‘But how do we handle the fact that such opinions were held by large numbers of highly educated people, at least as intelligent as us, for long periods of time, and organised along rigorously scientific lines?
The refusal to engage with the reality of religious belief mentioned above comes from a position of moral and intellectual superiority, (“they can’t really have though those things!”) and produces reductive and misguided interpretations of everything from the Crusades to the nineteenth century Missionary movement.”
Well, there are of course explanations for such phenomena - neurological, psychological, sociological and even political. The condensed truth is that most people (even those with university degrees or similar qualifications) are generally not as smart as they think they are. Most people also have a tendency towards avoidance of conflict, agreement with the opinions of their peers, deference to established authority. etc.
At the very lowest level we have the contradictions involved in being physical animals with inescapable physical needs for air, water and food combined with a mind - the basis of which we still have no real understanding - which has to range from crude animal behaviors like sex or eating, to composing music or exploring the quantum world. (Having a religious belief system falls somewhere between those two).
In my opinion these requirements that we find ourselves constrained by are fundamentally incompatible with each other, and it is a miracle that we can even function as abysmally as we do.
Even religion, which tries to make sense of the contradictions even going so far as to proclaim what is good/evil, leaves this mere human to conclude that none of it is what it seems. Although I think I 'see', I actually know nothing. Each week, as I ponder these things, I know less! I'm wrong often. My emotions, memories, and imagination? Completely unreliable. All the patterns I think I see and the out-of-context thoughts I may think go together, add a little more info and boom! I know nothing. Again.
It could be worse, but since I don't have an ivy league degree and I was introduced to the concept of a loving God as a child, I had the possibility to find myself on the road of humility, only after a steep, abysmal, and humiliating decline to get there. And, as you aptly state: "...it is a miracle that we can even function as abysmally as we do." which, in my mind, takes me to a belief in some kind of a merciful essence, an uncreated love, light, life source who, somehow, is keeping the power on and while remaining unseen, yet, present. Life is certainly a mystery.
I really like the unstated implications of what you write! Right now, I imagine a pundit in 2050 looking back at "those fools in 2025": was there a better solution at the time?
I found this essay enlightening. I am not inclined to giving gratuitous praise. And, I have no insight or special knowledge to add. Still, I want you to know how much I appreciate this work.
About the inter-war years, it is worth mentioning the numerous Nobel Peace Prices that went to French, German and others who sought peace and understanding and international cooperation, and were pretty much anti-war campaigners. It shows how disgusted people were with the bloodbath.
It's also interesting to read some 1930s literature of the time. You mentioned Orwell for UK, but for instance in France, you had Prevert who was strongly anti-fascist, yet pacifist at the same time - his poems basically were "We won't show up if you call another war, and if you want us to shoot the poor dudes from the other side, we'll shoot you, our rulers, wealthy elite, and MPs, instead." He wasn't a "Mussolini-apologist" or "closer Hitler supporter", he was just fed up with massive slaughter, like the bulk of the population at the time.
And that bulk of population opposed to mass casualties in war actually was also true of Germany. It's only because the Wehrmacht crushed Poland and France very quickly and with low casualties (overall and compared to WWI) that Hitler kept popular support. Having crushed various enemies so fast and with reasonably few German deaths, he actually convinced the German people that he was that good and that he would only wage wars that killed few Germans. Then came Barbarossa...
Your description of villagers going to war in WW1 reminds me of a local example that really makes me think of the past as an alien place. I live in a small farming community in Australia, population < 400. if demographics have followed most of the rest of the world, in 1914 there would have been less than 100 people here. The local hall has a memorial plaque with a dozen names of those who served - only one died, but there is no indication of those injured or disabled. But a dozen people represented perhaps half the men of serving age in the community that were persuaded that they needed to cross to the far side of the world and fight in a war that could have no possibility of affecting their lives in any way had they not gone.
I doubt I'm the only one who cannot fathom the thought processes that led to these men abandoning their farms and families for an adventure like Gallipoli followed by the Western Front...
Thanks a lot for that interesting reflection. I was wondering about your example of Munich 1938. It would make sense on the surface. However, what do you think about an interpretation of Chamberlain's role in Munich which is quite different (and seems to be supported by historical documents):
Hitler planned to occupy Czechoslovakia. The problem was, their army was large, well structured and supplied with modern arms, in particular, heavy battle tanks. In addition, the Western border to Germany was heavily fortified. The German Reichswehr command knew exactly that the limited forces of the post-Versailles Reichswehr where no match for this task, and objected strongly, even planning to kill Hitler, and seeking support from UK via back channels, to no avail.
Chamberlain presented Hitler the strategy and a draft for the Munich agreement, and behind the scenes, fully pressed the Benesz government in Prague to cave in, feeding misinformation about a huge capacity of the Reichswehr, and stating no support from the allies at all.
That worked, and the Czechoslovakian government complied to British pressure under the very humilating conditions of the Munich conference where their emissaries had been completely locked out. Result: Hitler had a big victory to be sold to the German public, and even more important, to the German Reichswehr brass who became duped. More importantly, the huge material of the Czechoslovakian army and air force prepped up the Reichswehr by an order of magnitude. Plus the industrial capacity of Czechoslovakia with its large armaments industry.
Why? Barbararossa would have been impossible without this infusion of military assets, if at all, the Reichswehr would likely have been able several years later only to implement such plan. And UK was in hurry. Their own plans (Operation Pike, the bombing of Baku, under preparation just parallel to Munich) turned out to be not feasible.
At Munich, the plan always was for Hitler and Stalin to fight, which was why the Little Entente was disbanded. Stalin recognized this, which is what gave rise to Molotov-Ribbentrop, which in turn upended this cunning plan.
Right. The big surprise then was how quickly France was defeated in June 1940. Stalin, being rational, could likely have expected a long drawn out war in the West and then been in a position to dictate terms. My sense is that most people thought that would be the case at the time.
Britain’s hope had been too that the USSR would bear the brunt of war with Germany. But given that the USSR (for example) was not even consulted over the Munich discussions then why would Stalin do that?
You may have seen it but Peter Hitchen’s book “The Phoney Victory” summarises a lot of the revisionist historiography that attacks much of the myth making of the era, whilst still recognising that Hitler did need to be stopped.
Of course, in the UK today it is for ever 1938, every “adversary” is a new Hitler and every Prime Minister wants to be Churchill and not Chamberlain.
Yes, Stalin even offered support to the Benesz governement in the Munich context, but - maybe due to the history of the Czechoslovakian troops fighting together with the White Russian troops against the Red Army during WW I deep inside Russia - Prague declined the offer.
France was a big surprise, but there had been quite some sympathy with the German dictatorship, soon materializing in the Vichy regime, which issued Franc coins with the words Travail - Famille - Patrie (meme of the fascist Croix de Feu) instead of the Liberté - Egalité - Fraternitè. Probably, the phony war at the West front contributed to lulling the French resistance. One should not forget that Fascism has been a pan-European phenomenon, in fact, Czechoslovakia has been the last real democracy in Europe apart from Switzerland (which remained neutral, being a very important facilitator for the Nazi regime). Until 1942, the Nazi criminal enterprise had been a success story, receiving quite some support internationally. With the Maison Rouge meeting on August 10, 1944 (Operation Adlerflug - Krupp Concern, Röchling Steel, Rheinmetall-Borslg AG, Thyssen Hütte AG, Linzer Hermann-GörIng-Werke, Brown-Boverle & Cie., Messerschmidt AG, Nazi departments of economics and of armament productions), the ratline organized by the Croatian Catholic structures in the Vatican, the Paperclip programme (von Braun, V2 development and production in the Dora KZ Nordhausen), the employment of Gehlen (Nazi military intelligence Foreign Armies East) offering his underground network in the Soviet Union, in particular in Ukraine, installed as head of the German Bundesnachrichtendienst in Pullach (Bandera living under his tutelage in Munich, featuring the Ukrainan language programme at the nearby Radio Free Europe), plus West Germany's first President Theodor Heuss (Thule Society Munich, Hitler was member), Adenauers funding of Dimona, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute Uranium in Peron's Argentina, Franz Josef Strauß' collaboration with the Apartheid nuclear programme in the resulting nuclear triangle, the Geesthacht nuclear centre employing the head of the second thread of the Nazi atomic bomb programme implemented by the SS, which btw drafted a concept for a European Union along the multiethnic Habsburg K&K army - and the resolution of the Maison Rouge meeting (war is lost, prepare safe fall back positions to achieve by economic means which was not feasible by military ones). Not to mention the employment of Hitler's Reichswehr brass in top NATO positions... Don't be surprised by the current state of the European Commission, there are some underlying currents.
Concerning Muslims’ desire to kill unbelievers I think that is a myth of ”the Evil Other”, created by Liberals who want to find a scape-goat for their own disastrous mismanagement of the last 30 years’ economy. Muslims have lived peacefully together with other creeds for a thousand years, and even the Quran states that other ”creeds of the book” should be protected, not exterminated.
When killing occurs, it has other reasons.
In West Africa it is about struggle for fertile land during desertification. In Europe it is about discrimination and the usual European contempt for ”the native”. And IS is a mafia, says Asef Bayat and points to the lifestyle of the leaders, with gaming, fast cars and expensive suits; it is natural for a mafia to do what it can to scare others.
Among other examples.
I agree that one can not look for truths in the mass media (and I see the above as a confirmation). Media people are always in a hurry and have no time and no other resources to search out what the truth is. Neither do they have an interest – media is in the entertainment business, said the legendary Swedish environmentalist Björn Eriksson, it has no duty to tell anything important. Also, it wants to please the advertisers and other powerful people. If one searches for truths one may occationally find it in academic research, but one has to know where to look.
If you look back at that part of the Essay, you'll recall I was specifically discussing militant radical Islam, which is a very recent development, and very much a minority tendency, even if it has powerful backers. There are shelves of books about it in various languages, years of videos and interviews and, not least, the pronouncements of the Islamists themselves. For them, the history of Muslims living peacefully with Christians is precisely the problem. No serious Muslim should live in a non-Muslim country, or obey any law that is not found in the Koran and the Hadith. The distressing popularity of such dogmas is essentially the result of successive failures of western imported ideas, and of the ideology of panarabism. There's a lot been written about that as well.
"Muslims have lived peacefully together with other creeds for a thousand years"
Is that serious? This is the very religion that started its expansion with military conquest and its most cherished 'saints', the "Good Caliphs" are the conquerors. Even the concept of holy war is something that was probably borrowed by Christianity from Islam - the first time we see it mentioned was in the 8th century Byzantine sources
Non-Muslims were usually heavily oppressed in Muslim states. Ethnic/religious cleansing, mass forced conversions, and in some cases, genocide, were not unusual. There were exceptions of course (Akbar the Great in India, Spanish Umayyads, some other) but there were far more examples of harsh, intolerant rule. Usually it was no different from the living of Jews under the rule of Christian kings,
They were not nearly as suppressed as Muslims in Non-Muslim states. In Christian states even adherents to rivalling Christian sects were usually killed off, or deported.
Muslim Spain has for example a well-earned reputation for toleration. True, non-muslims payed a surtax – but for exactly that reason they were protected by muslim rulers who needed the money.
The examples of Muslims living under Christian rule before 19 century are quite rare. Spain, Sicily, Crusader kingdoms, Russia and that's probably all. In most cases, their status was not much different from the status of Christian in Muslim lands. They also usually paid additional taxes, were banned from holding public offices but not much more than that. Up to late 15th century btw Spanish Christian kings were often considered MORE tolerant than their Muslim counterparts. It's quite logical though because they were natives of the land and not fanatics who came from the desert like Almoravid, Almohads and so on. That all started to change under Ferdinand, Isabella and then early Habsburgs.
As for the intra-Muslim religious quarrels, there were lots of them, starting with the Kharijites in the 7th century.
I'm certain that there could be disturbances from time to time. But not the systematic suppression that ruled in Christian states. Christians and Jews were tolerated and protected according to Muslim law, albeit that they had to pay the extra tax.
The latter was, according to Ira Lapidus: A history of Islamic societies, the reason why Muslim governments were not overly interested in having them conversed, then they would have lost the money.
Iirc it was from reading Aurelien2022 that I learned I learned of the SHWEP (https://shwep.net/). Episode 200: Introducing Islām starts a new chapter and is super interesting and I recommend it. A couple of things it emphasized is that the fundamentalist Islam that westerners fear is very recent, not really a thing until the 20c, and serves political purposes of states. According to SHWEP, for most of its history Islam was pluralist, dialectical, and did not have an prescribed urtext.
Concerning wars, it seems that they appear with cut-throat competition. War is not politics continued with other methods as Clausewitz thought, it's business continued with other methods.
At least Dale Copeland thinks so. He has studied all great power wars 1790-1990 and found that in an overwhelming majority of cases wars have been started by great powers that thought that they were defeated in the economic competition. So, for example, Germany felt itself be locked out from the empires of France and Britain already in 1914 and even more so in the 30s (socalled imperial preference). They must have their raw materials from somewhere, but where, if they were locked out from Africa and Asia?
It is easy to see that nowadays all participants in wars loose from it (unless they aren't very unequal in strength). So it should be as easy to see that cut-throat competition doesn't pay (something you can infer from Robert Axelrod's classic The evolusion of cooperation). But that is another Liberal delusion – that competition always is something Good.
Well, I don't think Austria feared economic competition from Serbia, or Russia from Austria. And Britain only entered the war to prevent German control of the Channel Ports.
Competition there was, and UK and France had shared most of the world between them. Particularly Germany resented that. And according to Copeland, this is what made it a world war.
I'm super glad our host brings up the Sudeten crisis. There's an excellent resource on that, where Airminded liveblogs the crisis day by day - you can find it at https://airminded.org/archives/sudeten-crisis/
Via British newspaper archived, you can actually get a feel for how it seemed *at the time*. I found it very eye opening. Otherwise I have nothing substantial to add to Aurelien's ever-insightful text
Clearly our behaviour is determined by the separation of apparent 'bodies-in-space'; an illusion effectively dismissed by the revelation of 'quantum' physics that the material world presented by our 5 senses is 99.99999% space.
Nevertheless our 'religions', in long-term, habitual 'hierarchical' dispute, ignore That Oneness of Space and, therefore, there is no cognisance of our Actual Nature as a Reflection in Divine Mind. So, we remain entrapped in a 'light-show' that manifests within waves of motion generated by Divine Thinking.
Thus, egoic delusion ensures that concepts of mind-body-spirit merely serve to increase our separation; as reflected in the social-cultural-economic-political- financial structures of our societies. In effect, believing in the illusion, mankind can only serve to intensify its delusions. Indeed, the most deluded and separated can and will continue to misdirect us through hierarchical control of our energies; employing money-law-education as debt-fraud-indoctrination.
Now we can employ digital tech systems to create media refocused to bring the 'missing link' of Divine Truth into a 'new conversation'. Thus, we can require 'real science' to meld science-religion-philosophy into the investigation and revelation of 'space' as Divine Mind - God - exploring ITs endless possibilities in space-time relativity.
In effect, we will realise the Divine Wisdom that cause-and-effect enables the living lessons whereby we can learn from our 'mistakes' as we discover the actual process of education from within - in-tuition. Founded on the Reality of Oneness, the wise advice of millennia has tried to guide us to 'cause no harm'. Now is the time (point in the 'script' of Divine Mind) that we can and must reveal the structure of 99.99999% space as the Divine 'Playground'; in effect, mankind is challenged to 'grow up and stand up' as characters who need to learn their True Nature in order that the Play of God can unfold perfectly and effortlessly.
Thus, the One will have gained the experience of mankind loosing, and regaining, conscious connection to - Real Living Awareness of - That Mind. So, we can dismiss the fertile ground wherein deluded ego-minds in total separation from Reality can manipulate Truth into the imbalanced effects that we review as history (his-story).
As those deluded narcissists seek to 'play god' by engineering their own digital holodeck, we have our final opportunity to stand up and re-educate ourselves. In effect, we are challenged to re-connect to the energies freely-available in Divine Mind in order to unveil our True Nature in Truth, Beauty and Goodness.
I wonder by how much we underestimate the role of propaganda and (social) mental conditioning; our need to go along to get along. Like a commenter above, mediocrity believes in its supremacy while excellence cultivates humility.
Maybe one day in the future historians will classify ideas of cultural and ethnic superiority as a continuation of eugenics. As a multicultural person it's always challenging to be lectured at about the superiority of Italian culture, all the more because I see discrimination better than most, especially when racism lurks beneath. Giving voice to this can lead to social exclusion; experience teaches.
Everyone needs a narrative to be functional and like the CEOs I've met, aside from their blindspots, the need to justify to themselves why they and not others reached a destination, ignoring anything which might discredit their bespoke narrative.
And the more I learn about cognitive biases, the more I'm sure there are so many influences we just quantify, statistically, so it's discarded in the final analysis, because standards of academia says references are not all equal.
It's easy to judge the past harshly. Maybe at Munich in 1938 some really did want to avoid a repeat of WW1, because they knew the carnage it wrought.
I remember as a child my grandma closing down any emerging discussion at the dinner table on current events involving America's misdeeds by saying "we were saved thanks to them".
A very nice essay, thanks. One could argue two things: 1) Taking the historians' defense, one should not forget the so-called"fog of the war", or even, shall I say, the "fog of the present". Sometimes the future see things better. 2) But this is related with 1: the present is always plural, there may be a majority opinion, but there are always others. For instance, in the case of races' scientific approach, there were also people back then who disagreed with this approach. And they were right (and courageous). But I agree with your point about Chamberlain, yes
‘But how do we handle the fact that such opinions were held by large numbers of highly educated people, at least as intelligent as us, for long periods of time, and organised along rigorously scientific lines?
The refusal to engage with the reality of religious belief mentioned above comes from a position of moral and intellectual superiority, (“they can’t really have though those things!”) and produces reductive and misguided interpretations of everything from the Crusades to the nineteenth century Missionary movement.”
Well, there are of course explanations for such phenomena - neurological, psychological, sociological and even political. The condensed truth is that most people (even those with university degrees or similar qualifications) are generally not as smart as they think they are. Most people also have a tendency towards avoidance of conflict, agreement with the opinions of their peers, deference to established authority. etc.
At the very lowest level we have the contradictions involved in being physical animals with inescapable physical needs for air, water and food combined with a mind - the basis of which we still have no real understanding - which has to range from crude animal behaviors like sex or eating, to composing music or exploring the quantum world. (Having a religious belief system falls somewhere between those two).
In my opinion these requirements that we find ourselves constrained by are fundamentally incompatible with each other, and it is a miracle that we can even function as abysmally as we do.
Even religion, which tries to make sense of the contradictions even going so far as to proclaim what is good/evil, leaves this mere human to conclude that none of it is what it seems. Although I think I 'see', I actually know nothing. Each week, as I ponder these things, I know less! I'm wrong often. My emotions, memories, and imagination? Completely unreliable. All the patterns I think I see and the out-of-context thoughts I may think go together, add a little more info and boom! I know nothing. Again.
It could be worse, but since I don't have an ivy league degree and I was introduced to the concept of a loving God as a child, I had the possibility to find myself on the road of humility, only after a steep, abysmal, and humiliating decline to get there. And, as you aptly state: "...it is a miracle that we can even function as abysmally as we do." which, in my mind, takes me to a belief in some kind of a merciful essence, an uncreated love, light, life source who, somehow, is keeping the power on and while remaining unseen, yet, present. Life is certainly a mystery.
I really like the unstated implications of what you write! Right now, I imagine a pundit in 2050 looking back at "those fools in 2025": was there a better solution at the time?
I found this essay enlightening. I am not inclined to giving gratuitous praise. And, I have no insight or special knowledge to add. Still, I want you to know how much I appreciate this work.
About the inter-war years, it is worth mentioning the numerous Nobel Peace Prices that went to French, German and others who sought peace and understanding and international cooperation, and were pretty much anti-war campaigners. It shows how disgusted people were with the bloodbath.
It's also interesting to read some 1930s literature of the time. You mentioned Orwell for UK, but for instance in France, you had Prevert who was strongly anti-fascist, yet pacifist at the same time - his poems basically were "We won't show up if you call another war, and if you want us to shoot the poor dudes from the other side, we'll shoot you, our rulers, wealthy elite, and MPs, instead." He wasn't a "Mussolini-apologist" or "closer Hitler supporter", he was just fed up with massive slaughter, like the bulk of the population at the time.
And that bulk of population opposed to mass casualties in war actually was also true of Germany. It's only because the Wehrmacht crushed Poland and France very quickly and with low casualties (overall and compared to WWI) that Hitler kept popular support. Having crushed various enemies so fast and with reasonably few German deaths, he actually convinced the German people that he was that good and that he would only wage wars that killed few Germans. Then came Barbarossa...
Your description of villagers going to war in WW1 reminds me of a local example that really makes me think of the past as an alien place. I live in a small farming community in Australia, population < 400. if demographics have followed most of the rest of the world, in 1914 there would have been less than 100 people here. The local hall has a memorial plaque with a dozen names of those who served - only one died, but there is no indication of those injured or disabled. But a dozen people represented perhaps half the men of serving age in the community that were persuaded that they needed to cross to the far side of the world and fight in a war that could have no possibility of affecting their lives in any way had they not gone.
I doubt I'm the only one who cannot fathom the thought processes that led to these men abandoning their farms and families for an adventure like Gallipoli followed by the Western Front...
Thanks a lot for that interesting reflection. I was wondering about your example of Munich 1938. It would make sense on the surface. However, what do you think about an interpretation of Chamberlain's role in Munich which is quite different (and seems to be supported by historical documents):
Hitler planned to occupy Czechoslovakia. The problem was, their army was large, well structured and supplied with modern arms, in particular, heavy battle tanks. In addition, the Western border to Germany was heavily fortified. The German Reichswehr command knew exactly that the limited forces of the post-Versailles Reichswehr where no match for this task, and objected strongly, even planning to kill Hitler, and seeking support from UK via back channels, to no avail.
Chamberlain presented Hitler the strategy and a draft for the Munich agreement, and behind the scenes, fully pressed the Benesz government in Prague to cave in, feeding misinformation about a huge capacity of the Reichswehr, and stating no support from the allies at all.
That worked, and the Czechoslovakian government complied to British pressure under the very humilating conditions of the Munich conference where their emissaries had been completely locked out. Result: Hitler had a big victory to be sold to the German public, and even more important, to the German Reichswehr brass who became duped. More importantly, the huge material of the Czechoslovakian army and air force prepped up the Reichswehr by an order of magnitude. Plus the industrial capacity of Czechoslovakia with its large armaments industry.
Why? Barbararossa would have been impossible without this infusion of military assets, if at all, the Reichswehr would likely have been able several years later only to implement such plan. And UK was in hurry. Their own plans (Operation Pike, the bombing of Baku, under preparation just parallel to Munich) turned out to be not feasible.
At Munich, the plan always was for Hitler and Stalin to fight, which was why the Little Entente was disbanded. Stalin recognized this, which is what gave rise to Molotov-Ribbentrop, which in turn upended this cunning plan.
Right. The big surprise then was how quickly France was defeated in June 1940. Stalin, being rational, could likely have expected a long drawn out war in the West and then been in a position to dictate terms. My sense is that most people thought that would be the case at the time.
Britain’s hope had been too that the USSR would bear the brunt of war with Germany. But given that the USSR (for example) was not even consulted over the Munich discussions then why would Stalin do that?
You may have seen it but Peter Hitchen’s book “The Phoney Victory” summarises a lot of the revisionist historiography that attacks much of the myth making of the era, whilst still recognising that Hitler did need to be stopped.
Of course, in the UK today it is for ever 1938, every “adversary” is a new Hitler and every Prime Minister wants to be Churchill and not Chamberlain.
Yes, Stalin even offered support to the Benesz governement in the Munich context, but - maybe due to the history of the Czechoslovakian troops fighting together with the White Russian troops against the Red Army during WW I deep inside Russia - Prague declined the offer.
France was a big surprise, but there had been quite some sympathy with the German dictatorship, soon materializing in the Vichy regime, which issued Franc coins with the words Travail - Famille - Patrie (meme of the fascist Croix de Feu) instead of the Liberté - Egalité - Fraternitè. Probably, the phony war at the West front contributed to lulling the French resistance. One should not forget that Fascism has been a pan-European phenomenon, in fact, Czechoslovakia has been the last real democracy in Europe apart from Switzerland (which remained neutral, being a very important facilitator for the Nazi regime). Until 1942, the Nazi criminal enterprise had been a success story, receiving quite some support internationally. With the Maison Rouge meeting on August 10, 1944 (Operation Adlerflug - Krupp Concern, Röchling Steel, Rheinmetall-Borslg AG, Thyssen Hütte AG, Linzer Hermann-GörIng-Werke, Brown-Boverle & Cie., Messerschmidt AG, Nazi departments of economics and of armament productions), the ratline organized by the Croatian Catholic structures in the Vatican, the Paperclip programme (von Braun, V2 development and production in the Dora KZ Nordhausen), the employment of Gehlen (Nazi military intelligence Foreign Armies East) offering his underground network in the Soviet Union, in particular in Ukraine, installed as head of the German Bundesnachrichtendienst in Pullach (Bandera living under his tutelage in Munich, featuring the Ukrainan language programme at the nearby Radio Free Europe), plus West Germany's first President Theodor Heuss (Thule Society Munich, Hitler was member), Adenauers funding of Dimona, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute Uranium in Peron's Argentina, Franz Josef Strauß' collaboration with the Apartheid nuclear programme in the resulting nuclear triangle, the Geesthacht nuclear centre employing the head of the second thread of the Nazi atomic bomb programme implemented by the SS, which btw drafted a concept for a European Union along the multiethnic Habsburg K&K army - and the resolution of the Maison Rouge meeting (war is lost, prepare safe fall back positions to achieve by economic means which was not feasible by military ones). Not to mention the employment of Hitler's Reichswehr brass in top NATO positions... Don't be surprised by the current state of the European Commission, there are some underlying currents.
Concerning Muslims’ desire to kill unbelievers I think that is a myth of ”the Evil Other”, created by Liberals who want to find a scape-goat for their own disastrous mismanagement of the last 30 years’ economy. Muslims have lived peacefully together with other creeds for a thousand years, and even the Quran states that other ”creeds of the book” should be protected, not exterminated.
When killing occurs, it has other reasons.
In West Africa it is about struggle for fertile land during desertification. In Europe it is about discrimination and the usual European contempt for ”the native”. And IS is a mafia, says Asef Bayat and points to the lifestyle of the leaders, with gaming, fast cars and expensive suits; it is natural for a mafia to do what it can to scare others.
Among other examples.
I agree that one can not look for truths in the mass media (and I see the above as a confirmation). Media people are always in a hurry and have no time and no other resources to search out what the truth is. Neither do they have an interest – media is in the entertainment business, said the legendary Swedish environmentalist Björn Eriksson, it has no duty to tell anything important. Also, it wants to please the advertisers and other powerful people. If one searches for truths one may occationally find it in academic research, but one has to know where to look.
If you look back at that part of the Essay, you'll recall I was specifically discussing militant radical Islam, which is a very recent development, and very much a minority tendency, even if it has powerful backers. There are shelves of books about it in various languages, years of videos and interviews and, not least, the pronouncements of the Islamists themselves. For them, the history of Muslims living peacefully with Christians is precisely the problem. No serious Muslim should live in a non-Muslim country, or obey any law that is not found in the Koran and the Hadith. The distressing popularity of such dogmas is essentially the result of successive failures of western imported ideas, and of the ideology of panarabism. There's a lot been written about that as well.
Yes, but very angry young men is not a Muslim speciality.
"Muslims have lived peacefully together with other creeds for a thousand years"
Is that serious? This is the very religion that started its expansion with military conquest and its most cherished 'saints', the "Good Caliphs" are the conquerors. Even the concept of holy war is something that was probably borrowed by Christianity from Islam - the first time we see it mentioned was in the 8th century Byzantine sources
Wars, directed by princes and the like, are quite common everywhere in world history. What I talk about is civil society.
Non-Muslims were usually heavily oppressed in Muslim states. Ethnic/religious cleansing, mass forced conversions, and in some cases, genocide, were not unusual. There were exceptions of course (Akbar the Great in India, Spanish Umayyads, some other) but there were far more examples of harsh, intolerant rule. Usually it was no different from the living of Jews under the rule of Christian kings,
They were not nearly as suppressed as Muslims in Non-Muslim states. In Christian states even adherents to rivalling Christian sects were usually killed off, or deported.
Muslim Spain has for example a well-earned reputation for toleration. True, non-muslims payed a surtax – but for exactly that reason they were protected by muslim rulers who needed the money.
The examples of Muslims living under Christian rule before 19 century are quite rare. Spain, Sicily, Crusader kingdoms, Russia and that's probably all. In most cases, their status was not much different from the status of Christian in Muslim lands. They also usually paid additional taxes, were banned from holding public offices but not much more than that. Up to late 15th century btw Spanish Christian kings were often considered MORE tolerant than their Muslim counterparts. It's quite logical though because they were natives of the land and not fanatics who came from the desert like Almoravid, Almohads and so on. That all started to change under Ferdinand, Isabella and then early Habsburgs.
As for the intra-Muslim religious quarrels, there were lots of them, starting with the Kharijites in the 7th century.
An academic article, from LSE, about this can be read at https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/religionglobalsociety/2022/09/tolerance-versus-toleration-the-lost-civility-of-the-muslim-empires/. And now I will not let me be disturbed by spurious ideas of past Muslim uncivility.
I'm certain that there could be disturbances from time to time. But not the systematic suppression that ruled in Christian states. Christians and Jews were tolerated and protected according to Muslim law, albeit that they had to pay the extra tax.
The latter was, according to Ira Lapidus: A history of Islamic societies, the reason why Muslim governments were not overly interested in having them conversed, then they would have lost the money.
Iirc it was from reading Aurelien2022 that I learned I learned of the SHWEP (https://shwep.net/). Episode 200: Introducing Islām starts a new chapter and is super interesting and I recommend it. A couple of things it emphasized is that the fundamentalist Islam that westerners fear is very recent, not really a thing until the 20c, and serves political purposes of states. According to SHWEP, for most of its history Islam was pluralist, dialectical, and did not have an prescribed urtext.
My usual italian translation, here:
"Prima che il passato divenisse nuovo.
Perché dovremmo preoccuparci di cercare di capire?"
https://trying2understandw.blogspot.com/2025/02/prima-che-il-passato-divenisse-nuovo.html
Thanks as always, Marco.
Concerning wars, it seems that they appear with cut-throat competition. War is not politics continued with other methods as Clausewitz thought, it's business continued with other methods.
At least Dale Copeland thinks so. He has studied all great power wars 1790-1990 and found that in an overwhelming majority of cases wars have been started by great powers that thought that they were defeated in the economic competition. So, for example, Germany felt itself be locked out from the empires of France and Britain already in 1914 and even more so in the 30s (socalled imperial preference). They must have their raw materials from somewhere, but where, if they were locked out from Africa and Asia?
It is easy to see that nowadays all participants in wars loose from it (unless they aren't very unequal in strength). So it should be as easy to see that cut-throat competition doesn't pay (something you can infer from Robert Axelrod's classic The evolusion of cooperation). But that is another Liberal delusion – that competition always is something Good.
Well, I don't think Austria feared economic competition from Serbia, or Russia from Austria. And Britain only entered the war to prevent German control of the Channel Ports.
Competition there was, and UK and France had shared most of the world between them. Particularly Germany resented that. And according to Copeland, this is what made it a world war.
But why should I defend what he writes, he can do it himself, https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691161594/economic-interdependence-and-war
I'm super glad our host brings up the Sudeten crisis. There's an excellent resource on that, where Airminded liveblogs the crisis day by day - you can find it at https://airminded.org/archives/sudeten-crisis/
Via British newspaper archived, you can actually get a feel for how it seemed *at the time*. I found it very eye opening. Otherwise I have nothing substantial to add to Aurelien's ever-insightful text
"After all the German claim to the Sudetenland was not just reasonable,"
Oh geez. There you go again. Look at the medieval map of the Czech lands...
You figure population conquest is the right logic here? Maybe then parts of France will soon go to Algeria. So reasonable!
Clearly our behaviour is determined by the separation of apparent 'bodies-in-space'; an illusion effectively dismissed by the revelation of 'quantum' physics that the material world presented by our 5 senses is 99.99999% space.
Nevertheless our 'religions', in long-term, habitual 'hierarchical' dispute, ignore That Oneness of Space and, therefore, there is no cognisance of our Actual Nature as a Reflection in Divine Mind. So, we remain entrapped in a 'light-show' that manifests within waves of motion generated by Divine Thinking.
Thus, egoic delusion ensures that concepts of mind-body-spirit merely serve to increase our separation; as reflected in the social-cultural-economic-political- financial structures of our societies. In effect, believing in the illusion, mankind can only serve to intensify its delusions. Indeed, the most deluded and separated can and will continue to misdirect us through hierarchical control of our energies; employing money-law-education as debt-fraud-indoctrination.
Now we can employ digital tech systems to create media refocused to bring the 'missing link' of Divine Truth into a 'new conversation'. Thus, we can require 'real science' to meld science-religion-philosophy into the investigation and revelation of 'space' as Divine Mind - God - exploring ITs endless possibilities in space-time relativity.
In effect, we will realise the Divine Wisdom that cause-and-effect enables the living lessons whereby we can learn from our 'mistakes' as we discover the actual process of education from within - in-tuition. Founded on the Reality of Oneness, the wise advice of millennia has tried to guide us to 'cause no harm'. Now is the time (point in the 'script' of Divine Mind) that we can and must reveal the structure of 99.99999% space as the Divine 'Playground'; in effect, mankind is challenged to 'grow up and stand up' as characters who need to learn their True Nature in order that the Play of God can unfold perfectly and effortlessly.
Thus, the One will have gained the experience of mankind loosing, and regaining, conscious connection to - Real Living Awareness of - That Mind. So, we can dismiss the fertile ground wherein deluded ego-minds in total separation from Reality can manipulate Truth into the imbalanced effects that we review as history (his-story).
As those deluded narcissists seek to 'play god' by engineering their own digital holodeck, we have our final opportunity to stand up and re-educate ourselves. In effect, we are challenged to re-connect to the energies freely-available in Divine Mind in order to unveil our True Nature in Truth, Beauty and Goodness.
Your essays make me think. Thank you 😊
I wonder by how much we underestimate the role of propaganda and (social) mental conditioning; our need to go along to get along. Like a commenter above, mediocrity believes in its supremacy while excellence cultivates humility.
Maybe one day in the future historians will classify ideas of cultural and ethnic superiority as a continuation of eugenics. As a multicultural person it's always challenging to be lectured at about the superiority of Italian culture, all the more because I see discrimination better than most, especially when racism lurks beneath. Giving voice to this can lead to social exclusion; experience teaches.
Everyone needs a narrative to be functional and like the CEOs I've met, aside from their blindspots, the need to justify to themselves why they and not others reached a destination, ignoring anything which might discredit their bespoke narrative.
And the more I learn about cognitive biases, the more I'm sure there are so many influences we just quantify, statistically, so it's discarded in the final analysis, because standards of academia says references are not all equal.
It's easy to judge the past harshly. Maybe at Munich in 1938 some really did want to avoid a repeat of WW1, because they knew the carnage it wrought.
I remember as a child my grandma closing down any emerging discussion at the dinner table on current events involving America's misdeeds by saying "we were saved thanks to them".
A very nice essay, thanks. One could argue two things: 1) Taking the historians' defense, one should not forget the so-called"fog of the war", or even, shall I say, the "fog of the present". Sometimes the future see things better. 2) But this is related with 1: the present is always plural, there may be a majority opinion, but there are always others. For instance, in the case of races' scientific approach, there were also people back then who disagreed with this approach. And they were right (and courageous). But I agree with your point about Chamberlain, yes