Frieden In Unserer Zeit, Peace In Our Time



Turn on the TV and you can see the US turning itself into the Weimar Republic under everyone’s nose. Gangs of hoodlums battle in the streets while the police stand to the side and watch.

Standing by and watching … when not taking sides. Untitled drawing by George Grosz, 1916 (?)

In post-World War One Germany, public life for 15 years was little more than street brawling between gangs of disgruntled ex-soldiers with little- or nothing to do, driven mad by propaganda and provocateurs, hatred and PTSD. The police stood to the side and watched. Meanwhile, the economy sank save for the fortunes of tycoons and industrialists who meddled endlessly in the affairs of government, who destroyed the returns to honest labor at the same time begging for credit from the US and relief from the reparation demands of England and France.

The Germans had been ruined by a calamitous misadventure that they themselves had embarked upon in a frenzy of ignorance and contempt. Having failed, they found themselves suspended in a kind of mirage. It was as if the millions of German deaths and millions more wounded, the destruction of German society was something that had happened to ‘someone else’, that surrender was a trick foisted off onto the despised Weimar government by sleight of hand.

Germans refused to believe they had been beaten by their rivals on the battlefield, only betrayed by ‘others’ inside Germany. There was the usual parade of scapegoats: liberals, Jews, democrats, Bolsheviks, shirkers, pacifists, Turks, French and English spies. The communists were the most frightful, claiming moral and historical ascendancy; the sailors’ revolt in Kiel in 1918 that had brought down the monarchy and led to surrender had a vaguely Marxist tinge, this was followed by the overtly communistic Spartacist coup attempt in 1919. The pillars of pre-war German society – nobility, the business community, the revered military and its Prussian affectations and the clergy – were damaged and discredited. There was no Kaiser – he had abdicated and was living in exile in the Netherlands – and no institutions, either. There were ghosts and violent factions, all of them groping in the fog.

In post- Vietnam War America public life has been little more than an endless hunt around the globe for the triumph that had been promised by the military state but has proven to be impossibly out of reach. There is political squabbling between disgruntled special interests with little- or nothing to do, made mad with their own propaganda and poisoned with corruption. When not slavishly supporting these interests or being co-opted by them, regulators and other authorities stand off to the side and watch. Meanwhile, the economy stagnates save for the fortunes of tycoons who meddle endlessly in the affairs of government, who destroy the returns to honest labor at the same time begging for cheaper credit from the central banks and relief from reasonable demands to carry their fair share of public burdens.

The Americans are ruined by a series of calamitous misadventures they themselves routinely embark upon in frenzies of ignorance and contempt. Being thwarted over and over, Americans withdraw into a kind of media fantasy land. It is as if the unraveling of American society is something that happens elsewhere then foisted at the last minute onto the despised DC establishment by sleight of hand.

As for institutions, they are the instruments of money-lust whose purpose is to consume credit and dispense distractions; they are the marketing avatars for resource waste, offering empty promises leaving citizens’ grandchildren to deal with the consequences.

The triggering demarché was the Habsburg ultimatum to Serbia in July: ‘Johannes Der Frauenmörder’ (John the Woman Slayer) George Grosz (1916)

The Great European War was in some ways inevitable, the natural culmination of industrial development, colonialism and mercantilism, Since the dawn of modernity in the 15th century, Europeans had busily carved up the rest of the world; even postage-stamp duchies like Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal had vast overseas possessions. The great powers were hogs always looking for more: by 1914, there was little left for the Europeans to conquer but each other.

At the same time, the war was also a kind of unhappy accident; the outcome of a mechanical process of interlocking transnational agreements and mobilization schedules that, once set into motion took on a tragic half-life of its own. The backdrop was decades of military preparations, half-wars and territorial skirmishes, some of which — like the Boer War, the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars, the Russia-Japanese conflict, the Balkan revolutions and Italian war vs the Ottomans — offered rationale for increased military buildups. Ironically, during this period, the continent enjoyed immense prosperity particularly Germany. The Europeans had everything to lose.

As with all wars, the 1914 version was founded upon a great lie: that a general war in Europe would be contained and relatively painless, that fighting would be over in a few months, ‘the boys would be home by Christmas’. This arose from the same technological advantages that created European empires in the first place. For roughly fifty years a second industrial revolution had unfolded across Europe. There was the continuous application of science and mechanical invention to warfare. There was improved rapid fire artillery, belt-fed machine guns, repeating rifles, smokeless powder and high explosives; dreadnought battleships, submarines, torpedoes, airplanes and wireless communications. Railroads and steamships allowed great numbers of men and masses of materiel to be moved rapidly over great distances. In the countries there were factories that made these things and much more in stupendous quantities. Technology offered chances for one side or the other to steal an advantage and win quickly.

Another factor was the enormous size of Europe’s armies. The continent was in the middle of a demographic bulge, another consequence of industrialization and technology. In 1914, the numbers of men in uniform were very large, both historically and relative to population. For example, Italy’s roster of active duty and reserves in 1914 was 1.25 million out of its population of 34 million. The prewar German strength was 4.5 million out of 68 millions. The Russians fielded almost 6 million out of 160 million. Compare to current Chinese military numbers: 2.14 million in all services out of 1.39 billion. On the other hand, the US active duty and reserve force in 1914 was 200 thousand out of 99 million; smaller than the militaries of Greece or the Ottoman Empire, equal to that of Serbia (out of its population of 4.6 million). France had fallen somewhat behind the bulge relative to Germany, it nevertheless fielded ten percent of its population in 1914: 4 million out of 40 million. These masses of fighting men posed a dilemma for governments. The armies appeared as geopolitical assets but were actually unsustainable economic liabilities, governments felt the pressure to make use these forces. Doing so would certainly not be cost free, yet, demobilization or voluntary reductions in force had their own costs and would have been seen by rivals as fatal weakness.

Victory was elusive during the Great War because of logistics constraints, attacking forces would outrun their supply lines. German artillerymen struggle to move a heavy field gun by hand during Michael Offensive in 1918. Unknown photographer.

Even as each country believed it would prevail due to technology and numbers, there was a strategic vacuum at the leadership levels in all the countries. Technology had run beyond the ability of managers to understand the ramifications of its use. There was a gap between what was understood about technology and what it could actually do. Governments tended to be hawkish, the commanders reactionaries protective of their prerogatives, clinging to the ‘tried and true’. The sense of disconnect that permeated Germany after the war was mirrored in the unreality of pre-war European leadership, this spilled over to the citizenry. With all the pomp and parades, battle fleets and Zeppelins, war was seen as a kind of tonic administered to illiterate peasants in faraway places like Bulgaria. Europe was youthful and bursting with vitality, alive with equal parts political ferment and naiveté, intoxicated by nationalism on the grandest scale. To the masses set to do the actual fighting, war was a lark, there would be the bayonet charge then all would be over. Because there had been no general war in Europe for decades, points of reference were non-existent or papered over with propaganda.

I can hire half the working class to kill the other half.”

— Jay Gould.

Dissent came from trade unionists and leftists who suggested something darker: that war frenzy was part of the effort by capitalists to murder workers by pitting them against each other. It also came from women, from families of young men who reckoned the real cost by instinct, by some military professionals who were familiar with technology and grasped the lethal potential of modern weaponry. The leftists were dismissed out of hand as subversives to be killed or arrested, women and families generally lacked suffrage or political standing; the professionals were patriots who fell into line like the rest behind incompetent leadership.

Germany invaded neutral Belgium on the 4th of August on its way to France. The Germans aimed to take the French surrender quickly then turn their attention toward Russia. Unfortunately for Berlin, they had had no clear idea how to compel France or Russia to quit or what to do with them afterward; or with Belgium, Romania, Poland, Austria-Hungary, Serbia or other territories it would ultimately absorb into its empire. Appropriation of territory was incidental to nothing in particular other than momentum. Absent a governing philosophy and the institutional armature to put it into effect, the ‘German Empire’ became a grab bag of disaffected, mutinous, German-hating populations, of compounding costs that Germany was increasingly unable to bear. The bigger Germany’s empire and the more violently it expanded, the more bankrupt it became.

Strategies were based on assumptions that were proven false almost immediately. Every technical advantage brought to bear was quickly duplicated or neutralized by countermeasures. The giant armies proved impossible to supply adequately, something the commands had not foreseen. The masses of men were easy targets. The only constant was attrition: every week of the war cost combatants 85 thousand dead and disabled, civilian losses were higher. In the west, armies found themselves bogged down in a series of grinding sieges punctuated with months-long offensives that produced scanty gains at unbearable cost. The somewhat greater ability to maneuver in eastern Europe did not offer relief from the stupendous casualties. As these mounted, the mandate granted to leadership was eroded leading to collapse of morale and revolts in the ranks. Instead of murder the war was more like collective suicide drawn out over time, that participants appeared increasingly powerless to stop.

Battlefield losses meant an insatiable demand for replacements. ‘Im dre tagen sind fie felddienstfahig.’ (In three days you are ready for field service.) George Grosz, 1928

US war with Vietnam was not inevitable. Over the terms of four US presidents, from the end of the Second World War in 1945 to the landing of Marines in Da Nang in 1965 the US had almost daily chances to walk away from Vietnam … to cut its losses, to refuse to engage in combat operations or to minimize its role, to not follow the French or rather, follow the French out of the country, to hand the entire mess over to the UN, to recognize the Hanoi government or ignore it, to continue token support for its proxy in Saigon and live with the consequences, to devise a regional diplomatic solution, to pronounce the end of European colonialism in Southeast Asia and accept the plebiscite arrangement called for in the Geneva Accords of 1954 … after the French defeat. Even after ’65, the US could have declared victory any time and flown home, but it didn’t.

America didn’t go to war with Vietnam so much as fall into it. Involvement tended to trace the irregular contours of the Cold War rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union. The existential threat posed by nuclear arms offered the rationale for the buildup and exercise of conventional forces. Their particular exercise in southeast Asia followed a chain of seemingly trivial events beginning with the death in Saigon of A. Peter Dewey at the hands of Vietnamese guerillas in 1945, the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia and the Berlin blockade in 1948, the crackdown in Hungary a few years later, the reflexive and incompetent American support for French army in Indochina. Gripped by McCarthyism and under the Soviet atom threat, communism appeared to be aggressive and unstoppable. The election of John Kennedy as president led to geopolitical jousts with the Soviet government in Cuba and elsewhere. Kennedy, the hero of PT-109 was not anti-war, by the end of 1963 there were 16 thousand US advisors in South Vietnam. Even then, astute observers could see the US effort was failing, that the war was fundamentally political in nature and American intervention was irrelevant or worse. The Americans doubled down, again and again and again: by the end of 1965, the year of the Da Nang landings, the second year of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, there were 184 thousand American soldiers in Vietnam.

Relative to its southeastern Asian adversary, the US was almost godlike. By 1965, American astronauts were orbiting in space, soon to walk on the Moon. Americans had freeways, televisions, suburbs, electric guitars and birth control pills. The Viets had water buffalo. The US held a 10-to-1 advantage in population, it was at the height of post war prosperity and industrial productivity. It could hit targets five thousand miles away with a missile, or drop thirty tons of bombs on the same target from a single airplane. Even so, there were limits to the damage the US could inflict on its peasant adversaries. Hanoi was a client of both the Soviet Union and communist China; the US could not risk a larger war that might have nuclear- or even regional consequences. As with the Europeans in 1914, there was there was a strategic vacuum at the American leadership level. American bosses were complacent. The could perceive the outline of communist threat but could not pinpoint the actual danger Vietnam posed. They had no clear idea how to win and worse, they didn’t care. According to president Johnson, Vietnam was a, “Piss-ant little country” whose inhabitants were worthless. American politicians were vain and reflexively hawkish, Pentagon commanders tended to be unimaginative reactionaries protective of their prerogatives, clinging to the ‘tried and true’ methods learned during the Second World War. The Vietnam adventure was born of its own lie; that America had never lost a war (and would not lose this one).

The Vietnamese had their own advantages, starting with American television. If Kennedy was the first TV president, Vietnam was the first TV war. Ironically, the Hanoi communists had a better grasp of what media messaging could accomplish than executives and political figures in the country that invented it. The Viets lacked a governing philosophy as such — theirs was a single-party state with a command economy — they embraced a simple, essentially political doctrine they stuck to until the end of the war: that nothing in Vietnam is worth a single American life (much less thousands) and that Vietnam would free itself from external rule regardless of cost.

Vietnam’s doctrine was asymmetric geopolitical calculus at its most brutal. Hanoi would accept an attrition war to gain its ends, it would trade dozens or even hundreds of its ‘worthless peasants’ for every high-value American soldier and it would do so on television. To the Americans, this didn’t compute. For them, war was a numbers game; victory could be had if only the US could drop one more bomb. Hanoi understood war was a political contest that would be won in the minds of the combatants, beginning with the Vietnamese themselves. In that sense, Vietnam had won that war before the fighting began:

Hindsight is 20-20, but it’s hard not to speculate how many lives might have been spared had U.S. President Woodrow Wilson received and listened to a young Vietnamese migrant worker who petitioned him at Versailles in 1919.

Wilson didn’t meet Ho Chi Minh. Most accounts say the U.S. delegation—in France for the Paris Peace Conference—never replied to a petition signed by Ho and other Vietnamese nationalists calling for more civil rights for Vietnamese in the French colony.

— Wall Street Journal

‘Die Hölle’ (Hell) George Grosz 1924

The ruin suffered during the Great European War left countries both burdened and shorthanded after it ended. The challenge posed by rising totalitarian states left little time for surviving institutions or replacements to organize themselves and mature. Europe’s monumental task was to rebuild its industries, housing and agriculture; to feed itself, to pension its veterans and care for millions of wounded and sick. It also needed to find the funds to do all these things. Weimar, confronted with crisis after crisis lacked the hard currency and the human material with which to cope. There was fighting in the streets because there were few alternatives Weimar could afford. The avenues for non-violent political discourse did not exist. The Germans bought into the idea of grievance and were unable to let this idea go. To many, the end of the war with its humiliations and hardships was worse than the war itself.

America in 1919 found itself in a role for which it was not yet ready. Its short and glorious involvement in Europe’s bloodletting experiment was sobering. In six short months of fighting it had suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties mostly to disease … Americans were eager to return to domestic pursuits. Wall Street had become Europe’s banker during the war but was uncertain about how much of an investment to carry with the war ended. The Europeans were left largely to their own devices:. in 1925 the IG Farben chemical cartel was formed; Germany was taking the first step toward rearmament and another lunge at empire:

The Vietnam debacle did not have the same effect on Americans as the Great War on European combatants. It did not suffer millions of deaths and wounded, its cities and towns were not damaged or destroyed or its farms churned to mud and littered with unexploded munitions. America’s physical losses were relatively insignificant, its human costs manageable, the financial expenses easily met by way of the printing press. Americans could have accepted failure and moved on but chose not to do so. The establishment’s ego had been tweaked. Its big lie, that the country had never lost a war, had been punctured. It turned out that lie was the foundation for all the other lesser lies: when American diplomats fled Saigon in 1975, the disintegration was already well underway. Support for the aimless, meandering conflict had required the ‘re-calibration’ of the American institutions in a more patriotic- or warlike direction. These became avatars of waste, enormous factories whose product was denial. This would be the way of American business going forward! The war taught managers they could conduct complex operations over thousands of miles distance, that any mistakes or ‘losses in translation’ could be ignored or papered over, so would environmental concerns and labor rights. High tech war at a distance afforded Americans a higher tolerance for pointless violence. The worthless Asian peasants who were expendable in war were equally expendable, low-cost workers in peacetime. Rural Asians soon enough replaced high cost organized American labor, which, having conveniently ‘re-calibrated’ itself with the war makers was effectively put out of business.

America set out with grim determination to repeating its mistakes over and over; it would do so without concern for consequences. The establishment adopted itself to the ‘Vietnam Mentality’ without overtly appearing to do so. There is supposed ‘peace in our time’ but this is fake. Culture became decadent then morphed into grievance. Fast forward and the circles of ineptitude widen like ripples on a pond; endless military adventures overseas in Laos, Cambodia, in Iran and Iraq and Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East; in Afghanistan, Africa and in a hundred other places around the globe; ultimately inside America itself. The ongoing chaos and polarization are mileposts on paths that lead back to Vietnam. There is the muttering by mad men of lights and tunnels and use of more force. There is denial that has become ordinary by repetition: of climate change, of resource depletion, of credit excess and financialization; denial of overpopulation, of thievery at highest levels. There is disregard of social inequality and racial injustice and the bizarre and incomprehensible mishandling of the ongoing Covid pandemic. As institutions became less relevant or capable, the avenues for discourse are narrowed. There is fighting in the streets because that is all that’s left. We are Weimar.

History suggests the shadows from great wars never really clear. History also illuminates what happens when institutions fail. Countries fail shortly after. The time for us to get ourselves in order is running out.

 

Postscript:

 

I had the idea of re titling this article: ‘When Thieves Call Themselves Patriots’. During the period of the Vietnam War it was common for American politicians and top level administrators to lie constantly about what was taking place in the war. Listening to Trump and his crew of freeloaders telling everyone on television that ‘down is up’ recalls Earle Weaver, Bill Westmoreland, Robert McNamara, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and many others doing the same thing. Arguably, the stakes were higher during the Viet war because lives were at risk every day. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese were going to win, the blow to American prestige was going to be severe and there was nothing the Americans could do about any of it but try to sugarcoat the inevitable. The government fell into the habit of lying all the time and Americans got comfortable with being lied to.

We’re still comfortable about it.

Every young student knows the Weimar Republic weaknesses led to Hitler and another, even larger world war. Today’s American Weimar leads to what, exactly? Another Hitler, maybe. In the 1930s, totalitarian governments were an innovation. Based as they were on ‘scientific industrial management’, they promised efficiency. They were eagerly embraced by progressive-minded people who saw them as the means to rapid prosperity. This is the dynamic that is in play, right now in mainland China. Single party states aren’t the shiny new toys anymore, they have a track record. They tend to fall apart under the weight of their own mismanagement like the Soviet Union or they become backwaters. Industrial development is expensive and difficult to sustain. In the worst case; the thieves in charge call themselves patriots and steal everything. Hitler was a thief who got away with his crimes as long as he did because there are many other thieves like Stalin and American bankers who wanted the same thing.

The US was able to develop because of our once-large domestic resource base and because of our functioning institutions which was why we were — and still are — creditworthy. Germany could afford Hitlerism because, until 1939, it was an investment that promised above average cash-on-cash returns, the same with mainland China over the past 20 years. But investment comes from somewhere and returns have to be real. We are the ‘somewhere’ today, but no guarantees going forward. Mass murder and thuggery are not the kinds of returns that are good for business.

We may be saved from the worst by the failure of credit, by the prior success of our patriotic, lying thieves.

8 thoughts on “Frieden In Unserer Zeit, Peace In Our Time

  1. Ken Barrows

    We Americans have a core belief: we can keeping creating collateral for the Federal Reserve to buy to keep infinite growth going. We need to let go of it before we can move to civilization’s next phase. Sad thing is we probably will never move on and there won’t be any next phase.

  2. ellenanderson

    @Steve What a clever response! The PO has been around for 245 years and would thus be a credible exorcist perhaps helping to defeat the spooks. Is it really going to go poof? Check this out… usmailnotforsale.org
    As I see it the republicrats (or demorubs if you prefer) have been going after the post office since the 1970s. The current post office was supported by progressives and Grangers in the late 19th century and still offers good unionized jobs in spite of the neoliberal/libertarian attacks over the past 50 years. Congress has been trying to get rid of the PO since the 70’s when the union went on strike. They are going to try to kill it now and blame it on Trump who is dumb enough to walk right into that trap. Then when deliveries must be made by disorganized oppressed Amazon employees, workers everywhere will be the worse for it. Then the Feds will be even freer to pursue the agenda that is the despair of most who comment on this site (see Ken Barrows comment above.)
    Listen libertarians – think about whether you really want to keep trending right now. Solidarity is worth a try IMHO. I wonder whether Jim Kunstler still lurks here. Hi RE – where are you?

  3. Ken Barrows

    According to EIA, US oil production decreased from 10.7 million barrels per day to 9.7 million in one week. If close to true, that’s not good. Perhaps a one off event.

  4. Mister Roboto

    Even very casual observers of the US socio-political scene know that our current intractable divisions can trace their origins back to the Vietnam War Era. This analysis was a superb fleshing out of this familiar observation.

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