrad managed to escape his captors and made the arduous journey back to Russian lines, where he was immediately arrested as a ‘deserter’ for having previously surrendered and sent to a remote penal company. Another Lieutenant was shot because two men in his platoon had deserted even though he’d only joined their regiment five days before and barely knew them. A Soviet pilot who bailed out of his burning plane tore up his Communist Party card immediately upon landing because he thought he had come down behind German lines. On his return to base his commissar accused him of cowardice even though Soviet propaganda emphasized that the Germans executed Communists on the spot. A civilian in a training battalion behind the lines was quickly denounced by his fellow recruits for saying that they would ‘freeze and starve when winter came’ and immediately arrested by the NKVD. Soldiers were shot even for stating the obvious to their comrades like ‘Soviet propaganda lies to raise morale in the army’ or for spreading ‘fascists statements’ like saying ‘collective farm workers were like slaves’. Soldiers could even be punished merely for picking up German propaganda leaflets (dropped by air) and using them to role up into cigarettes.
#6. The Feldgendarmerie
Amateurs…
The Nazis had many different military/police/espionage organizations during WW2. Alongside or within the overall German military, the Wehrmacht, you had the Army, the Heer, Germany’s secret police forces, the Gestapo, and the Nazi Party’s personal guard, the Schutzstaffel (or SS) whose armed component was called the Waffen-SS and intelligence agency the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). However the main committer, or failing that facilitator, of war crimes in the Stalingrad area was the German military police, the Feldgendarmerie. Even out here in southern Russia, more than 2,000km from Berlin, Jews from Stalingrad were forced to wear a yellow star on their sleeve and anyone found to be a member of the Communist party was handed over to the SD. The Russians claim that during the Battle of Stalingrad alone some 3,000 civilians were shot by the Germans and 60,000 deported to Germany, mainly as slave labour.
Massacres behind the lines, even of children, were commonplace. Local rarely went undisturbed by the Germans when under their occupation. Farmers were tortured to find out where they’d hidden their grain and if necessary the Germans didn’t think twice of throwing civillians out of their homes to use them as their own quarters, or even dismantling their homes to use as firewood out on the barren steppe.
Later on after the German encirclement Feldgendarmerie units often had to resort to using their sub-machine guns to maintain order as thousands of decrepit German stragglers tried to escape their predicament at the few remaining airfields still held by the 6th Army. After the 6th Army’s surrender, the Feldgendarmerie knew they were in grave danger as they were high priority targets for the Soviet NKVD to capture, and more often than not execute on the spot.
#5. Being a civilian
‘Their goes the neighbourhood’…ok no, that’s just too lame a joke isn’t it?
There’s no doubt that soldiers had a tough time of it in Stalingrad, but their suffering often paled in comparison to the city’s civilian population. In 1942 Stalingrad was home to about 750,000 people, or around the same size as Oklahoma City. While 300,000 civilians were evacuated during the first three weeks of the battle many tens of thousands remained trapped on the west bank of the Volga to struggle amid the fighting for the next five-months. 10,000 of them, including about 1,000 children, survived against all odds to emerge from the ruins when the Germans finally surrendered in February 1943.
They achieved this despite receiving practically no help from the Soviet government, which allocated every resource available to the Red Army. Many survived by performing meagre tasks for both armies, from shining boots to scouting out enemy positions. During breaks in the fighting women could be seen emerging from their hiding places to cut the meat off dead horses before the rats and homeless dogs got to them. Children were often the most successful scavenges because of their small size, but the Germans did not hesitate to shoot them if they were caught stealing army ration tins.
Civilian’s dwellings during the battle were often airless and buried deep underground. The Tsaritsa Gorge in southern Stalingrad for instance, forged by the river Tsaritsa which flowed down into the Volga, was home to thousands of civilians and soldiers for months who dug enormous underground cave systems into it’s sides to hide from the fighting. Others survived in the cellars of ruins and even in sewers. Disease, the cold and starvation slowly killed thousands, especially in the battle’s later stages. Civilians who fled from the city and made the arduous trek across the steppe often found little shelter for many days. The remnants of families huddled together at night by roadsides, babies died in their mother’s arms because of the cold, snow and bitter winds.
#4. Being captured
Only if you were lucky would you end up in Azkaban
Clearly the Germans and Russians at Stalingrad had never heard of the Geneva Convention. Despite enticing many Russians to surrender with promises of adequate food, shelter and maybe even a ticket home for Russians who had lived in the occupied territories, the Germans offered little sympathy to their prisoners. Prison camps behind the German lines were usually little more than a barbed wire enclosure out on the open steppe. Food supplies were meagre and often of such bad quality the Germans wouldn’t even eat them. Later on after the German encirclement such pitiful deliveries stopped entirely and after three months without food or shelter of the 3,500 Russian prisoners who had been trapped within the Kessel with the 6th Army only 20 had survived, and that had been by resorting to cannibalism.
But if you thought the Russians, with their nice, gentle, smiling, socialist ways were any better, then you could not be more wrong. Let’s not forget that the enemy soldiers they were locking up had just spent the past two years busily murdering, pillaging and raping their homeland, would you have shown any mercy to such monsters?
Of the 290,000 German soldiers surrounded within the Kessel in November barely 90,000 survived to surrender in February and only 5,000 eventually lived to see their homes again. Conditions within Russian camps, many of them in the Arctic climate of remote Siberia, were horrifying, and the Germans sometimes found themselves the ones resorting to cannibalism. Many remained in Russia until 1955.
#3. Surviving the winter
Think you’ve heard about all the horrors of the Russian Winter? Baby we’re just getting started. Stalingrad in January averaged –10 degrees at night and –4 in the day, as in half the time the temperature will be colder than that, with some nights plummeting down past –30. Meat and food froze into barely edible blocks that had to be sawed open because it was too hard to use knives. By October ice drifts were grating against each other down the Volga River and by December it had frozen over entirely. Many Russian reinforcements were crushed by incoming ice floes or drowned in the freezing river before they even had a chance to be machine gunned down or bombed by the Germans. There was eventually no fuel left to melt snow for washing or shaving. A bath and clean underwear were as distant a dream as a proper meal. Soldier’s minds went blank because the chilling of their blood slowed down mental activity. Walking wounded and sick made their own way to the rear through the snow. Many stopped to rest and never rose again. Attempts to supply the beleaguered Sixth army by air were hampered by the weather as much as enemy action. Icing was a constant problem. Heavy snowfalls paralysed airfields until planes could be dug out of snowdrifts, which often proved next to impossible for the exhausted and starving German troops. Soldiers sheltered in their bunkers as much from the cold as enemy artillery. On the German side especially conditions grew more and more primitive –
‘There they sit like hairy savages in stone-age caves, devouring horseflesh in the smoke and gloom, amidst the ruins of a beautiful city that they have destroyed’
Stalingrad, frozen over...
#2. The German surrender
Ever since the Germans had advanced upon Stalingrad in August, Stalin and his generals had been planning a massive counter-offensive. Hitler believed that Russia’s armies were finished, mainly due to the fact that some ten million Russians had been killed, wounded or captured in the last 18 months of fighting.
That’s this many times a thousand Russians.
However, by November 1942 the three million Axis troops fighting on the Eastern front were still facing five million Russians. The Soviet counter-offensive around Stalingrad aimed to break through to the north and south of the city, surround the German Sixth army and kick it in the rear and was called, very cleverly, Operation Uranus. Stalingrad had become the bait in one of the largest traps in history.
Where the hell is this guy when you need him?
On 19th November 1942 the trap was sprung, and within four days just over a million Russian troops had surrounded 300,000 German and Romanian troops in a pocket 40km across with the urban area of Stalingrad marking it’s eastern edge. The hunters had very abruptly become the hunted.
The situation at Stalingrad after the encirclement of the German 6th Army
Conditions within the Stalingrad pocket, which the Germans called the ‘Kessel’ (Cauldron), quickly went from bad to worse. As terrible as the earlier fighting in Stalingrad had been the Germans had until now been at least fairly adequately supplied with food, water, fuel and ammunition. What's more, the weather was growing ever worse as winter approached.
Out on the frozen steppes of southern Russia every imaginable horror faced the beleaguered German troops. As winter came the ground became too hard for the weakened Germans to dig trenches or dugouts, causing thousands to eventually die of exposure to the cold. Food supplies were running dangerously low by December. Even when food was delivered many soldiers quickly died from over-eating, akin to concentration camp survivors.
As clean clothes became as elusive as a hot meal lice spread to nearly every member of the Sixth Army. Epidemics of Typhus, Dysentery and a dozen other diseases swept through the German ranks. Frostbite was widespread, yet soldiers whose feet had merely swollen and turned blue soon did not merit more than basic medical attention and were immediately sent back to the frontline. Only when their extremities had become black and gangrenous were they amputated and their evacuation by plane became a possibility.
The Luftwaffe promised to supply the 6th Army by air, but less than a quarter of the required supplies landed between the Army’s encirclement in late-November and its final collapse and surrender at the start of February. Soldiers reported their frostbitten toes being gnawed off by rats while they fitfully slept between Russian artillery bombardments. Frequent Russian attacks became increasingly dangerous as ammunition supplies ran low. A scene of utter chaos pervaded at Pitomnik airfield, the only major airstrip within the Kessel. Thousands of critically wounded were packed in rows along its edges waiting to be evacuated while the burnt-out husks of dozens of destroyed aircraft and thousands of stacked corpses lay nearby. So desperate was the need for fuel to burn fires for heat that the signpost at the airfield’s edge was removed to be burnt as fuel and replaced with the gruesome sight of a horse’s leg stuck in a mound of snow with the sign re-attached to it’s top.
By January the German’s had been so weakened by starvation, the cold, disease and exhaustion that officers behind the lines had largely given up on playing chess or reading because of the concentration such tasks required. Battle stress eventually sent many soldiers insane, men raved wildly in their frozen dugouts and some lay their howling or wept helplessly. Others had to be forcefully restrained by their comrades. All the while Soviet propaganda broadcasts could be heard emanating from across No-Man’s-Land and Soviet attacks, air-raids and artillery bombardments grew ever more deadly by the day.
The German’s supply situation became more and more critical…Actually you know what? This is just getting depressing and distasteful; it’s like making fun of holocaust survivors…let’s move on.
The final blow began on January 10th 1943 when the Russians began their final assault to crush the Kessel and the 150,000 men it still contained. By January 23rd the last German airfield had been taken. The remains of the 6th Army retreated towards the ruins of Stalingrad at the Eastern end of the Kessel. The spectacle of defeat grew more terrible the closer retreating soldiers came to the city-
‘As far as the eye can see lie soldiers crushed by tanks, hopelessly moaning wounded, frozen corpes, vehicles abandoned through lack of fuel, blow-up guns and miscellaneous equipment…’
By the end of January the commander of the 6th Army Field Marshall Friedrich Paulus, who had previously stated ‘I have no intention of shooting myself for this Bohemian Corporal’ (Hitler) decided to let himself be captured rather than commit suicide. On February 2nd 1943 the bulk of the remaining Germans in Stalingrad surrendered. 90,000 were taken prisoner, yet only 5,000 would live to see Germany again, and only after years of nightmarish captivity.
Surely nothing could be worse than this nightmare?
#1. ‘Child traitors’
Civilians in Stalingrad didn’t just have the Germans and the elements to worry about; running afoul of the Soviet side was tragically all too easy. In their desperation for food many civilians begged the Germans for help, who occasionally obliged. As many simple tasks in Stalingrad were dangerous because of Soviet snipers, German soldiers sometimes promised young Russian boys and girls a crust of bread in return for something as simple as refilling their water bottles down by the Volga. When the Soviets realized what was happening they shot children on such missions without mercy. This was not just a local anomaly but official Soviet policy. Stalin had ordered the previous year not long after the initial German invasion that Red Army troops were to kill any civilians obeying German orders, even if under duress. Even when the Germans forced civilians to drag back German corpses from No-Man’s-Land to be reburied the Russians opened fire regardless. Both sides showed absolutely no mercy at Stalingrad.
Tuesday 4 September 2012
On the subject of abortion
Saw this shared by a friend on Facebook today, thought it was so absolutely spot on that I'd share it here.
Monday 6 August 2012
Wednesday 18 July 2012
Sunday 3 June 2012
The Nihilist Dilemma
In my earlier post 'Life, the Universe and Everything' I outlined my opinions on why people are superstitious. The inherent moral void we perceive in reality, I contend, is responsible for us filling that void with anything from Christianity to Hinduism to Scientology. Why do we do this? In short, boredom, we can't deal with our own meaningless as without any purpose in our lives we're incapable of surviving. Ideology at least deludes us into thinking we have some kind of grander purpose, whether that ideology is religion, nationalism, racism or simply being an avid football fan. Somebody I agree with on this subject is Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg who said the following on religion-
"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion. "
To be fair though, I'd change this quote slightly to-
"With or without an ideology, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; and for good people to do evil and evil people to do good—that takes ideology."
Overall the point is that delusional, non factual belief systems, including religions, can cause people to abandon reasoning and perform terrible or wonderful things. Weinberg then goes onto say almost the exact same thing I've been saying, and I swear I only found this quote recently-
"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless."
Exactly, ergo we become delusional ideologues to try and make it meaningful. It seems this understanding of things may be on the right track if a Nobel laureate agrees with it. But now we're going to go one step deeper, what should we do with this newfound understanding if it is indeed true?
The first option is to follow the advice of someone who can put things far more eloquently than I, George Carlin, one of the greatest comedians ever, in this video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSSwKffj9o.
In case you don't watch it, he basically outlines how ludicrous religions are, and then gives us this advice -
'So I've been praying to Joe for about a year now. And I noticed something. I noticed that all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answered at about the same 50% rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don't. Same as God, 50-50. Same as the four-leaf clover and the horseshoe, the wishing well and the rabbit's foot, same as the Mojo Man, same as the Voodoo Lady who tells you your fortune by squeezing the goat's testicles, it's all the same: 50-50. So just pick your superstition, sit back, make a wish, and enjoy yourself.'
Is this wise? Should a good nihilist choose to let himself be brainwashed, assuming that someone can even make that choice? This also brings us back to the old argument over whether it is wise, based solely on reason and not on faith, to believe in God. This is summed up in Pascal's Wager which states that to believe in God brings infinite reward if he (why not 'it', seriously?) is real and little downside if he isn't, while not believing in God would bring infinite suffering if he is real and little downside if he isn't.
The Wager seems to be as clear-cut as 2+2=4. But there are two main criticisms of it. Firstly, the fact that there are many religions and even variations within religions (are any two people's religious beliefs exactly the same? For instance by translating the Bible from Latin into English aren't you surely changing its meaning slightly?) and no obvious way to choose the 'true' religion. Secondly, what part of making a logical decision to simply save your own skin could possibly be worth getting into heaven for? Or for that matter, what part of simply swallowing your parent's beliefs when you were a child and never taking the time to question them makes you worthy of avoiding hell? Surely its just as likely that Jesus, if he was indeed the son of God, was actually testing our reasoning and intends to reward those that have rejected his ludicrous message of faith, as it is that he will reward those who have chosen to follow him by abandoning reason and relying on faith instead.
A further criticism of religion I'd like to add is the sheer impracticality of wholly abiding by most religions. As Jesus said, 'let he who is without sin cast the first stone', surely by the Bible's standards we're all going to hell? (I actually find this thought rather comforting, it has a certain inevitability about it that makes it pointless worrying at all).
So trying to become religious doesn't seem to be much of an option, what's plan B? The rejection of ideologies, including religions, entirely? So what purpose to life is substituted?
Lets examine two people who chose option B. What do Karl Marx and Ayn Rand have in common?
They both founded new ideologies based specifically on, if still the basic tenants that ideologies including religions have relied upon for centuries, a rejection of the notion of a God and any kind of faith and the replacing of getting into heaven with the goal of creating a utopia here on Earth.
Karl Marx may have championed communism and Ayn Rand libertarianism, two economic and social systems that couldn't be further apart on the issue of concentration of authority, but both of them agreed there was no God. Aside from that however, both chose very different ways of replacing him.
Karl Marx, probably still a fan of Christ's message though not a follower, foresaw an idealistic world where, basically, everyone cooperated with each other all the time. Competition (A.K.A. freedom, liberty or imperialism) was strictly taboo. This mirrors Christ's original message of 'love thy neighbour'. Except that Communism was an abysmal failure wherever attempts were made to implement it fully. Less socialist policies however, are often successful (like universal suffrage, healthcare and education) as they strike a good balance between providing equality (an even playing field and so preventing the strong from destroying their rivals instead of fairly competing with them) while still allowing competition. But economics is a different subject entirely to morality.
A possible reason for the failure of outright communist systems was that Marx tried to divorce the idea of loving thy fellow man unconditionally with the faith-based belief in God. Without thinking that they might get into heaven if they continued to act nice to each other according to biblical principles and in the absence of other deterrents to acting malevolently, people quickly lost their motivation to strive for success and equality. Facing this rebellion the Soviet Union began cracking down on dissent with astonishing ruthlessness from its very earliest days, and by the 1960s this combination of long-running state-sponsored terror and economic stagnation had brought the country to near collapse. A few years later Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and soon, combined with the drain of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and possibly outside pressures, the USSR collapsed into turmoil. Secular humanism in its purest form, it seems, doesn't work, and inevitably, as far as history shows, leads to brutal totalitarianism of a kind even more ruthless than the heartless despotisms it has replaced.
As for Ayn Rand, she in my opinion took things a step further than Marx, and there is no doubt that the nightmares of Communism paved the way for the modern neoliberalism she was one of the strongest proponents of. She understood that you couldn't divorce devotion to a fictional God with humanism, for without the former the latter becomes illogical. She named her specific ideology 'Objectivism'.
So what does Objectivism mean? It's the opposite of 'subjective', as in 'of a subject' (i.e. a person). A subjective way of thinking is 'how someone thinks about something', an objective way of thinking is 'how something is/should be thought about'. So if someone gives their opinion on something it is subjective, while a statement of fact is objective.
But can anything be truly objective? Aren't we all different beings with different experiences and slightly different ways of thinking about things? This returns us to the original problem, the reason we delude ourselves is because the truth is impossible to accept. This also couples with the fact that we're emotional creatures, not mindless, immortal robots. So just to what extent can someone unabashedly accept that there are no inherent moral standards and reject everything but logic.
Ayn Rand it seems, had a fair crack at it. Source: http://michaelprescott.net/hickman.htm
In 1928 a man named William Hickman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Edward_Hickman, carried out one of the most brutal murders in American history. He kidnapped, raped and dismembered the body of a 12 year old girl named Marion Parker and when her father paid the $1500 ransom he dumped the remains of her body on the street right in front of her father while driving away. He was later arrested and sentenced to hang, dying in the gallows in 1928. What did Ayn Rand think of him?
Hickman famously said after being arrested that "What is good for me is right". Ayn Rand enthusiastically described this as "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard". She goes on to say that Hickman "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should."
Hickman clearly remained an inspiration to Ayn Rand throughout her writing career. She said of the main protagonist of her book The Fountainhead, Howard Roark: He "has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world."
In possibly her starkest statement she said Man "is man only so long as he functions in accordance with the nature of a rational being. When he chooses to function otherwise, he is no longer man. There is no proper name for the thing which he then becomes ... When a man chooses to act in a sub-human manner, it is no longer proper for him to survive nor to be happy."
So what does Ayn Rand put in the place of our delusions of meaning?
Hedonism, in as pure a form as possible. She is doing one better than Karl Marx here, not only is she saying morality is a delusion that doesn't exist, but we shouldn't even try and emulate it. However, while millions of innocents may have died in the communist's quest to create their socialist utopia, Ayn Rand's side of the political isle is unfortunately just as guilty of genocide. Communism may have killed 100 million people during the 20th century, but total deaths due to war and genocide that century totalled about 200 million. What killed the other 100 million people? In a word - capitalism (broadly defined as any ruthless seeking of personal profit, so this includes colonialism, imperialism and fascism). The Belgian Congo, the World Wars and all manner of ethnic and religious conflicts were the tragedies that launched communism in the first place. What a vicious ideological cycle.
Taking a look at fascist regimes such as Nazi Germany, they in a way very closely resemble the totalitarian socialist societies they so dearly hated. Both kinds of dictatorships were driven not just by typical greed, but by an ideological agenda that in their eyes reduced their victims to the status of being sub-human. You could perhaps divide the entire history of ideological conflict, including all religious wars, into two groups, the hedonists and the utilitarianists. Groups like Muslims, Colonialists and Fascists tend to fall into the former category and Christians, Buddhists and Communists into the latter. Regardless of which side they were on, the more devout their ideological beliefs, then generally speaking the worse the conflicts they initiated.
So, it seems the key decision we have to make isn't really what religion we believe in or god we worship, its whether we're angels or demons. Religions are merely childish fantasies destined to collapse once attacked by sufficient logic compared to the grander ideological debate. Do we really have to pick a side to give our lives meaning or not?
While World War Two saw an epic showdown between communist and fascist regimes, there was of course a third faction that disliked both - Democracies. Where on the ideological spectrum do these complex political systems sit? Well hopefully near the middle, in fact as close to the middle as possible. The power of corporations should be kept in balance with that of unions. Employers with employees. The state with the individual. Just as the Earth orbits the sun in an ideal 'Goldilocks zone' that is neither too cold nor too hot, the most successful societies throughout history have typically steered clear of ideological extremes. On the right, ruthless tyrants like Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler have quickly built immensely powerful empires only for them to collapse almost overnight, in historical terms. On the left, ultra-religious medieval Christian Europe and the Communist Soviet Union remained locked in dark ages for generations. Societies need to be dynamic, yet stable enough that specialization in the economy can occur to a fair extent.
So to get back to my initial premise, how should people act to give their lives meaning? Left, right or centre?
I'd say, and have tried to abide by this premise for some time now, that the centre is by far the best place to hang out, and this is probably not as boring as you'd think. It is for instance, much trickier to determine exactly where the centre is. Heading to the left or right is easily done, just keep heading there. It’s not like ruthlessness or compassion have set limits, are they not obviously asymptotes? The centre however has no set point, and it can be very hard to determine who and what lies on either side of it. Is Barack Obama a left or right leaning politician for instance? If you ask your average Teabagger they'll adamantly proclaim his socialist tendencies, but if you ask any real socialists they'll say he's just as beholden to corporate America as Bush was. This is what makes being a centrist politician interesting, its more challenging, and thus potentially more meaningful. Bill Clinton, setting up camp in the Whitehouse just after the end of the long ideological confrontation that was the Cold War, talked of a 'third way' in politics besides liberalism and conservatism. A practical middle ground midway between the extremes and the genocidal behaviour they have so often precipitated.
So what's it gonna be? Rand, Marx or Clinton?
"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion. "
To be fair though, I'd change this quote slightly to-
"With or without an ideology, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; and for good people to do evil and evil people to do good—that takes ideology."
Overall the point is that delusional, non factual belief systems, including religions, can cause people to abandon reasoning and perform terrible or wonderful things. Weinberg then goes onto say almost the exact same thing I've been saying, and I swear I only found this quote recently-
"The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless."
Exactly, ergo we become delusional ideologues to try and make it meaningful. It seems this understanding of things may be on the right track if a Nobel laureate agrees with it. But now we're going to go one step deeper, what should we do with this newfound understanding if it is indeed true?
The first option is to follow the advice of someone who can put things far more eloquently than I, George Carlin, one of the greatest comedians ever, in this video, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSSwKffj9o.
In case you don't watch it, he basically outlines how ludicrous religions are, and then gives us this advice -
'So I've been praying to Joe for about a year now. And I noticed something. I noticed that all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answered at about the same 50% rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don't. Same as God, 50-50. Same as the four-leaf clover and the horseshoe, the wishing well and the rabbit's foot, same as the Mojo Man, same as the Voodoo Lady who tells you your fortune by squeezing the goat's testicles, it's all the same: 50-50. So just pick your superstition, sit back, make a wish, and enjoy yourself.'
Is this wise? Should a good nihilist choose to let himself be brainwashed, assuming that someone can even make that choice? This also brings us back to the old argument over whether it is wise, based solely on reason and not on faith, to believe in God. This is summed up in Pascal's Wager which states that to believe in God brings infinite reward if he (why not 'it', seriously?) is real and little downside if he isn't, while not believing in God would bring infinite suffering if he is real and little downside if he isn't.
The Wager seems to be as clear-cut as 2+2=4. But there are two main criticisms of it. Firstly, the fact that there are many religions and even variations within religions (are any two people's religious beliefs exactly the same? For instance by translating the Bible from Latin into English aren't you surely changing its meaning slightly?) and no obvious way to choose the 'true' religion. Secondly, what part of making a logical decision to simply save your own skin could possibly be worth getting into heaven for? Or for that matter, what part of simply swallowing your parent's beliefs when you were a child and never taking the time to question them makes you worthy of avoiding hell? Surely its just as likely that Jesus, if he was indeed the son of God, was actually testing our reasoning and intends to reward those that have rejected his ludicrous message of faith, as it is that he will reward those who have chosen to follow him by abandoning reason and relying on faith instead.
A further criticism of religion I'd like to add is the sheer impracticality of wholly abiding by most religions. As Jesus said, 'let he who is without sin cast the first stone', surely by the Bible's standards we're all going to hell? (I actually find this thought rather comforting, it has a certain inevitability about it that makes it pointless worrying at all).
So trying to become religious doesn't seem to be much of an option, what's plan B? The rejection of ideologies, including religions, entirely? So what purpose to life is substituted?
Lets examine two people who chose option B. What do Karl Marx and Ayn Rand have in common?
They both founded new ideologies based specifically on, if still the basic tenants that ideologies including religions have relied upon for centuries, a rejection of the notion of a God and any kind of faith and the replacing of getting into heaven with the goal of creating a utopia here on Earth.
Karl Marx may have championed communism and Ayn Rand libertarianism, two economic and social systems that couldn't be further apart on the issue of concentration of authority, but both of them agreed there was no God. Aside from that however, both chose very different ways of replacing him.
Karl Marx, probably still a fan of Christ's message though not a follower, foresaw an idealistic world where, basically, everyone cooperated with each other all the time. Competition (A.K.A. freedom, liberty or imperialism) was strictly taboo. This mirrors Christ's original message of 'love thy neighbour'. Except that Communism was an abysmal failure wherever attempts were made to implement it fully. Less socialist policies however, are often successful (like universal suffrage, healthcare and education) as they strike a good balance between providing equality (an even playing field and so preventing the strong from destroying their rivals instead of fairly competing with them) while still allowing competition. But economics is a different subject entirely to morality.
A possible reason for the failure of outright communist systems was that Marx tried to divorce the idea of loving thy fellow man unconditionally with the faith-based belief in God. Without thinking that they might get into heaven if they continued to act nice to each other according to biblical principles and in the absence of other deterrents to acting malevolently, people quickly lost their motivation to strive for success and equality. Facing this rebellion the Soviet Union began cracking down on dissent with astonishing ruthlessness from its very earliest days, and by the 1960s this combination of long-running state-sponsored terror and economic stagnation had brought the country to near collapse. A few years later Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and soon, combined with the drain of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and possibly outside pressures, the USSR collapsed into turmoil. Secular humanism in its purest form, it seems, doesn't work, and inevitably, as far as history shows, leads to brutal totalitarianism of a kind even more ruthless than the heartless despotisms it has replaced.
As for Ayn Rand, she in my opinion took things a step further than Marx, and there is no doubt that the nightmares of Communism paved the way for the modern neoliberalism she was one of the strongest proponents of. She understood that you couldn't divorce devotion to a fictional God with humanism, for without the former the latter becomes illogical. She named her specific ideology 'Objectivism'.
So what does Objectivism mean? It's the opposite of 'subjective', as in 'of a subject' (i.e. a person). A subjective way of thinking is 'how someone thinks about something', an objective way of thinking is 'how something is/should be thought about'. So if someone gives their opinion on something it is subjective, while a statement of fact is objective.
But can anything be truly objective? Aren't we all different beings with different experiences and slightly different ways of thinking about things? This returns us to the original problem, the reason we delude ourselves is because the truth is impossible to accept. This also couples with the fact that we're emotional creatures, not mindless, immortal robots. So just to what extent can someone unabashedly accept that there are no inherent moral standards and reject everything but logic.
Ayn Rand it seems, had a fair crack at it. Source: http://michaelprescott.net/hickman.htm
In 1928 a man named William Hickman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Edward_Hickman, carried out one of the most brutal murders in American history. He kidnapped, raped and dismembered the body of a 12 year old girl named Marion Parker and when her father paid the $1500 ransom he dumped the remains of her body on the street right in front of her father while driving away. He was later arrested and sentenced to hang, dying in the gallows in 1928. What did Ayn Rand think of him?
Hickman famously said after being arrested that "What is good for me is right". Ayn Rand enthusiastically described this as "The best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I have heard". She goes on to say that Hickman "is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness -- [resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand, because he has no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people ... Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should."
Hickman clearly remained an inspiration to Ayn Rand throughout her writing career. She said of the main protagonist of her book The Fountainhead, Howard Roark: He "has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world."
In possibly her starkest statement she said Man "is man only so long as he functions in accordance with the nature of a rational being. When he chooses to function otherwise, he is no longer man. There is no proper name for the thing which he then becomes ... When a man chooses to act in a sub-human manner, it is no longer proper for him to survive nor to be happy."
So what does Ayn Rand put in the place of our delusions of meaning?
Hedonism, in as pure a form as possible. She is doing one better than Karl Marx here, not only is she saying morality is a delusion that doesn't exist, but we shouldn't even try and emulate it. However, while millions of innocents may have died in the communist's quest to create their socialist utopia, Ayn Rand's side of the political isle is unfortunately just as guilty of genocide. Communism may have killed 100 million people during the 20th century, but total deaths due to war and genocide that century totalled about 200 million. What killed the other 100 million people? In a word - capitalism (broadly defined as any ruthless seeking of personal profit, so this includes colonialism, imperialism and fascism). The Belgian Congo, the World Wars and all manner of ethnic and religious conflicts were the tragedies that launched communism in the first place. What a vicious ideological cycle.
Taking a look at fascist regimes such as Nazi Germany, they in a way very closely resemble the totalitarian socialist societies they so dearly hated. Both kinds of dictatorships were driven not just by typical greed, but by an ideological agenda that in their eyes reduced their victims to the status of being sub-human. You could perhaps divide the entire history of ideological conflict, including all religious wars, into two groups, the hedonists and the utilitarianists. Groups like Muslims, Colonialists and Fascists tend to fall into the former category and Christians, Buddhists and Communists into the latter. Regardless of which side they were on, the more devout their ideological beliefs, then generally speaking the worse the conflicts they initiated.
So, it seems the key decision we have to make isn't really what religion we believe in or god we worship, its whether we're angels or demons. Religions are merely childish fantasies destined to collapse once attacked by sufficient logic compared to the grander ideological debate. Do we really have to pick a side to give our lives meaning or not?
While World War Two saw an epic showdown between communist and fascist regimes, there was of course a third faction that disliked both - Democracies. Where on the ideological spectrum do these complex political systems sit? Well hopefully near the middle, in fact as close to the middle as possible. The power of corporations should be kept in balance with that of unions. Employers with employees. The state with the individual. Just as the Earth orbits the sun in an ideal 'Goldilocks zone' that is neither too cold nor too hot, the most successful societies throughout history have typically steered clear of ideological extremes. On the right, ruthless tyrants like Genghis Khan and Adolf Hitler have quickly built immensely powerful empires only for them to collapse almost overnight, in historical terms. On the left, ultra-religious medieval Christian Europe and the Communist Soviet Union remained locked in dark ages for generations. Societies need to be dynamic, yet stable enough that specialization in the economy can occur to a fair extent.
So to get back to my initial premise, how should people act to give their lives meaning? Left, right or centre?
I'd say, and have tried to abide by this premise for some time now, that the centre is by far the best place to hang out, and this is probably not as boring as you'd think. It is for instance, much trickier to determine exactly where the centre is. Heading to the left or right is easily done, just keep heading there. It’s not like ruthlessness or compassion have set limits, are they not obviously asymptotes? The centre however has no set point, and it can be very hard to determine who and what lies on either side of it. Is Barack Obama a left or right leaning politician for instance? If you ask your average Teabagger they'll adamantly proclaim his socialist tendencies, but if you ask any real socialists they'll say he's just as beholden to corporate America as Bush was. This is what makes being a centrist politician interesting, its more challenging, and thus potentially more meaningful. Bill Clinton, setting up camp in the Whitehouse just after the end of the long ideological confrontation that was the Cold War, talked of a 'third way' in politics besides liberalism and conservatism. A practical middle ground midway between the extremes and the genocidal behaviour they have so often precipitated.
So what's it gonna be? Rand, Marx or Clinton?
Monday 20 February 2012
The History of Democracy
First of all, I'd hardly consider myself a raging leftie, but only as modestly left-leaning. Just because I think young-earth creationists and climate change deniers are lunatics and that George Bush's invasion of Iraq was misguided and at least partially based on lies doesn't make me a member of the socialist alliance. I'd say the road to a fairer world is primarily through electoral success with the odd protest along the way rather than violent revolution. This is evidently the core of most modern leftist movements in developed countries at least. The right is, despite everything, quite similar. Sure they sometimes run a slicker propaganda machine (cough 'Fox News' cough) and the odd Norwegian Christian fundamentalist might go on a rampage, but neither side differs too wildly on their political methods. Overall violence is rare and the public discoure, however vitriolic, is generally decent.
The developing world is sometimes dramatically different. The recent Arab Spring has a definite populist tone. From Tripoli to Damascus people have called for the overthrow of brutal, often decades-old totalitarian regimes. The situation is of course complicated and varies by country, some of those regimes have long been backed by the US (Egypt) or are the result of earlier 'populist' and 'anti-western' revolutions (Libya) but every Arab country that has seen violent protests and civil wars of late has been fuelld by people power. The idea of 'the people' rising up against a dictator to create a newfound democracy is of course brilliant, but often carries a lot of baggage which can take generations of progressive change to eliminate. Even the founding fathers of the United States, who fought against King George III with all the passion of Libya's tribes and Islamists against Muammar Gaddafi, kept the draconian institution of slavery in their newfound country and more than a century would pass before women and ethnic minorities would attain equal rights, such as suffrage, with the rich, white, racist, tax-evading old men who founded America. One must not expect the Arabs to embrace democracy overnight, it took Europe two world wars and half a millenium to get it only kinda right. The Arabs haven't really done too bad a job so far when you think about it.
There was a time when the 'developed' countries of the world went though their own, and often far bloodier, periods of violent revolution. These have occurred from both the left and the right. The English Civil War in the 17th century would have to be one of the earliest examples, when the Parliament won the penultimate battle with the English Monarchy after centuries of power struggles. America and France were among several countries who endured similar revolutions in the late 18th century. By the beginning of the twentieth it looked like democracy was the way of the future. The world's most affluent countries were all relatively democratic and liberal (Britain, France, the US) or getting there (Germany, Italy) while Europe and Asia's old monarchies were in various states of decline (Turkey, Austro-Hungary, Russia, China). However, democracy came too late to save Europe's masses from the meat-grinder that was warfare following the industrial revolution. The sense of superiority European leaders inherited from centuries of colonial conquests was to be their undoing.
The aftermath of WW1 shattered the old imperial order. The Imperial governments of Russia, Germany, Austro-Hungary and Turkey collapsed and by 1920 it has been said that if you stood on the French border with Germany and looked east, the next country you'd see that was functioning effectively was Japan. Even in the more liberal west huge changes were brought about, most European Nations as well as the US gave women the vote after the war and talk of 'empire' became taboo where it had not just been excepted, but downright expected, a few years before. Nearly every country in the world took a dramatic turn to the left and nowhere was this shift more dramatic than in the old Russian Empire, which collapsed into five years of brutal fighting between the Communist 'Red Army' and the most conservative and disparate 'White Army' and its western backers, before it would be reformed in the 1920s as the Soviet Union. The trenches of the eastern front had instilled in much of the Russian populist a sincere anti-capitalist fanaticism that makes Fox New's inherent bias look genuinely 'fair and balanced'. In such a climate democracy, the best hope for populist revolutions, never stood a chance against such power-hungry individuals as Joseph Stalin.
Not everywhere was this shift to the left permanent, it was often made fleeting by anti-communist movements that had arisen out of the ashes of the old Imperialist regimes. In Italy Benito Mussolini's fascists soon became that Kingdom's 'saviours' when they, with the backing of Italy's elite, kicked out the Communists in the 1920s despite the latter movement's widespread support. This would later contribute to the Italian military's low morale and abysmal performance during WW2. Spain underwent a similar civil war in the 1930s, and Francisco Franco's wise decision to keep Spain out of WW2 kept his regime alive well into the 1970s. Only in Germany were the old imperialist dreams so successfully reawakened by the Nazis under Adolf Hitler. The lessons of the First World War, argued Hitler so passionately, were not that Imperialism was a bad idea but that a lack of Nationalist pride on the part of the German people, especially those 'vile Jews' and other untermenschen, had led to disaster. He rapidly prepared Germany's second bid for superpower status. Japan, also a rising industrial power, had similiar ambitions and a not so dissimilar worldview. Other factors such as the high unemployment and despair of the Great Depression only heightened global tensions further.
Thus, the stage for the Second World War was set. Whereas the first had been basically an imperialist struggle, a markedly right-wing affair declared and waged by rival, affluent power brokers and fought by the poor and working class from many nations, the second was fought along very different ideological lines. Instead of Imperial Germany in 1914 being scarcely different from the somewhat more democratic British Empire or poorer Tsarist Russia, the three countries by 1939 were ruled by radically different regimes whose power extended from fundamentally different ideologies and worldviews. The western world was basically politically centrist, a mix of corporate dominance, popular elections, military-industrial complexes and universal suffrage and education. Fascist regimes such as Germany, Japan, Italy and Spain leaned dramatically to the right, mocking the weaknesses of democracies and openly calling for the extermination, rather than the empowering, of the 'weaker' individuals of society. The Soviet Union, and later its communist acolytes around the world, from China to Cuba, leaned dramatically to the left calling for an end to the old Bourgeois system and a new world order emphasizing cooperation over virtually all forms of competition.
The Fascists had learned nothing from the First World War, and it would take the utter devastation of their homelands in the second to curb the more brutal political aspirations of Nationalism, racism, Imperialism and Colonialism once and, hopefully, for all. The Communists, blinded by the horror of the war to the importance of freedom alongside equality, had initially learned their lessons too well. Their social engineering and even more so their political repression in pursuit of their ideology would devastate the lives of millions over the next half century. Meanwhile the west, for all its flaws and eccentricities, had taken a much wiser course, and usually managed throughout the 20th century to navigate the narrow political path between blatant right-wing nationalism and full-blown left-wing socialism, something largely made possible by their relatively free and fair democratic systems.
The more recent political landscape of the 21st century seems harder to read, perhaps because we currently lack the obvious benefit of hindsight. The western world has in some ways moved further to the left. Increased spending on social programs, from public education to universal healthcare, social security to environmental preservation, indicates a continuing shift to the left. However the growing power of corporate interests and the widening divide between rich and poor evidences a shift back to the right. Only a few years after the collapse of most die-hard, supposedly left-wing governments with the dissolution of the Warsaw pact in 1991, a new generation of political polarisation, with growing extremes on both the left and right, seems to be emerging.
The current global financial crisis has certainly accelerated this process and curbed the growth of democracy over the past few years. Like the great depression in the 1930s, the economic turmoil of the 2010s may be looked back upon as one of the catalysts of major ideological conflicts in subsequent decades. While over the past two years there have been tentative signs of economy recovery, notably the dropping of the US unemployment rate from 10% in October 2009 to 8.3% at the start of 2012, these may turn out to be illusory in the long run. The income gap is still growing, promised reforms of the world's financial system to prevent another 2008-style collapse have not materialized, the cost of living in nearly every country is rising sharply and, perhaps most worryingly in the long run, the global debt crisis has worsened dramatically and no real solution is in sight. The bottom line is that the structural problems in the world economy that caused the crisis have not been solved. It is possible, I daresay even likely, that any apparent 'recovery' in the world economy in the next few years will prove fleeting and that by 2020 a second great depression may hit for real. Could the next step truly be a Third World War?
The developing world is sometimes dramatically different. The recent Arab Spring has a definite populist tone. From Tripoli to Damascus people have called for the overthrow of brutal, often decades-old totalitarian regimes. The situation is of course complicated and varies by country, some of those regimes have long been backed by the US (Egypt) or are the result of earlier 'populist' and 'anti-western' revolutions (Libya) but every Arab country that has seen violent protests and civil wars of late has been fuelld by people power. The idea of 'the people' rising up against a dictator to create a newfound democracy is of course brilliant, but often carries a lot of baggage which can take generations of progressive change to eliminate. Even the founding fathers of the United States, who fought against King George III with all the passion of Libya's tribes and Islamists against Muammar Gaddafi, kept the draconian institution of slavery in their newfound country and more than a century would pass before women and ethnic minorities would attain equal rights, such as suffrage, with the rich, white, racist, tax-evading old men who founded America. One must not expect the Arabs to embrace democracy overnight, it took Europe two world wars and half a millenium to get it only kinda right. The Arabs haven't really done too bad a job so far when you think about it.
There was a time when the 'developed' countries of the world went though their own, and often far bloodier, periods of violent revolution. These have occurred from both the left and the right. The English Civil War in the 17th century would have to be one of the earliest examples, when the Parliament won the penultimate battle with the English Monarchy after centuries of power struggles. America and France were among several countries who endured similar revolutions in the late 18th century. By the beginning of the twentieth it looked like democracy was the way of the future. The world's most affluent countries were all relatively democratic and liberal (Britain, France, the US) or getting there (Germany, Italy) while Europe and Asia's old monarchies were in various states of decline (Turkey, Austro-Hungary, Russia, China). However, democracy came too late to save Europe's masses from the meat-grinder that was warfare following the industrial revolution. The sense of superiority European leaders inherited from centuries of colonial conquests was to be their undoing.
The aftermath of WW1 shattered the old imperial order. The Imperial governments of Russia, Germany, Austro-Hungary and Turkey collapsed and by 1920 it has been said that if you stood on the French border with Germany and looked east, the next country you'd see that was functioning effectively was Japan. Even in the more liberal west huge changes were brought about, most European Nations as well as the US gave women the vote after the war and talk of 'empire' became taboo where it had not just been excepted, but downright expected, a few years before. Nearly every country in the world took a dramatic turn to the left and nowhere was this shift more dramatic than in the old Russian Empire, which collapsed into five years of brutal fighting between the Communist 'Red Army' and the most conservative and disparate 'White Army' and its western backers, before it would be reformed in the 1920s as the Soviet Union. The trenches of the eastern front had instilled in much of the Russian populist a sincere anti-capitalist fanaticism that makes Fox New's inherent bias look genuinely 'fair and balanced'. In such a climate democracy, the best hope for populist revolutions, never stood a chance against such power-hungry individuals as Joseph Stalin.
Not everywhere was this shift to the left permanent, it was often made fleeting by anti-communist movements that had arisen out of the ashes of the old Imperialist regimes. In Italy Benito Mussolini's fascists soon became that Kingdom's 'saviours' when they, with the backing of Italy's elite, kicked out the Communists in the 1920s despite the latter movement's widespread support. This would later contribute to the Italian military's low morale and abysmal performance during WW2. Spain underwent a similar civil war in the 1930s, and Francisco Franco's wise decision to keep Spain out of WW2 kept his regime alive well into the 1970s. Only in Germany were the old imperialist dreams so successfully reawakened by the Nazis under Adolf Hitler. The lessons of the First World War, argued Hitler so passionately, were not that Imperialism was a bad idea but that a lack of Nationalist pride on the part of the German people, especially those 'vile Jews' and other untermenschen, had led to disaster. He rapidly prepared Germany's second bid for superpower status. Japan, also a rising industrial power, had similiar ambitions and a not so dissimilar worldview. Other factors such as the high unemployment and despair of the Great Depression only heightened global tensions further.
Thus, the stage for the Second World War was set. Whereas the first had been basically an imperialist struggle, a markedly right-wing affair declared and waged by rival, affluent power brokers and fought by the poor and working class from many nations, the second was fought along very different ideological lines. Instead of Imperial Germany in 1914 being scarcely different from the somewhat more democratic British Empire or poorer Tsarist Russia, the three countries by 1939 were ruled by radically different regimes whose power extended from fundamentally different ideologies and worldviews. The western world was basically politically centrist, a mix of corporate dominance, popular elections, military-industrial complexes and universal suffrage and education. Fascist regimes such as Germany, Japan, Italy and Spain leaned dramatically to the right, mocking the weaknesses of democracies and openly calling for the extermination, rather than the empowering, of the 'weaker' individuals of society. The Soviet Union, and later its communist acolytes around the world, from China to Cuba, leaned dramatically to the left calling for an end to the old Bourgeois system and a new world order emphasizing cooperation over virtually all forms of competition.
The Fascists had learned nothing from the First World War, and it would take the utter devastation of their homelands in the second to curb the more brutal political aspirations of Nationalism, racism, Imperialism and Colonialism once and, hopefully, for all. The Communists, blinded by the horror of the war to the importance of freedom alongside equality, had initially learned their lessons too well. Their social engineering and even more so their political repression in pursuit of their ideology would devastate the lives of millions over the next half century. Meanwhile the west, for all its flaws and eccentricities, had taken a much wiser course, and usually managed throughout the 20th century to navigate the narrow political path between blatant right-wing nationalism and full-blown left-wing socialism, something largely made possible by their relatively free and fair democratic systems.
The more recent political landscape of the 21st century seems harder to read, perhaps because we currently lack the obvious benefit of hindsight. The western world has in some ways moved further to the left. Increased spending on social programs, from public education to universal healthcare, social security to environmental preservation, indicates a continuing shift to the left. However the growing power of corporate interests and the widening divide between rich and poor evidences a shift back to the right. Only a few years after the collapse of most die-hard, supposedly left-wing governments with the dissolution of the Warsaw pact in 1991, a new generation of political polarisation, with growing extremes on both the left and right, seems to be emerging.
The current global financial crisis has certainly accelerated this process and curbed the growth of democracy over the past few years. Like the great depression in the 1930s, the economic turmoil of the 2010s may be looked back upon as one of the catalysts of major ideological conflicts in subsequent decades. While over the past two years there have been tentative signs of economy recovery, notably the dropping of the US unemployment rate from 10% in October 2009 to 8.3% at the start of 2012, these may turn out to be illusory in the long run. The income gap is still growing, promised reforms of the world's financial system to prevent another 2008-style collapse have not materialized, the cost of living in nearly every country is rising sharply and, perhaps most worryingly in the long run, the global debt crisis has worsened dramatically and no real solution is in sight. The bottom line is that the structural problems in the world economy that caused the crisis have not been solved. It is possible, I daresay even likely, that any apparent 'recovery' in the world economy in the next few years will prove fleeting and that by 2020 a second great depression may hit for real. Could the next step truly be a Third World War?
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