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SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1History 317 Richards
Packet of Readings on the Causes of War
PART TWO
Selection #1
Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Sociology of Imperialism (1918)
For it is always a question, when one speaks of imperialism, of the assertion of an aggressiveness whose real basis does not lie in the aims followed at the moment but an aggressiveness in itself. And
actually history shows us people and classes who desire expansion for the sake of expanding, war for the sake of fighting, domination for the sake of dominating. It values conquest not so much because of the advantages it brings, which are often more than doubtful, as because it is conquest, success, activity. Although expansion as self-purpose always needs concrete objects to activate it and
support it, its meaning is not included therein. Hence its tendency toward the infinite unto the exhaustion of its forces, and its motto: plus ultra [“further beyond”; the motto of Spain]. Thus we define: Imperialism is the object-less disposition of a state to expansion by force without assigned limits.
Our analysis of historical material show: First, the undoubted fact that object-less tendencies toward forceful expansion without definite limits of purpose, nonrational and irrational, purely instinctive inclinations to war and conquest, play a very great role in the history of humanity. As paradoxical as it sounds, innumerable wars, perhaps the majority of all wars, have been waged without sufficient reason. Secondly, the explanation of the martial, functional need, this will to war, lies in the necessities of a situation, in which peoples and classes must become fighters or go under, and in the fact that the physical dispositions and social structure acquired in the past, once existent and consolidated, maintain themselves and continue to work after they have lost their meaning and their function of preserving life. Thirdly, the existence of supporting elements which ease the continued life of these dispositions ans structures can be divided into groups. Martial dispositions are especially furthered by the groups ruling the internal relationships of interests. And with martial dispositions are allied the influences of all those who individually stand to gain, either economically or socially, by martial policy. Both groups of motives are in general overgrown by another kind of
foliage which is not merely political propaganda but also individual psychological motivation. Imperialism is an atavism. It falls in the great group of those things that live on from earlier epochs, things which play so great a role in every concrete situation and which are to be explained not from the conditions of the present but from the conditions of the past. It is an atavism of social structure and an atavism of individual emotional habits. Since the necessities which created it have gone forever, it must – though ever martial development tends to revitalize it – disappear in time.
Modern Imperialism is one of the heirlooms of the absolute monarchical state. The "inner logic" of capitalism would have never evolved it. Its sources come from the policy of the princes and the customs of a pre-capitalist milieu. But even export monopoly is not imperialism and it would never have developed to imperialism in the hands of the pacific bourgeoisie. This happened only because the war machine, its social atmosphere, and the martial will were inherited and because a martially-oriented class (i.e., the nobility) maintained itself in a ruling position with which of all the varied interests of the bourgeoisie the martial ones could ally themselves. This alliance keeps alive fighting instincts and ideas of domination. It led to social relations which perhaps ultimately are to be explained by relations of production but not by the productive relations of capitalism alone.
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Selection #2
Paul Kopperman, “The Holocaust: Origins and Triggers”
Too often, the Holocaust is discussed almost entirely in the context of German history, and even then the focus is primarily on the Nazi period, 1933-45. Such emphasis suggests that the Nazi murder campaign represented a radical departure in European history. On the contrary, in most respects the Holocaust was part of the historical fabric, for over the centuries the Jews had often fallen victim to mass violence.
Of the forces that shape history, none is more decisive than what may be called "association": how people are arranged in groups by such phenomena as nation, religion, ethnicity, and class; how strongly individuals identify with the group; and how the group relates to others. It was the fate of the Jew, from an early date and for all the centuries down to the Holocaust, to be seen by non-Jews of almost every category as the “other,” the perpetual outcast -- isolated, feared, and hated. Indeed, the Jew was seen not only as being outside of these associations, but of being hostile to each, and a real danger. He was likewise thought to embody the polar opposite of whatever was regarded as the primary virtue of the association. The avenue to Jew-hatred that a particular Antisemite took therefore tells much of his own values and priorities.
Those who are unaware of the history, nature, scope, and virulence of European Jew-hatred may find the Holocaust to be inexplicable. Those familiar with them know all too well the answer to the question, “How could it have happened?”
1. Antiquity and the Early Christian Period
Antisemitism -- prejudice against Jews -- is probably as old as Judaism, and it is documented in many ancient sources, including the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament. Even before the time of Jesus, it was widespread in the Middle East. Jews were condemned for their refusal to worship gods other than their own, and they were demonized in legends. Apion, who was apparently an Egyptian contemporary of Jesus, even claimed that each year Jews killed and devoured non-Jews in a savage ritual. In Europe, more than a thousand years later, a similar charge would prompt the murder of thousands of Jews.
The ancient world also saw the rise of a stereotype that was to haunt the Jews for centuries: that they were loyal only to themselves. The Book of Esther relates that Haman, minister to the ruler of Persia, was offended when an individual Jew did not bow before him, and he decided to avenge himself on all Jews in the realm. He told the king, "There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of thy kingdom; and their laws are diverse from those of every people; neither keep they the king's laws; therefore it pleaseth not the king to suffer them. If it please the king, let it be written that they be destroyed." Haman's plot failed, but his portrayal of the Jews as a nation within a nation endured.
A series of outsiders who ruled the land of Israel sought to force the Jews to abandon their religion and traditions. By such means they tried to make them more tractable subjects. The campaign was especially intense during the centuries when Rome controlled the region. The Romans sought to bar Jews from Jerusalem and banned Jewish practice and teaching. Instead of succumbing to imperial dictates, however, the Jews rose in several rebellions. In the end, the Jewish forces were crushed, after both suffering and inflicting heavy losses. Devastation in the homeland and the persecution that was focused there now accelerated a process that had been under way for some time: the Diaspora, or dispersion of the Jews. For many centuries thereafter, Jews almost everywhere would constitute a minority, usually a tiny one.
Though the Jews were few and dispersed, Antisemitism did not decline. Their many enemies claimed that they were hostile to all except their fellow Jews. But being few in number, the Jews could not, it was said, destroy in direct confrontation. Rather, the early Antisemites charged, they ate away at the societies in which they lived, killing from within. Tacitus, the greatest of Roman historians, reflected the widespread sentiment when he wrote that however benevolent Jews might be to each other, "the rest of the world they confront with the hatred reserved for enemies." He ridiculed Judaism, then added, "Proselytes to Jewry adopt the same practices, and the very first lesson they learn is to despise the gods, shed all feelings of patriotism, and consider parents, children and brothers as readily expendable." The image of Jews as destroyers of civilizations was to last the centuries.
Although Antisemitism existed in the pagan world, it increased markedly with the rise of Christianity. The New Testament itself included many negative characterizations of the Jews, and it was to provide ammunition for centuries of Antisemites. Above all, Jews collectively were blamed for the crucifixion of Jesus. According to the gospels, a mob in Jerusalem confronted Pontius Pilate, the Roman proconsul of Judea, and demanded that Jesus be crucified. The proconsul tried to dissuade them, but finally, as reported by Matthew, "Pilate, seeing that he was doing no good, but rather that a riot was breaking out, took water and washed his hands in sight of the crowd, saying, 'I am innocent of the blood of this just man: see to it yourselves.' And all the people answered and said, 'His blood be on us and on our children.'" The last words in this passage, "His blood be on us and on our children" (a statement reported only in Matthew, and not in the other gospels), would be used to justify the doctrine that Jewish guilt for the crucifixion was eternal. It would likewise be held that guilt fell upon every Jew and was not limited to members of the mob that confronted Pilate. All Jews, for all time, were culpable.
From an early date Christian authorities treated Jewry as the enemy. The charge of deicide was in part a cause, in part an excuse. In either case, however, it was extremely potent. In the late fourth century, for example, John Chrysostom, patriarch of Constantinople, was telling his audience, "The Jews are the odious assassins of Christ and for killing God there is no expiation possible, no indulgence or pardon. Christians may never cease vengeance, and the Jew must live in servitude forever.... It is incumbent upon all Christians to hate the Jews." By such arguments, he and other influential figures sought to establish hatred of the Jews as an act of faith for Christians.
Chrysostom also stated, "[Jews] worship the devil.... God always hated the Jews." It was in fact already a commonplace to believe that God hated the Jews. Whether this had always been the case or whether (perhaps the more usual view) it had become so after the Jews had rejected and killed Jesus was the only real point of debate. For their part, Jews were seen as enemies of God, so twisted that they in fact had embraced the devil. They therefore embodied evil in the world, and Christians, as champions of God and good, were obligated to do battle with them.
There is also evidence that the early Christians resented and perhaps feared the Jews as rivals. In Thessalonians, Paul complains that Jews are "hindering [Christians] from speaking to the Gentiles that they may be saved." Jews were furthermore seen as having a corruptive effect on Christians. About 420, Jerome, a scholar whose translation of the Bible into Latin was to be standard for centuries, was writing, "Jews are congenital liars who lure Christians to heresy. They should therefore be punished until they confess." Individual Jews did indeed proselytize, though Jews collectively never mounted organized missionary efforts, as did the church. And Jews did win converts, some of whom were Christian. It appears that their success was much resented.
In another, more fundamental way, Judaism represented a challenge. Chrysostom again: "If the Jewish rites are holy and venerable, our way of life must be false. But if our way is true, as indeed it is, theirs is fraudulent." To most Christians, the matter was not even worth considering. There was only one true faith, and it was obviously Christianity. That Jews put forward an alternative merely demonstrated that their nature was malicious and perverse. Indeed, it was widely believed that Jews secretly recognized the truth of Christianity, but that because of their perversity and their hatred of non-Jews they would not admit it. Alternatively, some argued that Jews were too corrupt, their nature too debased, for them to understand God's message. Early in the fifth century, Augustine, bishop of Hippo, wrote, "The true image of the Hebrew is Judas Iscariot, who sells the Lord for silver. The Jew can never understand the Scriptures."
As Christianity began to spread and gain influence during the later years of the Roman Empire, some church leaders began to assert that Judaism should no longer be tolerated. In about 388, a Christian mob, incited by their bishop, burnt the synagogue in Callinicum, a town in Syria. When the emperor ordered that it be rebuilt with church funds, Ambrose, bishop of Milan, wrote him in defense of his fellow bishop, noting that he would be willing to incite the same action, "so that there should no longer be any place where Christ is denied." The emperor backed down, and the incident was celebrated as a victory for church authority. In the past, leading church figures had occasionally taken strong measures against the Jews. For example, in 250 the bishop of Carthage had ordered all Jews expelled from his diocese, at swordpoint if necessary. During the fifth and sixth centuries, however, such directives became more common, and several bishops incited mobs to convert Jews by force.
Matthew ... Paul ... Chrysostom ... Jerome ... Augustine ... Ambrose. These are not merely individuals who verbally assailed the Jews. Rather, they are among the foundational figures of Christianity. In reviewing the history of Antisemitism, it is important to note not only what was being said about the Jews in a given time, but by whom. Time and again one finds central authority figures -- of religious and of secular traditions, of nations, of cultures -- vilifying the Jews. In every age there have been a multitude of lesser lights who have said the same or worse. The difference is, the words of icons have stuck, binding generations together in Jew-hatred.
The age of the Roman Empire saw church leaders condemning the Jews by the written or the spoken word, but it was primarily the state that persecuted them. Although some later emperors displayed tolerance toward the Jews, by and large they shared the stance of the church. Generally Christian (invariably so after 363), they threw the power of the state behind church initiatives that were intended to isolate the Jews and force them to quit their religion. In 325 Constantine, the first Christian emperor, forbade Jews to proselytize, and in 357 his successor, Constantius, decreed that Christians who converted to Judaism forfeit their property. The fifth and sixth centuries saw several codifications of Roman law -- works that were to have an influence for more than 1000 years -- and they included numerous injunctions against the Jews. By their authority, Jews were barred from holding positions that might give them authority over Christians, and they were placed under many civil disabilities.
When Constantius became emperor in 337, he declared, "Let my will be religion." In 392, the practice of pagan religions was banned, though paganism continued strong through the late Empire and for several centuries beyond. Judaism continued to be legally tolerated, but after 392 it was merely the other faith in an Empire that was increasingly defined as Christian. As the official religion of the Empire, Christianity enjoyed the backing of the state. Already at this time, and even more so in future centuries, a nation was thought to be defined in large part by its dominant religion. This way of thinking necessarily left the Jews as outsiders. Furthermore, from the perspective of the state, a mark of good subjects was that they shared the religion of the ruler. The fact that the Jews would not conform made their loyalty suspect.
2. The Middle Ages
During the Early Middle Ages (c.500-1000), church and state worked together against the Jews, most of whom were living in Europe by the end of the period. Persecution continued despite the fact that the church was clearly triumphant. Whatever rational basis may have existed earlier for seeing Judaism as a rival to Christianity had evaporated, as Europe became progressively more Christianized. By 1000, almost all European nations were at least ostensibly Christian. Jewish communities were present in most of them, but they were small, never constituting more than a few percent of the population. Moreover, Jews did not challenge the fact that they were a minority. They were not rebellious, and seldom did they proselytize. Except in times of crisis, they were passive, fully aware of the danger that encircled them.
Their enemies were far from passive. Church councils set out decrees and policies that barred Christians from interacting with Jews and imposed upon the latter a number of penalties. Occasionally, lay rulers tried to force their Jewish subjects to convert to Christianity and ordered expulsion or death for those who did not comply. Among the most hostile were the rulers of the Byzantine (eastern Roman) Empire and the Visigothic kings of Spain. In 628, the emperor Heraclius ordered all Jews throughout his realm to be converted, by force if necessary. Leo III repeated that command in 722, and although like Heraclius's directive it did not achieve its end it did initiate a wave of persecution that saw some Jews burn themselves to death in their synagogues, rather than be baptized. In Spain, which was controlled by the Visigoths from the late fifth century to 711, persecution was the norm and several kings ordered the Jews to quit their realm. A similar decree was issued by the king of France in 582, and he further threatened that Jews who refused baptism would have their eyes torn out. Since governments of the period were weak and communications poor, such orders usually had an impact in only a small area, and the Jews could escape. Nevertheless, the intent of these orders was clear. Had they been fully carried out, Judaism would have ceased to exist in much of Europe.
Under intense pressure and sometimes the threat of death, significant numbers of Jews agreed to be baptized. If they later tried to return to Judaism they found their way blocked, for popes and governments alike ruled that they could not renounce their baptism. There were many pronouncements on this issue, suggesting that it was a common problem. In 638, the Fourth Council of Toledo decreed that converts who were found to be practicing Judaism could be burnt at the stake. That council also forbade non-Christians to live in Spain. Centuries later, the Spanish Inquisition would take the same positions on both issues.
Papal policy, especially as put forward by Gregory I (pope, 590-604), tended to be more moderate. Gregory, whose influence was to be felt for centuries, stated that Jews should not be converted by force and that they and their property should not be harmed. He even ordered the rebuilding of several synagogues that had been destroyed by Christian mobs. On the other hand, he endorsed the anti-Jewish policies of the Visigothic state in Spain. He condemned violence, but not persecution.
It was not only church and state that the Jews had to fear. Mobs threatened them as well. But while they were subjected to occasional assault during the Early Middle Ages, it seems rather to have been during the period 1000-1500 that large-scale violence became a common hazard for Jews.
Often events that spurred religious fervor in Christian Europe were the occasion for massacre. At the time of the First Crusade (1095-99), for example, crusaders and peasant mobs killed perhaps 30,000 Jews in France, Germany, and Hungary. After the crusaders took Jerusalem, they forced the local Jews into their central synagogue, then burnt it to the ground. Several later crusades were likewise accompanied by massacres of Jews. Also dangerous were the various poor peoples' crusades that welled up spontaneously, with little encouragement from the church. In 1320-21, the crusade of "The Shepherds" wiped out many Jewish communities in France and Spain.
Religious fervor was most dangerous when linked to nationalism. The Jews were looked on as outsiders, wherever they lived, and the more nationalism intensified, the more likely they were to face violence. In Spain, where Jews enjoyed some measure of toleration and prosperity during the period 1100-1300, rising nationalist feeling, accompanied by religious bigotry, moved mobs to attack the Jews again and again during the Late Middle Ages (1300-1500). The worst violence came in 1391-92, when perhaps 70,000 Jews were killed and an equal or greater number accepted baptism. In the overall period, as many as 120,000 Spanish Jews lost their lives. Finally, in 1492, the Jews were expelled from Spain, as they earlier had been from England (1290) and France (1306).
The proliferation of mob violence reflects the fact that virulent Antisemitism had taken on a life of its own and could flourish with or without the encouragement of church and state. Actually, this development had taken place centuries before, but in the circumstances of the period 1000-1500, which was marked by the crusades and rising nationalism, it was brought out in dramatic fashion. Violence against the Jews often took place even when church leaders and major government officials sought to prevent it. In 1096, a mob of crusaders and townspeople rose against the Jewish community of Mainz, and the bishop there offered the Jews protection in his own residence. Nevertheless, the mob, as reported by a chronicler, "attacked the Jews in the hall with arrows and lances. Breaking the bolts and doors, they killed the Jews, about seven hundred in number, who in vain resisted the force and attack of so many thousands. They killed the women, also, and with their swords pierced tender children of whatever age or sex."
That some clerical and lay leaders tried to stop violence against the Jews does not mean that all did or that church and state had ceased to promote Antisemitism. The age-old campaign of vilification and persecution continued, and it was often the more powerful popes and kings who were most active in this regard. Innocent III, whose reign (1198-1216) marked the apogee of the medieval papacy, wrote, "The Jews, like the fratricide Cain, are doomed to wander about the earth as fugitives and vagabonds, and their faces must be covered with shame. They are under no circumstances to be protected by Christian princes, but, on the contrary to be condemned to serfdom." Innocent criticized kings who accepted Jews into their service and he presided over one of the most important councils of the Middle Ages, the Fourth Lateran, which renewed decrees barring Jews from public office and required that Jews wear a distinctive badge (the first instance in European history of a practice that would later be identified with the Holocaust period). Louis IX of France (d. 1274) -- St. Louis -- may well have been the most revered ruler of his century and he was especially admired by Christian Europe for his piety. But as was the case with many leaders, the other side of Christian devotion was Jew-hatred, and a contemporary French chronicler told the truth even as he addressed the Jews mockingly: "See how the King of France hates you and persecutes you."
When the Jews were protected by government, their value as a source of revenue for the crown was often the primary motivation. Jews were usually classified differently from the rest of the population. They did not enjoy the same rights or the same degree of protection under the law. More than others, they were subject to the will of the king, and he was free to tax them without limits. Jews were always heavily taxed, but starting in about the thirteenth century royal demands increased in many places, and Jewish communities were driven into poverty -- which, in turn, made them less useful to the state.
The perceived wealth of the Jews could serve to protect them, but it also might endanger them. Mobs that assaulted and murdered them seldom left without pillaging their homes, as well. The armies of crusaders that threatened them with violence were sometimes satisfied to extort money and valuables. Local officials who charged Jewish communities with such crimes as ritual murder often did so as a pretext to levy a huge fine or simply to seize property. Rulers, too, coveted Jewish wealth, and some of them were not content to bring it in piecemeal through heavy taxes. In 1450, Louis the Rich, duke of Bavaria, arrested all the Jews in his duchy, confiscated their property, extracted a huge ransom, then banished the entire community.
Even when the leaders of church and state were relatively tolerant, there were lesser personnel who spewed hatred of the Jews and incited the mob against them. As a group, the friars were especially characterized by virulent Antisemitism, and their influence reached the masses through countless sermons. Their message seldom changed: Jews were the enemy. Indeed, hatred of Jews was still promoted as an act of faith for Christians. As Giovanni da Capistrano, an Italian friar, was telling his audiences around 1450, "To fight the Jew is a duty of the Catholic, not a choice."
In this atmosphere of hatred, even the wildest rumors about the Jews were widely believed. During the period 1000-1500 an extensive range of Antisemitic mythology sprung up in Europe. One myth had it that Jews were horned. This legend myth may have arisen from the mistranslation of a line in the Bible, but it is more probable that it was linked to the belief that Jews were begotten of the devil and the horns reflected his own. A second myth, which depicted Jews as hunchbacked or otherwise deformed, may well have been linked to the common notion that physical appearance mirrored the nature of one's soul. The soul of the Jew was seen as twisted -- evil, malevolent -- and the body reflected this. These two myths both fed off and fed the belief that Jews were not human beings at all, but rather were monsters. And there could be no pity for monsters.
Other myths showed the Jews performing evil deeds. One, the "Blood Libel," had it that Jews occasionally kidnapped Christian children (especially at Passover or Easter), then murdered them and used their blood in rituals. As we have seen, Apion had put forward a similar myth centuries before and so had some early Christians, but after a period of dormancy it gained unprecedented prominence in the twelfth century. After it became popular, there were hundreds of cases of Jews, sometimes entire communities, being killed when some Christian child was found dead and was thought to have been murdered by them. The Blood Libel persisted into the twentieth century, despite the fact that from the beginning it was denounced as preposterous by some Christian scholars and prelates.
Another popular myth was that Jews sometimes stole the Host (a consecrated wafer, supposed to be the body of Jesus), and pierced it with knives or used it to parody the Mass. In 1298 a report that Jews in one German town had desecrated the Host prompted a nobleman named Rindfleisch to build an army -- the Judenschächter ("Jew slaughterers") -- and lead it through Austria and Bavaria, plundering and wiping out Jewish communities along the way. Before the year was out, many thousands of Jews had perished. Although this was the worst violence to spring from a rumor of Host desecration, it was far from the only mass assault.
Not only were Jews cast as being hostile to Christianity and its symbols, but they were said to be contemptuous of faith generally -- of God -- even of Judaism itself. Theirs was not a religion, but anti-religion. Often Jews were depicted in art and literature as eating pork, in violation of Jewish dietary law. The linkage of Jews and pigs became standard in the realm of stereotype, and during the sixteenth century a German chronicler even reported that a Jewish woman had given birth to piglets.
Possibly the most pervasive charge was that Jews were a nation unto themselves and were not merely indifferent but hostile to the countries where they happened to reside. In point of fact, there was a certain degree of anti-Christian feeling within the Jewish communities of Europe, and there is evidence that it grew in step with violence against the Jews. Nevertheless, the Jews did nothing to openly challenge Christian dominance, and not even their most rabid enemies accused them of direct confrontation. Rather, they claimed, Jews were advancing piecemeal, by stealth. Assaults on Christian symbols, as in Host desecration, marked their effort, as did ritual murder. Their ultimate aim, however, was domination and the destruction of their Christian enemy. Such was the belief, and over the centuries it would bring about the deaths of millions of Jews. The Holocaust itself grew from the perception that Jewry was an implacable and dangerous enemy of the general community. But in the Middle Ages, too, this myth prompted mass murder.
From an early date, the myth had a corollary: that Jews from throughout Europe were working in concert to achieve their aim of destruction. The most damaging early manifestation of the fear of an "international Jewish conspiracy" came in 1348-49. The Black Death (bubonic plague) was sweeping Europe at the time, killing millions, and the rumor began to spread that Jews had caused the outbreak -- specifically, that Jewish delegates from all over Europe had met in Prague, and their leader had given them vials of poison, with instructions that at a specified time they should empty the contents into the wells in their home districts, thereby causing a pestilence. Despite the fact that Jews were dying from the plague in great numbers, and despite a papal pronouncement that they were innocent, many Europeans were willing to believe the rumor. Within months, mobs in Poland, Germany, and elsewhere slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews.
In medieval Europe a nearly universal stereotype of the Jew emerged. This stereotype allowed for nothing that was positive. So, for example, the Jew as moneylender fed into the stereotype, and some Jews did in fact lend money to Christians, often at high interest. But other Jews interacted with the broader community in ways that had no negative connotation. Jewish physicians provided, in hundreds of towns, the most professional medical help that was available, and there is ample evidence that many communities valued their work. Nevertheless, the image of Jew as physician did not impress itself on the public mind. On the other hand, the image of the Jew as moneylender not only became an important element in the overall stereotype, but it was adapted by later ages to encompass the Jew as banker, financier, stockbroker, industrialist, capitalist -- in short, the Jew as manipulator and as exploiter. In point of fact, few major European bankers and industrialists of later centuries were Jewish, and whatever harm these groups were responsible for could not reasonably be blamed on Jews at large. But the stereotype was not reasonable.
The demonization of the Jews was promoted by rumor, exaggeration, and sheer myth. Hatred was woven into standard Christian prayers and hymns. Works of fiction, too, played their part in driving home the message. In societies that were predominantly illiterate, stage pieces had perhaps the greatest impact, for unlike printed literature they reached a mass audience. Crowds that may not have distinguished fact from fiction and were in any case willing to believe the worst saw Jewish characters on stage admitting to evil deeds and promising worse to come. Such characters were common in plays of the later Middle Ages and for many generations beyond. In Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, for example, the villain confides to his slave, "Sometimes I go about and poison wells."
The Jew of Malta, which drew heavily on anti-Jewish stereotype and myth, was directed to an English audience, yet it was produced three full centuries after the Jews had been expelled from England. It did not take the presence of Jews for Antisemitism to flourish. Indeed, even in countries where they lived they were largely invisible. During the Middle Ages, the Jews of Europe became primarily an urban people -- this, in societies that were overwhelmingly agrarian. There were a number of reasons for this, among them being, that by living concentrated in towns, rather than dispersed, the Jews were better able to protect themselves from mobs. In larger towns, the Jewish quarters were often walled, for greater security.
The walls that separated Jews and Christians, however, were not just literal but figurative. Most Christians seldom saw Jews, this being especially the case in the rural areas. And the Jews they did see were often either men of business, whose wealth caused envy, or the hated moneylenders, who embodied a negative stereotype. Jews at large were not visible. Their enemies could characterize them however they chose and be believed.
3. Early Modern Europe
The Reformation of the sixteenth century saw Antisemitism grafted onto Protestantism by the founder of that movement, Martin Luther. In a pamphlet, Concerning the Jews and Their Lies (1543), Luther advised the leaders of German society, "we cannot tolerate [the Jews] if we do not wish to share in their lies, curses, and blasphemy.... First, their synagogues or churches should be set on fire.... And this ought to be done for the honor of God and of Christianity.... Secondly, their homes should likewise be broken down and destroyed.... Thirdly, they should be deprived of their prayer-books and Talmuds in which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are taught.... To sum up, dear princes and nobles who have Jews in your domains, if this advice of mine does not suit you, then find a better one so that you and we may all be free of this insufferable devilish burden -- the Jews."
Not all Protestants, even at this early date, were as hostile to the Jews as was Luther. The Calvinists (denominations inspired by John Calvin, d. 1564) were often more tolerant, and it was an English Calvinist, Oliver Cromwell, who invited the Jews to return to England (1655), though he acted in the face of opposition from many who otherwise shared his religious views. It is also worth noting that during the Holocaust period the Scandinavian countries, which were predominantly Lutheran, had an unmatched record for protecting the Jews. Luther's impact, however, was not just as a religious leader, but as a nationalist, and among his German followers he reinforced the conviction that Jews were a danger to Germany.
Luther also appealed to class bias. As we have seen, Jews were for the most part town-dwellers in a world that was predominantly rural. In consequence, they came to be seen as mere consumers of produce, living off the toil of country folk. Some of them were middle class, and stereotype assigned to Jews generally a level of wealth that few of them actually enjoyed. Theirs was thought to be an easy, lazy life, far different from that of the peasant and his "honest" labor. Luther endorsed the image of the Jew as self-indulgent parasite, writing, "Let the young and strong Jews and Jewesses be given the flail, the ax, the hoe, the spindle, and let them earn their bread ... for it is not proper that they should want us to work in the sweat of our brow and that they idle away their days at the fireside in laziness, feasting, and display."
By the close of the Middle Ages, most Jews had either fled, or been expelled from, western Europe. Some sought refuge in the Muslim world, but there, too, they found persecution. Most instead traveled to central Europe, especially Poland, a move encouraged by several Polish kings. But while the government might be tolerant -- and even this was to change -- the populace seems to have been hostile from an early date, and the hatred of Jews prompted a series of massacres that extended down to the Holocaust.
The first major assault on the Jews of this region came in 1648, when armies of Ukrainians and Cossacks, led by Bogdan Chmielnicki, massacred Jews throughout the Ukraine and on into Poland and Lithuania. As violence spread, local mobs joined in the carnage. The Chmielnicki massacres, which continued until 1657, cost the lives of tens of thousands of Jews, perhaps 100,000, making them more devastating than any such campaign prior to the twentieth century. But even beyond numbers, accounts testify to the brutality of the murderers. They tell of men being flayed, of women being cut open and having live cats sewn into them, of infants being spitted and roasted alive. The boundless hatred reflected in these reports, the desire of the killers to cause not merely death but agonizing death, these attitudes would be mirrored in the Holocaust.
Even after the massacres ceased, virulent Jew-hatred continued to thrive in this region. Among the common people it retained a medieval flavor, drawing heavily on myths that had lost their currency in the west. Significantly, the Blood Libel was widely believed, and during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries charges of ritual murder remained common. The churches, too, continued to play a large part in inculcating Antisemitism. But perhaps what set the region off most dramatically from the rest of Europe was that the state was so active in persecuting the Jews.
The Russian government was consistently hostile. In the late fifteenth century, Jews were barred from residing in Russia. Moreover, as the empire expanded and swallowed up areas where Jews lived, it dealt with them harshly. During the eighteenth century Russia came to control a vast tract of land in central Europe, a tract that was home to most European Jews. Rather than allow these Jews to enter Russia, in 1772 the tsarina Catherine II "the Great" restricted them to the newly acquired areas, the "Pale of Settlement." Russian expansion continued, and eventually the Pale came to encompass a region that extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea and included most of modern-day Poland, Lithuania, and the Ukraine. Although restrictions on settling in Russia were eased slightly during the latter half of the nineteenth century, most Jews remained fixed in the Pale until it was abolished in 1917, after the Russian Revolution.
Within the Pale, most Jews lived in shtetlach (predominantly Jewish villages). Jewish culture and communal life flourished in these surroundings, so much so that the world of the shtetl -- a world finally destroyed in the Holocaust -- is even today recalled nostalgically by many Jews. It was, however, in some ways a harsh world, marked by incessant persecution emanating from the government of the tsar. Legally barred from agriculture, most professions, and many forms of business, Jews were kept in poverty. Beyond that, however, they were kept in fear, for the government was quite open in its determination to solve the Jewish Problem, one way or another.
For the relatively small Jewish communities of Germany and western Europe, the situation was somewhat better. From the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries, Jews in this region were seldom subjected to mob violence. And although governments were usually hostile to some degree, the order of persecution that was the norm in the Pale was rare here. Nevertheless, Antisemitism continued strong, even in periods that were characterized by new ideas and the abandonment of old ones.
The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, an intellectual movement focused on France and Germany, was marked by challenges to many established views on religious, political, and social issues. Such a circumstance provided an opportunity to rethink anti-Jewish attitudes and stereotypes. When it came to the Jews, however, most major Enlightenment thinkers revealed the same prejudice that European writers had for centuries, even if they put forward different arguments to justify it.
Perhaps the most influential of them, the Frenchman Voltaire (d. 1778), denounced religious intolerance, but characterized Judaism as the grossest superstition and constantly identified Jews with greed. According to him, Jews went "wherever there is money to be made.... They are ... the greatest scoundrels who ever sullied the face of the globe." He and other writers often wrote critically of Christianity, but assigned Jewish origins to much of what they found repugnant in it and held out hope that it could be purified by reducing Judaic influence. Judaism, on the other hand, they considered irredeemable.
4. The Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Negative though Voltaire's characterization of Jews may have been, if it had become the common perception, it is doubtful that the Holocaust would have taken place. His "Jew" was distasteful, but not dangerous. The course of Antisemitism, however, was now to take a decisive turn, one that would lead to the Final Solution. In the process, the Jew would come to be seen as huge and malevolent, a threat to all Europe and to every nation. Governing this shift was nationalism. As we have seen, in the past rising nationalism had tended to aggravate Antisemitism. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the linkage was more starkly drawn than at any time in history. And it began with Romanticism, a movement that in some ways presaged the fascism of a future generation.
The Romantic age, which roughly spanned the period 1760-1830, saw a tendency to challenge old ideas. As in the case of the Enlightenment, there was some promise of a new, more positive attitude toward the Jews, but again, this was not to happen. Several major literary products of the period did in fact place Jews in a highly favorable light. The title character of Nathan the Wise (1779), a play by the German Gotthold Lessing, was based on Lessing's friend, the Jewish intellectual Moses Mendelssohn. Like Nathan, the character Rebecca, in Sir Walter Scott's celebrated novel Ivanhoe (1820), was sympathetically drawn, and she made a plea for mutual respect between Jews and Christians. On a personal level, too, some writers of the time demonstrated real affection toward Jews. The English poet Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) wrote, “I never forgot the Jews’ synagogue ... and the courtesy with which strangers were allowed to see it. I had the pleasure, before I left school, of becoming acquainted with some members of their community, who were extremely liberal toward other opinions, and who, nevertheless, entertained a sense of the Supreme Being far more reverential than I had observed in any Christian, my mother excepted.”
But if there were advocates of toleration during that period, they did not, at least in most countries, reflect typical Romantic attitudes. The Romantics tended to be strong nationalists, and to most of them, as to Europeans generally, the Jews appeared to constitute a separate nation. Some believed, furthermore, that they like other nations had an essential nature that was uniquely theirs. Even if Jews converted to Christianity, they could not change that nature. The Germans were a nation, the French were a nation, the English were a nation -- the Jews were a nation. Furthermore, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the rather fuzzy concept of differentness was put forward in a much more rigorous way, one that seemed scientific and appealed to those who fancied themselves intellectuals. The new dividing line that would set Jews apart was race.
Although there were many progenitors, racialism sprung particularly from Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, a lengthy work written by a French aristocrat, Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, and published 1853-55. Gobineau posited that history was shaped by the conflict and interaction of the three human races: the white, which alone had the ability to create civilization; the yellow, which could absorb or convey civilization but not create it; and the black, which destroyed it. The creative powers of the whites, he claimed, were being eroded through race mixing. In northern Europe and in England, the white race was still relatively pure, but that purity was endangered. “Race,” as the term was used by Gobineau and his successors, was only in part defined by physical attributes like skin color. A person’s intelligence, capabilities, behavior, and mentality – inner being, perspectives, values, associations – were also thought to be racially determined to a significant degree, making each race very different from the others.
Given that Gobineau was a pessimist, who had little positive to say about any group or nation, his comments on the Jews were exceptionally complimentary. He included them as a branch of the white race, although inferior to the pure Europeans, who were later to be called “Aryans.” Even Jews whose lineage in Europe extended back more than 1000 years were “Semites” in his nomenclature, and he used the term "semitization" when he referred to race mixing or debasement. Semitization, he asserted, had caused the decline of both Greece and Rome and posed a danger to modern civilization, as well. In this usage, he did not have the Jews in mind, but it was easy for Antisemites to interpret him in a way that fed their prejudice.
Gobineau's friend, the noted writer Alexis de Tocqueville, warned him of the dangers inherent in the racialist model that he laid out: "I believe that [these theories] are probably quite false. I know that they are certainly very pernicious." But on the publication of the Essay Gobineau became a celebrity throughout Europe, and a number of societies were established to study and publicize his work. Soon other racialists were embroidering his basic concept with a web of theory and "scientific" observation that seemed scholarly. In part because of this, racialism came to have a special appeal to those who fancied themselves intellectual.
Although Gobineau counted Semites within the white race, racialists were soon casting them as a separate race and as a polar opposite to the Aryans. By the 1870's, racialists were portraying the Jews as the main threat to the Aryans, hence, to civilization.
Like racialism, Social Darwinism boded badly for the Jews. One of the primary tenets of this philosophy was that humankind, like Nature, was divided into camps that were battling over scant resources, and that the contest was resolved through the principle, "survival of the fittest." Conflict was seen as inevitable, and an aspect of "fitness" was the willingness to fight. It was therefore natural that the Jewish "race" would selfishly promote its own interests and that it would seek to destroy rival nations or races. Belief that the Jews were antagonistic to broader society was of course not new, but Social Darwinism like racialism appealed because of its seeming sophistication.
Yet another product of nineteenth-century thought that was in some cases to prove damaging to Jews was Marxism. Although not all Marxists were Antisemitic -- some, including Karl Marx himself, were of Jewish descent, though few practiced Judaism -- many of them were hostile to the Jews, identifying them with capitalism. The Marxist tendency to see capitalism as innate in Jews encouraged Antisemitism on the left, while racialism appealed to the right.
In Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, and some other areas, these ideologies were not always linked to Jew-hatred, for Jews had been to some degree accepted as simply an element in the population. Generally, however, the new doctrines did much to magnify Antisemitism. Furthermore, to Europeans who were becoming more secular in outlook, they helped to modernize Jew-hatred, by reducing the importance of religion in the mix.
Even as new arguments to justify Antisemitism were gaining popularity, Jews were becoming more involved in general European society. For several centuries prior to 1800, most Jews in western Europe and Germany had lived in -- in many cases, had been legally restricted to -- walled quarters, often called "ghettos." Ghettos had been similar in some respects to the Jewish quarters that had been found in many European towns during the Middle Ages. Within the ghetto walls, Jewish communities had enjoyed some degree of security and autonomy. Beginning in about 1750, however, young Jews began to leave the ghettos, seeking advancement in business and the professions. Within a century, Jews were achieving prominence in broader society and were making an impact not only as professionals and businessmen but as artists and politicians. Furthermore, by the middle of the nineteenth century, Jews had won full citizenship in most nations of central and western Europe, and at least on paper they enjoyed the same rights as did their non-Jewish countrymen. As these developments demonstrate, not everyone hated the Jews or wanted to hold them back. Nevertheless, many Europeans feared the new direction, believing that Jews were poised to take over European politics and culture. For centuries, Jews had been hated for standing apart from broader European society; now, they were hated for taking an active role in it.
Their perceived success also fed traditional Antisemitism. During the age of emancipation, Jews seemed to be succeeding on every front, and many people were profoundly troubled. In 1900, an American journalist summed up complaints that he had heard in a number of interviews: "The Jew is winning everywhere. By fair means or by foul means he wins.... Jews beat us in the schools, in the colleges, in business ... everywhere, and we are not used to being beaten."
In fact, most Jews of the time faced a hard existence, whether in American sweatshops or in the dilapidated shtetlach of the Pale. But that was not the common image, and in any case it was especially Germany and western Europe, where the new, racially based, Antisemitism was strongest, that found Jews advancing most dramatically. Jewish success was what the Antisemites witnessed, and this they resented. If Jews were succeeding it followed that they were doing so at the expense of those with whom they shared countries but not nations. So it was that perceived success generated real resentment.
Throughout most of Europe, Antisemitism appears to have intensified steadily during the 1800's as a whole, then to have risen sharply in the last years of the century. The late-century surge in Jew-hatred was marked by the Dreyfus Affair in France. In 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish captain in the French Army, was convicted of having sent secret documents to the Germans. French liberals took up his cause, claiming that the case against him had been fabricated, and his retrial and eventual exoneration took place against the backdrop of a major political clash that pitted the liberals against conservatives, nationalists, the military, and the Catholic Church. The contest was marked by the display of intense and open attacks on French Jewry, as the Antisemitic press and political parties vilified Dreyfus, using him as an example to demonstrate the treasonable tendencies of French Jews generally.
Yet another dramatic reflection of the depth of Jew-hatred came in Russia (as well as Poland and the Ukraine), where political crises led the government to exploit popular Antisemitism by encouraging mob attacks on the Jews, the "pogroms." Finally, in 1904, The League of the Russian People (the "Black Hundreds") was founded, with the blessing of the tsar. During the next decade the Black Hundreds did much violence to the Jews of Russia. Evaluating the pogroms, a leading government official in Russia expressed the hope that the violence and the persecution of Russian Jews would soon resolve the Jewish Problem, for one-third would consent to be baptized, one-third would emigrate, and one-third would die.
The Jew-hatred that descended to the twentieth century was multi-faceted. Religiously based Antisemitism was still widespread, especially in some regions of Europe, and it was not uncommon to hear the hatred of Jews being justified on the grounds that they were anti-Christian or were Christ-killers. But the nature of justification had broadened during the nineteenth century, and it allowed for many perspectives. To nationalists, Jews were strangers, their own nation, "the enemy within." To racialists, they were innately malevolent and were corrupters of the superior Aryan race. To Marxists and laborers, they were capitalist exploiters. To the middle class, they were rivals. The poor saw them as rich and envied their wealth. The weak saw them as powerful and resented their influence. Arguments put forward to justify Antisemitism were many, but the bottom line was always the same: hatred of the Jews.
By 1918, the close of the First World War, the stage for the Holocaust was almost fully set. Nationalism was intense, and nowhere more so than among the peoples of central Europe. In eastern Europe, devastated during the war, people saw as enemies all those who were not of their nation. And then there were the Jews, the perpetual outsiders. Inspired by a sense of crisis and by long-held hatreds, eastern Europe turned on the Jews. During the years 1918-20 many thousands of Jews -- estimates go as high as 250,000 -- were massacred, mostly by Ukrainian nationalists and by Russians who opposed the newly installed Bolshevik regime (which they believed to be under the control of the Jews).
Clearly, the Holocaust did not spring from nowhere. The hatred of Jews was age-old, and it had often caused violence in the past. During the Nazi period, and particularly in Germany and in the former Pale of Settlement, there were literally tens of millions who were eager to see the Jews victimized by violence. When the Holocaust came, many of these people would take part in the killing. Others would turn the Jews in for slaughter. Great numbers of Europeans would simply turn a deaf ear to the Jews who so desperately needed refuge. And a few, but only a few, would risk their own lives to help their Jewish neighbors.
5. Hitler in Context
The Germany where Hitler came to power was probably not as Antisemitic as were some other European nations. Jew-hatred was very deep in France, as had been manifest during the Dreyfus Affair. And nowhere in Europe was it as prevalent and as virulent as it was to the east of Germany, in Poland, the Baltic states, Russia, and the Ukraine.
Germany, however, had its own tradition of Jew-hatred. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the prejudice was most often associated with nationalism. It traversed German society and permeated almost every intellectual, political, and cultural movement.
The tone of modern German Antisemitism was set by the Romantics. In 1793, one of the most influential of them, Johann Fichte, responded to suggestions that German Jews be granted the rights of citizens by writing, "the only way to give them full citizenship would be to cut off their heads on the same night in order to replace them with those containing no Jewish ideas." He furthermore reinforced the old idea that Jews not only constituted a nation apart, but one that was hostile to all other nations: "A mighty state stretches across almost all of the countries of Europe, hostile in intent and engaged in constant strife with everyone else.... This is Jewry."
Although Gobineau was French, the racialist theory that he put forward had its greatest impact in Germany. German (and some non-German) racialists believed that among Germans the Aryan racial strain was exceptionally pure and that this was the key to their national greatness. But they perceived a danger in the "race pollution" being perpetrated by the Jews. They furthermore believed that International Jewry had a particular mission to destroy Germany, and thereby destroy Aryanism.
The sense of danger was heightened by the perceived tendency of Jews to intermarry or engage in sexual relationships with non-Jews, thereby polluting the racial stock of other groups. (In fact, intermarriage rates were on the rise, though as of the 1920's well over four-fifths of German-Jewish marriages were within the faith.) Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing on through the Nazi period, German racialist writers spun countless erotic fantasies of Jews seducing Aryan women.
It was a German writer, Wilhelm Marr, who in 1879 coined the term "Antisemitism," a word that has come to mean Jew-hatred generally but that, as used by Marr and later by the Nazis, had a distinctly racialist slant. Marr himself heaped scorn on religiously based prejudice against Jews. To him, the Semitic threat lay in the fact that Jewry was universal and that everywhere it was hostile to the majority society. Moreover, he believed that Jews had already triumphed in Germany and throughout Europe, except in Russia, where persecution was holding them down. But despite his avowed pessimism, he organized the first Antisemitic party, to fight this force that he claimed had already won. Soon there were such parties in several countries, all of them committed to countering the excessive influence of the Jews.
Marr was among the most important Antisemitic German writers, but there were many others, so many as to suggest that the Jews were becoming a national fixation. During the last third of the nineteenth century fully 1200 German publications focused on the Jewish Problem, almost all of them from an Antisemitic perspective. And increasingly writers suggested how the problem might be resolved. A significant number, including a high proportion of the best known among them, found the answer in annihilation.
From Social Darwinism grew the world view of Friedrich Nietzsche (d. 1900), a German philosopher who saw virtue in violence. Nations remained young and strong, he argued, by conquering others that had grown complacent or unskillful in arms as the result of an extended peace. "War is indispensable!," he wrote. "For the present we know of no other means whereby the rough energy of the camp, the deep impersonal hatred, the cold-bloodedness of murder with a clear conscience [and] the general ardor of the system in the destruction of the enemy ... can be as forcibly and certainly communicated to enervated nations as is done by every war." While Nietzsche sometimes deprecated Jews and Judaism, he was not notably Antisemitic, and indeed he referred to Antisemites as "misfits." But two generations of German nationalists, including Hitler, were to be drawn to the cult of violence that he helped to establish, and to many of them it was obvious which enemy Germany must crush, to save its soul: the Jews.
Those who glorified war projected an exaggerated masculinity, which would later characterize the Nazis and fascists generally. But the Jews were again set off as the opposite of the ideal -- effeminate and timid. Effeminacy had attended the Jewish stereotype as early as the Middle Ages, but now it was given heightened importance, as masculinity was. Historically, the many strains of Jew-hatred had often revealed more about the ideals of Antisemites than they had about the Jews themselves. This was simply one more case, and it was of particular significance in Germany.
The fact that many Jews fought in German armies did nothing to weaken the widespread perception that they were reluctant and cowardly soldiers. Furthermore, Jews had a reputation for advocating peaceful means of resolving international disputes. During the period 1870-1914, but even more in the years between the world wars, many Jews, notably Albert Einstein, were prominent advocates of pacifism. Disciples of Nietzsche imagined that they were seeking to emasculate Germany, by undermining its manly love of war. Paradoxically, however, they also believed that Jews were secretly aggressive. When the Germans had become soft, they would take over, not by military means but by manipulating their wealth and their influence in government and the media.
German Antisemites in the mold of Marr ridiculed religiously based Jew-hatred. Others, however, justified their Antisemitism on religious grounds. There were, of course, the old charges against the Jews: that they had betrayed and killed Jesus, that they served the devil, and the like. More important, however, at least among the German elite, was a different concern, especially prevalent in conservative circles. German conservatives were deeply troubled by what they saw as deterioration in morals, culture, and social cohesion. Many of them found at least part of the answer to lie in the "Re-Christianization" of society. In their vision, the churches and clergy would take the lead in molding the German mentality. Through political action as well as through the pulpit, they would insist on normative behavior and morals. These conservatives not surprisingly saw the Jews as an impediment to realizing their scheme.
German conservatives also tended to be critical of diversity in society and in politics. Most of them were hostile to democracy, for they saw it as the manifestation of diversity in the political area, as different classes and ethnic groups fought for their own interests. This critique of democracy they held in common with the nationalists. And when both groups thought of democrats, they often thought particularly of Jews.
Another tendency that linked conservatives with nationalists was a concern that traditional German culture was in decline and a belief that the Jews were behind it. Supporting these suspicions was the composer and ardent nationalist Richard Wagner (d. 1883). In several publications, Wagner claimed the Jews were an alien influence in Germany. His most noted polemic, Jewry in Music (1850), cast them as a group that could not understand German culture -- or any other -- hence, could not contribute to it in any positive way, but only weaken it. Wagner bemoaned the "Judaization" (Verjudung, a word he coined) of German culture. In a later essay, he referred to Jews in a cultural context as "The Moderns," a usage that epitomized much of what conservatives and nationalists alike found repugnant in them. Like Nietzsche, Wagner was to be seen as a hero by the Nazis, and he was Hitler's favorite composer.
Wagner asserted that Jews could never appreciate high culture because they were inherently materialistic. The linkage of Jews to materialism was generally assumed in Germany, and both nationalists and conservatives saw dire consequences. Conservatives believed that materialism was causing a breakdown in morality and social cohesiveness. Nationalists saw materialism as inimical to German ideals and unity. The socialists were despised by both groups, yet they, too, saw materialism as an enemy, for it encouraged exploitation of workers by the middle classes, while at the same time the pursuit of individual gain disrupted working-class solidarity. All of these groups tied materialism to capitalism and capitalism to the Jews. They did not claim that all capitalists were Jewish, but they did believe that Jews were innately capitalistic and that the German economy was excessively influenced by them.
German conservatives imagined that liberals were fellow travellers of the Jews. Liberals by and large endorsed the vision of a secular, democratic society and most of them were pro-capitalist. These tendencies should have served to make them more sympathetic to the Jews than were the conservatives, and indeed some did have a positive attitude toward them. But German liberals also tended to be highly nationalistic, and with them as with others this characteristic marked an avenue to Antisemitism. In an essay written in 1879, "A Word about Our Jews," a leading liberal politician and historian, Heinrich von Treitschke, castigated the Jews for not being sufficiently "German" and introduced a catch-phrase: "The Jews are our misfortune." Treitschke, a professor himself, had a large following at the universities, and he helped inspire the founding, in 1880, of the Union of German Students, which was to become a primary advocate of Antisemitism on campuses throughout Germany and was also to be active in the political arena.
During the period 1870-1914 Antisemitism became more fashionable than it had been for some time. On the German left and in the center there was some level of toleration for the Jews, though it was uneven and grudging. But among nationalists and rightists, overlapping groups that were always large and influential, Antisemitism was widespread and often intense. It was also implacable. There was nothing that the Jews could do to soften it. Many German Jews were highly nationalistic, but non-Jewish nationalists refused to accept them, continuing instead to regard Jewry as the enemy within. Their mentality is reflected in verbal assaults directed at the Navy League, a nationalistic society founded in 1898 to promote expansion of the German Navy. A significant minority of charter members were Jews. This brought attack by Antisemites, among them one who wrote, "A Jew-free Germany which didn't have to support Jewish parasites, could build a new battlefleet every year."
German society was divided along many lines, yet animosity toward the Jews was common to almost all groups. In 1879 Adolf Stoeker, a Protestant minister, wrote, "The Jewish question ... has flamed brightly for several months. The orthodox and the freethinker, the conservative and the liberal, write and speak about it with equal violence." That same year -- also the year when Marr coined the word "Antisemitism" -- Treitschke took note of a "passionate movement against Jewry" that was sweeping Germany, a movement reflected in Antisemitic publications, in the rhetoric of politicians and the electorate, and in conversation at all social levels. He further observed that the press, which had earlier condemned outpourings of Antisemitism, was now muted. Treitschke asked, "Are these outbreaks of deep, long-restrained anger merely an ephemeral excrescence?," and answered, "No; in fact, the instinct of the masses has correctly identified a serious danger, a critical defect in the new German life."
The belief that Jews represented a danger out of all proportion to their numbers helped fuel the success of political Antisemitism. In the election of 1893, 19.6% of the vote in Saxony went to candidates from Antisemitic parties-- this, in a state where the Jewish population was about 0.25%. Nationwide, the Jews accounted for only about 1% of the population, yet, the parties that defined themselves as Antisemitic, combined with parties that espoused policies that discriminated against the Jews, won a majority of seats in the Reichstag.
In the period 1900-1914 the Antisemitic parties went into decline, but in other respects Antisemitism continued to advance. Especially significant was its conquest of the rising generation, Hitler's generation. By 1914 several scouting and youth groups, most notably the Wandervogel ("Wandering Birds"), had virtually or entirely barred Jews from membership. At the universities, students embraced ever more militant Antisemitism. The shock of war, and of defeat, did nothing to change the focus. During the years 1918-20 Antisemites came to control student government at a number of universities, and they began to demand curtailment of the admission of Jews to student organizations and to the universities themselves. Antisemitic professors became more vocal and enjoyed widespread support among the students. Surveying the scene, Max Weber, a noted social scientist, commented, "the academic atmosphere has become extremely reactionary, and in addition radically antisemitic."
The years leading to and immediately following the war also saw the rise of various occult movements and societies in Germany. Blending a number of elements, including mysticism, Eastern philosophy, Gnosticism, and paganism, occultists foretold a glorious destiny for Germany. Some saw in Jewry the embodiment of evil and preached the need for Germans to destroy it. Like many racialists, they simplified a complex world by fixing the Jew as the polar opposite of the Aryan and by magnifying both, portraying their struggle as the ultimate contest for civilization, for survival itself. Again like racialism, occultism appealed not only by its simplicity but by its seeming complexity, as occult writers wove together disparate theories and intellectual strains, salting them with jargon. The occultist movement had a significant impact on early Nazism. Before the Nazis adopted it, the swastika was a symbol revered by several occult societies. Several Nazi leaders, including Heinrich Himmler and Rudolf Hess, were fascinated by the occult and were much influenced by occultist ideas and perspectives. Hitler himself read deeply in occultist literature and may have been a member of one of the societies. He was certainly an admirer of Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels, a virulent Antisemite whose slogan was “Race fight until the castration knife.”
The intense Antisemitism that characterized Nazi Germany has been tied to scapegoating of Jews by Hitler and his propaganda machine. In particular, writers note that Hitler took advantage of discontent caused by the German defeat of 1918, runaway inflation in 1922-23, and the depression of the early 1930's. Scapegoating there was, certainly, but it did not require the stimulus of current affairs. As of 1918 German Antisemitism was widespread, angry, and militant. But it had a long history and since about 1870 it had been gathering force. For the most part the burgeoning had nothing to do with particular events, but rather with the perception that Jews were becoming too powerful and were undermining Germany.
6. Jews in the Mind and Rhetoric of Hitler
In 1920 German Antisemitism received yet another boost, when the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, originally written in Russian, was published in German. The Protocols was purportedly the record of a meeting at which a secret Jewish government laid out strategy for destabilizing society, the economy, and politics so that international Jewry could take over the world. It was filled with invective, put in the mouth of the government leader (in some editions identified as the "Chief Rabbi," in others as the devil), lines such as, "The non-Jews are a herd of castrated sheep; we Jews are the wolves."
The Protocols was a fabrication, as a number of writers pointed out at the time. In 1921, an English journalist, Philip Graves, published an article in which he demonstrated, by comparing texts, that the bulk of the Protocols had been drawn from Dialogue in Hell between Montesquieu and Machiavelli, a political satire written in 1864 by a French lawyer, Maurice Joly. Whoever concocted the Protocols had replaced the character of Machiavelli (himself a stand-in for the French emperor, Napoleon III) with the Chief Rabbi, then lifted almost verbatim large chunks of Joly's text. A second work, The Rabbi's Speech -- drawn from a German novel written in 1868; first published as a separate piece in Russia in 1872 -- also served as a source for the Protocols, and various other Antisemitic screeds may have, as well, for the premise of a secret Jewish government and a plan for world conquest was quite conventional and often found expression in print.
Despite the demonstration by Graves and others that the Protocols was a fabrication, it was widely accepted as true, and it was published in most European languages, as well as in Japanese, Chinese, and Arabic. In Germany itself it sold more than 120,000 copies during its first year in print, and its impact was immediate. A Jewish reporter noted: "In Berlin I attended several meetings which were entirely devoted to the Protocols. The speaker was usually a professor, a teacher, an editor, a lawyer or someone of that kind. The audience consisted of members of the educated class, civil servants, tradesmen, former officers, ladies, above all students.... Passions were whipped up to the boiling point." In the eyes of many nationalists, the Protocols simply endorsed what they had always known: that Jewry was a race unto itself, hostile to all others and bent on destruction. But they also saw this document as the "smoking gun" that would persuade their countrymen of the danger.
Hitler himself needed no persuasion. Impressed though he was by the Protocols, which he saw as authentic, he had long been convinced that the Jews were the enemy of western society in general and Germany in particular, and that their animosity was innate and implacable. He had read widely in Antisemitic literature, including even Voltaire, and from these writings, particularly those by nationalists and racialists, he had gathered ideas on the nature of the Jewish menace and how the Jews could be stopped.
It is uncertain when Hitler became an Antisemite. Probably he was exposed to conventional Antisemitism at an early age, for Austrians no less than Germans were typically Antisemitic to some degree. According to a boyhood friend, even as an adolescent Hitler was given to making negative comments about the Jews. Hitler himself, however, claimed that he had undergone a sudden conversion to Antisemitism and that it had come later. By his own account in Mein Kampf (a memoir that he wrote in 1924-25, mainly while in prison for attempting to overthrow the German government), during his boyhood in the Austrian town of Linz he had no feelings against the Jews, who were few, "Europeanized and human looking. Indeed, I even took them for Germans. The nonsense of this conception was not clear to me because I saw just a single distinctive characteristic, the alien religion." Shortly after arriving in Vienna in 1909, as the age of twenty-three, he entered -- again, his own account -- a period of spiritual and mental turmoil. One day he encountered "an apparition in a long caftan with black locks. Is this a Jew? was my first thought.... But the longer I stared at this alien face ... the more my first question was transformed into a new conception. Is this a German?" So it was that Hitler, on the basis of seeing one Jew in traditional costume, had a revelation: A Jew could not be a German.
In the case of Hitler, the key question is not when he became an Antisemite but rather when he became virulently Antisemitic. This transformation may not have occurred until the last months of World War One. What is certain is that by the close of the war his Jew-hatred was intense and that he had accepted a complex of accusations and stereotypes that showed the Jews to be not only a potential but a present danger, already with much German blood on their hands and on the verge of triumph over the culture and people of Germany. The defeat of Germany in the war had not come on the battlefield, he believed, but rather because the "November Criminals" -- Jews and their accomplices -- had stabbed the nation in the back by forcing out the kaiser and agreeing to the armistice that had brought the war to a close in November 1918. In 1921 he wrote, "The army command made one mistake: that it did not string up in good time all the filthy Jewish rabble that drove our people into the dreadful calamity of 1918."
Hitler was obsessed by the Jewish Problem. In a speech of February 1925, he stated, "The greatest danger is and remains the alien poison in our body. All other dangers are transitory." Like many racialists and occultists, Hitler imagined the Jew to be the polar opposites of the Aryan, wholly evil and extremely dangerous. Hermann Rauschning, who was close to him during the 1930's, reported that Hitler once told him, “Two worlds face one another -- the men of God and the men of Satan! The Jew is the anti-man, the creature of another god.... Not that I would call the Jew a beast. He is much further from the beasts than we Aryans. He is a creature outside nature and alien to nature.”
Again and again in his speeches and writings, Hitler evoked the image of the Jew as parasite, as leech, as destroyer: "The Jew has never founded any civilization," he said in 1922, "though he has destroyed hundreds." In Mein Kampf, Hitler asserted that the Jew had remained unchanged for 2000 years: "He poisons the blood of others, but preserves his own." In the same work, he expressed the vision, at once apocalyptic and pornographic, which had captured the imagination of many racialists, that of the Jew as seducer. He wrote, “With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jew lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her own people. With every means he tries to destroy the racial foundations of the people he has set out to subjugate.”
Judaism was not a religion, Hitler insisted, but only a cover for greed. For centuries the Jew had prospered by sucking the blood of the masses, but even this was not enough: "In keeping with the ultimate aims of the Jewish struggle, which are not exhausted in the mere economic conquest of the world, but also demand its political subjugation ... he stops at nothing, and in his vileness he becomes so gigantic that no one need be surprised if among our people the personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew."
Hitler imagined the Jews to be nearing their goal of world domination. He blamed World War One on international Jewish finance, publicly stating this on a number of occasions. In January 1939, during a speech to the Reichstag, he addressed the possibility of another war. Again, he pointed to Jews as the instigators, and warned of the price they would pay: "If international finance Jewry in and outside Europe succeeds in plunging the peoples into another world war, then the end result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and the consequent victory of Jewry but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."
During his early period of prominence, 1920-32, Hitler spoke or wrote countless times of what should be done to the Jews of Germany. His imagery was often violent: "Fight to the knife against Jewry"; "The Jew's skull will be smashed by Germanic will"; "Short work must be made of Jewry"; "We are actuated by the inexorable resolve to grasp the evil by the roots and eradicate it to the core." He proposed placing Jews in concentration camps, and in Mein Kampf he lamented, "Had twelve or fifteen thousand ... Hebraic nation-spoilers been put under poison gas at the start of the war ... then the millionfold sacrifice at the front would not have been in vain." Sometimes he called for the expulsion of Jews from Germany, sometimes for their "disappearance." Occasionally, however, he spoke of liquidation. In 1922, he told a crowd, "If I am ever really in power, the annihilation of the Jews will be my first and foremost task."
A number of historians have argued that when Hitler suggested solving the Jewish Problem by mass murder he was using hyperbole or metaphor, and that he did not really decide to liquidate the Jews until shortly before he initiated the Final Solution in July 1941. These historians are sometimes referred to as "functionalists" and stand in contrast to the "intentionalists," who believe that Hitler meant what he said during the 1920's and that as soon as he gained power he began to plan the destruction of the Jews. While it is perhaps impossible to be certain on the matter, this much may be said: Hitler's hatred and fear of the Jews was central to his world-view; as his drive into war suggests, he was quite willing to use violence on a massive scale; he considered life, especially non-Aryan life, very cheap. Albert Speer, who entered Hitler's inner circle in 1934, wrote in 1969, "For him who cared to hear, Hitler had never concealed even his intention to exterminate the Jewish people." There appears little room for doubt that already by the early 1920's Hitler saw severe persecution of German Jews as being essential if Germany was to be saved. Whether he foresaw persecution moving to liquidation is the only point at issue.
In his rise to power, Hitler used Antisemitism as a political weapon, blaming the Jews for Germany's defeat in the First World War, portraying them as capitalist exploiters of the German people, linking them to the Bolshevik threat -- in general, encouraging everyone in his audience to place personal or national failures and fears at the door of the Jews. That many of his "facts" were freely fabricated and that his characterizations of the Jews were often wildly contradictory -- for example, that they were both capitalists and communists -- made little difference. His audiences believed him. More than a thousand years of Antisemitism had predisposed them to believe.
7. Toward the Holocaust: Early Nazi Policy on the Jews, 1933-41
Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933, and by the close of March his authority was almost absolute. Even as he was consolidating power, he began to move against the Jews. April 1933 brought a series of new pronouncements and policies that were intended to reduce Jewish involvement with the broader community. The government declared an official boycott of Jewish shops, doctors, and lawyers. It effected the dismissal of all Jewish schoolteachers and of any civil servant who had even a single Jewish grandparent. The admission of Jews to public schools and to universities was sharply curtailed. Hitler offered to respect the independence of the judiciary, provided that various "necessary measures" were taken, including the dismissal of all Jewish staff. The judges agreed.
In stages, the Jews were stripped of the legal protection enjoyed by other Germans. April 1933 saw the enactment of no fewer than eleven laws that impacted specifically on Jews -- the frenetic pace reflecting how seriously the Nazis took their Antisemitic campaign -- and the period 1933-39 saw nearly 200 in all. Perhaps most significant were the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which: defined the term "Jew" (anyone with three Jewish grandparents, or two if he associated with the Jewish community); barred Jews from marrying Aryans; and denied them the status of "citizen of the Reich." By other Antisemitic legislation, German Jews were barred from various occupations and were placed under a number of legal disabilities.
Abroad, this legislation was widely criticized, but aside from a few privately sponsored boycotts of German goods nothing was done. Indeed, while Germany went further in institutionalizing Antisemitism than did other nations, a number of European governments initiated anti-Jewish policies during the 1930's, and discrimination against Jews was accepted almost everywhere -- if not by everyone -- including the United States. Fully one-third of Americans responding to a poll in 1939 said that something should be done to limit the power of Jews in the business world; one-tenth of the respondents said that Jews should be deported.
Not only by legislation did Antisemitism advance in Germany. The Nazis placed a high priority on insuring that the rising generation would be firm in its Jew-hatred. German textbooks provided an incessant assault on the Jews. The Bolshevik Revolution was portrayed as their handiwork. German Jews were the November Criminals, schoolchildren read; furthermore, Jews dominated international finance, and their manipulations had brought about Germany's defeat in the First World War. Jews were depicted as champions of internationalism, and the various institutions that promoted peace, such as the League of Nations, were cast as their creations. Just as pacifism and internationalism were repugnant to the Nazis, so was the notion that there was an all-encompassing "humanity," rather than an array of races, and Jews were assailed for promoting the "idea of the equality of all men." "Jewish" ideas like liberalism and democracy were blamed for weakening the German nation. Jews were likewise condemned for race-mixing and for defiling German culture by introducing "Negro music" (jazz). Books that dealt with the Middle Ages often not only repeated but affirmed the charge that by widespread usury Jews oppressed the poor. And Luther's attack on them was recalled and applauded. Schoolteachers were expected to reinforce the message in the texts by regularly pointing out to their classes how dominant and how dangerous to Germany Jews were -- or at least had been, before Hitler had stepped forward to protect the German people. Conversely, if they had any Jewish pupils, they were to heap ridicule on them.
Outside the schools, Hitler Youth promoted virulent Antisemitism among its members. The press likewise vilified the Jews, both by the printed word and in cartoons. So did films and countless speeches. The ring of propaganda was extensive, and its message was incessant.
Hitler had definite ideas on how to persuade, and they drew heavily on his contempt for his audience. Since that audience as he saw it lacked intelligence, the message had to be made simple, then be repeated constantly. Since it lacked discernment, the message was to be advanced in terms of black and white, without qualification. Finally, since it was gullible, the message could be supported with whatever arguments came to mind, however spurious, and whatever evidence could be most effective, however fabricated. Hitler outlined this method clearly in Mein Kampf, noting finally, "in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility." He often used the big lie in his Antisemitic harangues.
From the first, the Nazi government condoned acts of violence against German Jews, and soon it turned to direct sponsorship. In early November 1938, a Jewish teenager, infuriated when the Germans deported his parents to their native Poland, murdered a German official in Paris. This was the occasion for the Nazis to launch an intense verbal assault on the German Jewish community and to encourage mob violence against the Jews, promising that the police would not interfere with "the spontaneous reaction of the German people." On November 9-10, "Crystal Night," mobs throughout Germany looted Jewish homes and businesses, destroying 7000 Jewish-owned shops and many synagogues. Thousands of Jews were beaten and 91 were murdered, but as promised the perpetrators went unpunished. Indeed, the Jewish community was heavily fined for the damage that it had "caused," and shortly thereafter, 30,000 Jews were sent to concentration camps, among the first of many that would face incarceration and ultimately death.
While the Nazis had been mounting their increasingly virulent campaign of Antisemitism, they had also been organizing the corps that would engineer the Holocaust. By 1939 Heinrich Himmler -- aside from Hitler, the most powerful man in Germany -- was in charge of the SS (Schutzstaffeln, "Protection Squads"), which in turn directed a vast network, including the Gestapo, or secret police, and the Waffen SS, a conglomerate of armed units that oppressed and often killed. Himmler's right-hand man was Reinhard Heydrich, probably the chief architect of the Holocaust in its early phase (he was assassinated by Czech freedom fighters in 1942). Heydrich not only helped Himmler rule his empire, but had particular charge of mobile units known as Einsatzgruppen, which were to play a central role in the Holocaust.
The first months of war in 1939 saw the Germans sweep through Poland. This success, combined with the earlier annexation of Austria and of much of Czechoslovakia, brought almost four million Jews under German control. Some Jews were killed and others deported, but the main aim of German policy at this time, especially in Poland, was to force them into ghettos, where they could be isolated and so more easily be managed. The policy of ghettoization continued through 1940, a year marked by Germany's conquest of the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, victories that imperiled additional thousands of Jews.
Even though ghettos continued to be established and Jews shunted into them virtually throughout the war, during the summer of 1941 the Nazis’ attention shifted from ghettoization to genocide. This happened almost immediately after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, in July 1941. On July 22, Heydrich issued an order to the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen: “The Führer has ordered the liquidation of all Jews, Gypsies, and Communist functionaries in the entire area of the Soviet Union in order to secure the territory.” Large-scale massacres of Jews followed, as the Germans pushed east. The Einsatzgruppen were responsible for the most deaths, but other groups were involved as well, notably the Waffen SS,
On July 31, 1941, Hermann Goering, Hitler's confidant and favorite, issued an order charging Heydrich to make "all necessary preparations in regard to organizational and financial matters for bringing about a complete solution of the Jewish question in the German sphere of influence in Europe. Wherever other governmental agencies are involved, these are to cooperate with you." The Entlösung, the Final Solution, was under way.
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Selection #3
Al Qaeda's Second Fatwa
[The following text is the fatwa published on Feb. 23, 1998, to declare a holy war against the West and Israel. It is signed by Osama bin Laden, head of al Qaeda; Ayman al-Zawahiri, head of Jihad Group in Egypt, and other Islamic terrorist groups.]
Praise be to God, who revealed the Book, controls the clouds, defeats factionalism, and says in His Book: "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)"; and peace be upon our Prophet, Muhammad Bin-'Abdallah, who said: I have been sent with the sword between my hands to ensure that no one but God is worshipped, God who put my
livelihood under the shadow of my spear and who inflicts humiliation and scorn on those who disobey my orders.
The Arabian Peninsula has never -- since God made it flat, created its desert, and encircled it with seas -- been stormed by any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts, eating its riches and wiping out its plantations. All this is happening at a time in which nations are attacking Muslims like people fighting over a plate of food. In the light of the grave situation and the lack of support, we and you are obliged to discuss current events, and we should all agree on how to settle the matter. No one argues today about three facts that are known to everyone; we will list them, in order to remind everyone:
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.
If some people have in the past argued about the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it. The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, but they are helpless.
Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.
So here they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.
All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his messenger, and Muslims. And ulema have throughout Islamic history unanimously agreed that the jihad is an individual duty if the enemy destroys the Muslim countries. This was revealed by Imam Bin-Qadamah in "Al- Mughni," Imam al-Kisa'i in "Al-Bada'i," al-Qurtubi in his interpretation, and the shaykh of al-Islam in his books, where he said: "As for the fighting to repulse [an enemy], it is aimed at defending sanctity and religion, and it is a duty as agreed [by the ulema]. Nothing is more sacred than belief except repulsing an enemy who is attacking religion and life." On that basis, and in compliance with God's order, we issue the following fatwa to all Muslims:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God."
This is in addition to the words of Almighty God: "And why should ye not fight in the cause of God and of those who, being weak, are ill-treated (and oppressed)? -- women and children, whose cry is: 'Our Lord, rescue us from this town, whose people are oppressors; and raise for us from thee one who will help!'"
We -- with God's help -- call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.
Almighty God said: "O ye who believe, give your response to God and His Apostle, when He calleth you to that which will give you life. And know that God cometh between a man and his heart, and that it is He to whom ye shall all be gathered."
Almighty God also says: "O ye who believe, what is the matter with you, that when ye are asked to go forth in the cause of God, ye cling so heavily to the earth! Do ye prefer the life of this world to the hereafter? But little is the comfort of this life, as compared with the hereafter. Unless ye go forth, He will punish you with a grievous penalty, and put others in your place; but Him ye would not harm in the least. For God hath power over all things."
Almighty God also says: "So lose no heart, nor fall into despair. For ye must gain mastery if ye are true in faith."
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Selection #4
Benjamin Rush, A Plan of a Peace-Office for the United States (1799)
AMONG THE defects which have been pointed out in the Federal Constitution by its antifederal enemies, it is much to be lamented that no person has taken notice of its total silence upon the subject of an office of the utmost importance to the welfare of the United States, that is, an office for promoting and preserving perpetual peace in our country.
It is to be hoped that no objection will be made to the establishment of such an office, while we are engaged in a war with the Indians, for as the War-Office of the United States was established in the time of peace, it is equally reasonable that a Peace-Office should be established in the time of war.
The plan of this office is as follows:
I. Let a Secretary of the Peace be appointed to preside in this office, who shall be perfectly free from all the present absurd and vulgar European prejudices upon the subject of government; let him be a genuine republican and a sincere Christian, for the principles of republicanism and Christianity are no less friendly to universal and perpetual peace, than they are to universal and equal liberty.
II. Let a power be given to this Secretary to establish and maintain free-schools in every city, vllage and township of the United States; and let him be made responsible for the talents,
principles, and morals, of all his schoolmasters. Let the youth of our country be carefully instructed in reading, writing, arithmetic, and in the doctrines of a religion of some kind: the
Christian religion should be preferred to all others; for it belongs to this religion exclusively to teach us not only to cultivate peace with men, but to forgive, nay more to love our very enemies.
It belongs to it further to teach us thatthe Supreme Being alone possesses a power to take away human life, and that we rebel against his laws, whenever we undertake to execute death in any
way whatever upon any of his creatures.
III. Let every family in the United States be furnished at the public expense, by the Secretary of this office, with a copy of an American edition of the BIBLE. This measure has become the more necessary in our country, since the banishment of the bible, as a school-book, from most of the schools in the United States. Unless the price of this book be paid for by the public, there is reason to fear that in a few years it will be met with only in courts of justice or in magistrates' offices; and should the absurd mode of establishing truth by kissing this sacred book fall into disuse, it may probably, in the course of the next generation, be seen only as a curiosity on a shelf in a public museum.
IV. Let the following sentence be inscribed in letters of gold over the doors of every State and Court house in the United States.
THE SON OF MAN CAME INTO THE WORLD, NOT TO DESTROY MEN'S LIVES, BUT TO SAVE THEM.
V. To inspire a veneration for human life, and an horror at the shedding of human blood, let all those laws be repealed which authorise juries, judges, sheriffs, or hangmen to assume the resentments of individuals and to commit murder in cold blood in any case whatever. Until this reformation in our code of penal jurisprudence takes place, it will be in vain to attempt to introduce universal and perpetual peace in our country.
VI. To subdue that passion for war, which education, added to human depravity, have made universal, a familiarity with the instruments of death, as well as all military shows, should be
carefully avoided. For which reason, militia laws should everywhere be repealed, and military dresses and military titles should be laid aside: reviews tend to lessen the horrors of a battle by
connecting them with the charms of order; militia laws generate idleness and vice, and thereby produce the wars they are said to prevent; military dresses fascinate the minds of young men, and lead them from serious and useful professions; were there no unorms, there would probably be no armies; lastly, military titles feed vanity, and keep up ideas in the mind which lessen a sense of the folly and miseries of war.
VII. In the last place, let a large room, adjoining the federal hall, be appropriated for transacting the business and preserving all the records of this office. Over the door of this room let there be a sign, on which the figures of a LAMB, a DOVE and an OLIVE BRANCH should be painted, together with the following inscriptions in letters of gold:
PEACE ON EARTH GOOD-WILL TO MAN.
AH! WHY WILL MEN FORGET THAT THEY ARE BRETHREN?
Within this apartment let there be a collection of plough-shares and pruning-hooks made out of swords and speaks; and on each of the walls of the apartment, the following pictures as large as the life:
1. A lion eating straw with an ox, and an adder playing upon the lips of a child.
2. An Indian boiling his venison in the same pot with a citizen of Kentucky.
3. Lord Cornwallis and Tippoo Saib, under the shade of a sycamore-tree in the East Indies, drinking Madeira wine together out of the same decanter.
4. A group of French and Austrian soldiers dancing arm and arm, under a bower erected in the neighbourhood of Mons.
5. A St. Domingo planter, a man of color, and a native of Africa, legislating together in the same colonial assembly.
To complete the entertainment of this delightful apartment, let a group of young ladies, clad in white robes, assemble every day at a certain hour, in a gallery to be erected for the purpose, and sing odes, and hymns, and anthems in praise of the blessings of peace.
One of these songs should consist of the following lines.
Peace o'er the world her olive wand extends,
And white-rob'd innocence from heaven descends;
All crimes shall cease, and ancient frauds shall fail,
Returning justice lifts aloft her scale.
In order more deeply to affect the minds of the citizens of the United States with the blessings of peace, by contrasting them with the evils of war, let the following inscriptions be painted upon the sign, which is placed over the door of the War Office.
1. An office for butchering the human species.
2. A Widow and Orphan making office.
3. A broken bone making office.
4. A Wooden leg making office.
5. An office for creating public and private vices.
6. An office for creating a public debt.
7. An office for creating speculators, stock jobbers, and bankrupts.
8. An office for creating famine.
9. An office for creating pestilential diseases.
10. An office for creating poverty, and the destruction of liberty, and national happiness.
In the lobby of this office let there be painted representations of all the common military instruments of death, also human skulls, broken bones, unburied and putrefying dead bodies, hospitals crowded with sick and wounded soldiers, villages on fire, mothers in besieged towns eating the flesh of their children, ships sinking in the ocean, rivers dyed with blood, and extensive plains without a tree or fence, or any other object, but the ruins of deserted farm houses.
Above this group of woeful figures, let the following words be inserted, in red characters to represent human blood,
'NATIONAL GLORY."
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Selection #5
Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795)
“PERPETUAL PEACE”: Whether this satirical inscription on a Dutch innkeeper's sign upon which a burial ground was painted had for its object mankind in general, or the rulers of states in particular, who are insatiable of war, or merely the philosophers who dream this sweet dream, it is not for us to decide. But one condition the author of this essay wishes to lay down. The practical politician assumes the attitude of looking down with great self-satisfaction on the political theorist as a pedant whose empty ideas in no way threaten the security of the state, inasmuch as the state must proceed on empirical principles; so the theorist is allowed to play his game without interference from the worldly-wise statesman. Such being his attitude, the practical politician -- and this is the condition I make -- should at least act consistently in the case of a conflict and not suspect some danger to the state in the political theorist's opinions which are ventured and publicly expressed without any ulterior purpose. By this clausula salvatoria [closing statement] the author desires formally and emphatically to deprecate herewith any malevolent interpretation which might be placed on his words.
Section I: Containing the Preliminary Articles for Perpetual Peace among States
1. "No Treaty of Peace Shall Be Held Valid in Which There Is Tacitly Reserved Matter for a Future War";
Otherwise a treaty would be only a truce, a suspension of hostilities but not peace, which means the end of all hostilities ? so much so that even to attach the word "perpetual" to it is a dubious pleonasm. The causes for making future wars (which are perhaps unknown to the contracting parties) are without exception annihilated by the treaty of peace, even if they should be dug out of dusty documents by acute sleuthing. When one or both parties to a treaty of peace, being too exhausted to continue warring with each other, make a tacit reservation in regard to old claims to be elaborated only at some more favorable opportunity in the future, the treaty is made in bad faith, and we have an artifice worthy of the casuistry of a Jesuit. Considered by itself, it is beneath the dignity of a sovereign, just as the readiness to indulge in this kind of reasoning is unworthy of the dignity of his minister.
But if, in consequence of enlightened concepts of statecraft, the glory of the state is placed in its continual aggrandizement by whatever means, my conclusion will appear merely academic and pedantic.
2. "No Independent States, Large or Small, Shall Come under the Dominion of Another State by Inheritance, Exchange, Purchase, or Donation"
A state is not, like the ground which it occupies, a piece of property. It is a society of men whom no one else has any right to command or to dispose except the state itself. It is a trunk with its own roots. But to incorporate it into another state, like a graft, is to destroy its existence as a moral person, reducing it to a thing; such incorporation thus contradicts the idea of the original contract without which no right over a people can be conceived.
Everyone knows to what dangers Europe, the only part of the world where this manner of acquisition is known, has been brought, even down to the most recent times, by the presumption that states could espouse one another; it is in part a new kind of industry for gaining ascendancy by means of family alliances and without expenditure of forces, and in part a way of extending one's domain. Also the hiring-out of troops by one state to another, so that they can be used against an enemy not common to both, is to be counted under this principle; for in this manner the subjects, as though they were things to be manipulated at pleasure, are used and also used up.
3. "Standing Armies Shall in Time Be Totally Abolished";
For they incessantly menace other states by their readiness to appear at all times prepared for war; they incite them to compete with each other in the number of armed men, and there is no limit to this. For this reason, the cost of peace finally becomes more oppressive than that of a short war, and consequently a standing army is itself a cause of offensive war waged in order to relieve the state of this burden. Add to this that to pay men to kill or to be killed seems to entail using them as mere machines and tools in the hand of another (the state), and this is hardly compatible with the rights of mankind in our own person. But the periodic and voluntary military exercises of citizens who thereby secure themselves and their country against foreign aggression are entirely different.
The accumulation of treasure would have the same effect, for, of the three powers -- the power of armies, of alliances, and of money -- the third is perhaps the most dependable weapon. Such accumulation of treasure is regarded by other states as a threat of war, and if it were not for the difficulties in learning the amount, it would force the other state to make an early attack.
4. "National Debts Shall Not Be Contracted with a View to the External Friction of States";
This expedient of seeking aid within or without the state is above suspicion when the purpose is domestic economy (e.g., the improvement of roads, new settlements, establishment of stores against unfruitful years, etc.). But as an opposing machine in the antagonism of powers, a credit system which grows beyond sight and which is yet a safe debt for the present requirements -- because all the creditors do not require payment at one time -- constitutes a dangerous money power. This ingenious invention of a commercial people [England] in this century is dangerous because it is a war treasure which exceeds the treasures of all other states; it cannot be exhausted except by default of taxes (which is inevitable), though it can be long delayed by the stimulus to trade which occurs through the reaction of credit on industry and commerce. This facility in making war, together with the inclination to do so on the part of rulers--an inclination which seems inborn in human nature -- is thus a great hindrance to perpetual peace. Therefore, to forbid this credit system must be a preliminary article of perpetual peace all the more because it must eventually entangle many innocent states in the inevitable bankruptcy and openly harm them. They are therefore justified in allying themselves against such a state and its measures.
5. "No State Shall by Force Interfere with the Constitution or Government of Another State";
For what is there to authorize it to do so? The offense, perhaps, which a state gives to the subjects of another state? Rather the example of the evil into which a state has fallen because of its lawlessness should serve as a warning. Moreover, the bad example which one free person affords another as a /scandalum acceptum/ is not an infringement of his rights. But it would be quite different if a state, by internal rebellion, should fall into two parts, each of which pretended to be a separate state making claim to the whole. To lend assistance to one of these cannot be considered an interference in the constitution of the other state (for it is then in a state of anarchy). But so long as the internal dissension has not come to this critical point, such interference by foreign powers would infringe on the rights of an independent people struggling with its internal disease; hence it would itself be an offense and would render the autonomy of all states insecure.
6. "No State Shall, during War, Permit Such Acts of Hostility Which Would Make Mutual Confidence in the Subsequent Peace Impossible: Such Are the Employment of Assassins, Poisoners, Breach of Capitulation, and Incitement to Treason in the Opposing State";
These are dishonorable stratagems. For some confidence in the character of the enemy must remain even in the midst of war, as otherwise no peace could be concluded and the hostilities would degenerate into a war of extermination. War, however, is only the sad recourse in the state of nature (where there is no tribunal which could judge with the force of law) by which each state asserts its right by violence and in which neither party can be adjudged unjust (for that would presuppose a juridical decision); in lieu of such a decision, the issue of the conflict (as if given by a so-called "judgment of God") decides on which side justice lies. But between states no punitive war is conceivable, because there is no relation between them of master and servant.
It follows that a war of extermination, in which the destruction of both parties and of all justice can result, would permit perpetual peace only in the vast burial ground of the human race. Therefore, such a war and the use of all means leading to it must be absolutely forbidden. But that the means cited do inevitably lead to it is clear from the fact that these infernal arts, vile in themselves, when once used would not long be confined to the sphere of war. Take, for instance, the use of spies. In this, one employs the infamy of others (which can never be entirely eradicated) only to encourage its persistence even into the state of peace, to the undoing of the very spirit of peace.
Although the laws stated are objectively, i.e., in so far as they express the intention of rulers, mere prohibitions, some of them are of that strict kind which hold regardless of circumstances and which demand prompt execution. Such are Nos. 1, 5, and 6. Others, like Nos. 2, 3, and 4, while not exceptions from the rule of law, nevertheless are subjectively broader in respect to their observation, containing permission to delay their execution without, however, losing sight of the end. This permission does not authorize, under No. 2, for example, delaying until doomsday (or, as Augustus used to say, ad calendas Graecas) the re-establishment of the freedom of states which have been deprived of it -- i.e., it does not permit us to fail to do it, but it allows a delay to prevent precipitation which might injure the goal striven for. For the prohibition concerns only the manner of acquisition which is no longer permitted, but not the possession, which, though not bearing a requisite title of right, has nevertheless been held lawful in all states by the public opinion of the time (the time of the putative acquisition).
Section II: Containing the Definitive Articles for Perpetual Peace among States
The state of peace among men living side by side is not the natural state; the natural state is one of war. This does not always mean open hostilities, but at least an unceasing threat of war. A state of peace, therefore, must be /established/, for in order to be secured against hostility it is not sufficient that hostilities simply be not committed; and, unless this security is pledged to each by his neighbor (a thing that can occur only in a civil state), each may treat his neighbor, from whom he demands this security, as an enemy.
First Definitive Article for Perpetual Peace
"The Civil Constitution of Every State Should Be Republican";
The only constitution which derives from the idea of the original compact, and on which all juridical legislation of a people must be based, is the republican. This constitution is established, firstly, by principles of the freedom of the members of a society (as men); secondly, by principles of dependence of all upon a single common legislation (as subjects); and, thirdly, by the law of their equality (as citizens). The republican constitution, therefore, is, with respect to law, the one which is the original basis of every form of civil constitution. The only question now is: Is it also the one which can lead to perpetual peace?
The republican constitution, besides the purity of its origin (having sprung from the pure source of the concept of law), also gives a favorable prospect for the desired consequence, i.e., perpetual peace. The reason is this: if the consent of the citizens is required in order to decide that war should be declared (and in this constitution it cannot but be the case), nothing is more natural than that they would be very cautious in commencing such a poor game, decreeing for themselves all the calamities of war. Among the latter would be: having to fight, having to pay the costs of war from their own resources, having painfully to repair the devastation war leaves behind, and, to fill up the measure of evils, load themselves with a heavy national debt that would embitter peace itself and that can never be liquidated on account of constant wars in the future. But, on the other hand, in a constitution which is not republican, and under which the subjects are not citizens, a declaration of war is the easiest thing in the world to decide upon, because war does not require of the ruler, who is the proprietor and not a member of the state, the least sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions, and the like. He may, therefore, resolve on war as on a pleasure party for the most trivial reasons, and with perfect indifference leave the justification which decency requires to the diplomatic corps who are ever ready to provide it.
In order not to confuse the republican constitution with the democratic (as is commonly done), the following should be noted. The forms of a state can be divided either according to the persons who possess the sovereign power or according to the mode of administration exercised over the people by the chief, whoever he may be. The first is properly called the form of sovereignty, and there are only three possible forms of it: autocracy, in which one, aristocracy, in which some associated together, or democracy, in which all those who constitute society, possess sovereign power. They may be characterized, respectively, as the power of a monarch, of the nobility, or of the people. The second division is that by the form of government and is based on the way in which the state makes use of its power; this way is based on the constitution, which is the act of the general will through which the many persons become one nation. In this respect government is either republican or despotic. Republicanism is the political principle of the separation of the executive power (the administration) from the legislative; despotism is that of the autonomous execution by the state of laws which it has itself decreed. Thus in a despotism the public will is administered by the ruler as his own will. Of the three forms of the state, that of democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which "all" decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, "all," who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom.
Every form of government which is not representative is, properly speaking, without form. The legislator can unite in one and the same person his function as legislative and as executor of his will just as little as the universal of the major premise in a syllogism can also be the subsumption of the particular under the universal in the minor. And even though the other two constitutions are always defective to the extent that they do leave room for this mode of administration, it is at least possible for them to assume a mode of government conforming to the spirit of a representative system (as when Frederick II at least said he was merely the first servant of the state). On the other hand, the democratic mode of government makes this impossible, since everyone wishes to be master. Therefore, we can say: the smaller the personnel of the government (the smaller the number of rulers), the greater is their representation and the more nearly the constitution approaches to the possibility of republicanism; thus the constitution may be expected by gradual reform finally to raise itself to republicanism. For these reasons it is more difficult for an aristocracy than for a monarchy to achieve the one completely juridical constitution, and it is impossible for a democracy to do so except by violent revolution.
The mode of governments, however, is incomparably more important to the people than the form of sovereignty, although much depends on the greater or lesser suitability of the latter to the end of [good] government. To conform to the concept of law, however, government must have a representative form, and in this system only a republican mode of government is possible; without it, government is despotic and arbitrary, whatever the constitution may be. None of the ancient so-called "republics" knew this system, and they all finally and inevitably degenerated into despotism under the sovereignty of one, which is the most bearable of all forms of despotism.
Second Definitive Article for a Perpetual Peace:
"The Law of Nations Shall be Founded on a Federation of Free States";
Peoples, as states, like individuals, may be judged to injure one another merely by their coexistence in the state of nature (i.e., while independent of external laws). Each of then, may and should for the sake of its own security demand that the others enter with it into a constitution similar to the civil constitution, for under such a constitution each can be secure in his right. This would be a league of nations, but it would not have to be a state consisting of nations. That would be contradictory, since a state implies the relation of a superior (legislating) to an inferior (obeying), i.e., the people, and many nations in one state would then constitute only one nation. This contradicts the presupposition, for here we have to weigh the rights of nations against each other so far as they are distinct states and not amalgamated into one.
When we see the attachment of savages to their lawless freedom, preferring ceaseless combat to subjection to a lawful constraint which they might establish, and thus preferring senseless freedom to rational freedom, we regard it with deep contempt as barbarity, rudeness, and a brutish degradation of humanity. Accordingly, one would think that civilized people (each united in a state) would hasten all the more to escape, the sooner the better, from such a depraved condition. But, instead, each state places its majesty (for it is absurd to speak of the majesty of the people) in being subject to no external juridical restraint, and the splendor of its sovereign consists in the fact that many thousands stand at his command to sacrifice themselves for something that does not concern them and without his needing to place himself in the least danger. The chief difference between European and American savages lies in the fact that many tribes of the latter have been eaten by their enemies, while the former know how to make better use of their conquered enemies than to dine off them; they know better how to use them to increase the number of their subjects and thus the quantity of instruments for even more extensive wars.
When we consider the perverseness of human nature which is nakedly revealed in the uncontrolled relations between nations (this perverseness being veiled in the state of civil law by the constraint exercised by government), we may well be astonished that the word "law" has not yet been banished from war politics as pedantic, and that no state has yet been bold enough to advocate this point of view. Up to the present, Hugo Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel, and many other irritating comforters have been cited in justification of war, though their code, philosophically or diplomatically formulated, has not and cannot have the least legal force, because states as such do not stand under a common external power. There is no instance on record that a state has ever been moved to desist from its purpose because of arguments backed up by the testimony of such great men. But the homage which each state pays (at least in words) to the concept of law proves that there is slumbering in man an even greater moral disposition to become master of the evil principle in himself (which he cannot disclaim) and to hope for the same from others. Otherwise the word "law" would never be pronounced by states which wish to war upon one another; it would be used only ironically, as a Gallic prince interpreted it when he said, "It is the prerogative which nature has given the stronger that the weaker should obey him."
States do not plead their cause before a tribunal; war alone is their way of bringing suit. But by war and its favorable issue, in victory, right is not decided, and though by a treaty of peace this particular war is brought to an end, the state of war, of always finding a new pretext to hostilities, is not terminated. Nor can this be declared wrong, considering the fact that in this state each is the judge of his own case. Notwithstanding, the obligation which men in a lawless condition have under the natural law, and which requires them to abandon the state of nature, does not quite apply to states under the law of nations, for as states they already have an internal juridical constitution and have thus outgrown compulsion from others to submit to a more extended lawful constitution according to their ideas of right. This is true in spite of the fact that reason, from its throne of supreme moral legislating authority, absolutely condemns war as a legal recourse and makes a state of peace a direct duty, even though peace cannot be established or secured except by a compact among nations.
For these reasons there must be a league of a particular kind, which can be called a league of peace, and which would be distinguished from a treaty of peace by the fact that the latter terminates only one war, while the former seeks to make an end of all wars forever. This league does not tend to any dominion over the power of the state but only to the maintenance and security of the freedom of the state itself and of other states in league with it, without there being any need for them to submit to civil laws and their compulsion, as men in a state of nature must submit.
The practicability (objective reality) of this idea of federation, which should gradually spread to all states and thus lead to perpetual peace, can be proved. For if fortune directs that a powerful and enlightened people can make itself a republic, which by its nature must be inclined to perpetual peace, this gives a fulcrum to the federation with other states so that they may adhere to it and thus secure freedom under the idea of the law of nations. By more and more such associations, the federation may be gradually extended.
We may readily conceive that a people should say, "There ought to be no war among us, for we want to make ourselves into a state; that is, we want to establish a supreme legislative, executive, and judiciary power which will reconcile our differences peaceably." But when this state says, "There ought to be no war between myself and other states, even though I acknowledge no supreme legislative power by which our rights are mutually guaranteed," it is not at all clear on what I can base my confidence in my own rights unless it is the free federation, the surrogate of the civil social order, which reason necessarily associates with the concept of the law of nations ? assuming that something is really meant by the latter.
The concept of a law of nations as a right to make war does not really mean anything, because it is then a law of deciding what is right by unilateral maxims through force and not by universally valid public laws which restrict the freedom of each one. The only conceivable meaning of such a law of nations might be that it serves men right who are so inclined that they should destroy each other and thus find perpetual peace in the vast grave that swallows both the atrocities and their perpetrators. For states in their relation to each other, there cannot be any reasonable way out of the lawless condition which entails only war except that they, like individual men, should give up their savage (lawless) freedom, adjust themselves to the constraints of public law, and thus establish a continuously growing state consisting of various nations, which will ultimately include all the nations of the world. But under the idea of the law of nations they do not wish this, and reject in practice what is correct in theory. If all is not to be lost, there can be, then, in place of the positive idea of a world republic, only the negative surrogate of an alliance which averts war, endures, spreads, and holds back the stream of those hostile passions which fear the law, though such an alliance is in constant peril of their breaking loose again....
Third Definitive Article for a Perpetual Peace
"The Law of World Citizenship Shall Be Limited to Conditions of Universal Hospitality";
Here, as in the preceding articles, it is not a question of philanthropy but of right. Hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another. One may refuse to receive him when this can be done without causing his destruction; but, so long as he peacefully occupies his place, one may not treat him with hostility. It is not the right to be a permanent visitor that one may demand. A special beneficent agreement would be needed in order to give an outsider a right to become a fellow inhabitant for a certain length of time. It is only a right of temporary sojourn, a right to associate, which all men have. They have it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infinitely disperse and hence must finally tolerate the presence of each other. Originally, no one had more right than another to a particular part of the earth.
Uninhabitable parts of the earth -- the sea and the deserts – divide this community of all men, but the ship and the camel (the desert ship) enable them to approach each other across these unruled regions and to establish communication by using the common right to the face of the earth, which belongs to human beings generally. The inhospitality of the inhabitants of coasts (for instance, of the Barbary Coast) in robbing ships in neighboring seas or enslaving stranded travelers, or the inhospitality of the inhabitants of the deserts (for instance, the Bedouin Arabs) who view contact with nomadic tribes as conferring the right to plunder them, is thus opposed to natural law, even though it extends the right of hospitality, i.e., the privilege of foreign arrivals, no further than to conditions of the possibility of seeking to communicate with the prior inhabitants. In this way distant parts of the world can come into peaceable relations with each other, and these are finally publicly established by law. Thus the human race can gradually
be brought closer and closer to a constitution establishing world citizenship.
But to this perfection compare the inhospitable actions of the civilized and especially of the commercial states of our part of the world. The injustice which they show to lands and peoples they visit (which is equivalent to conquering them) is carried by them to terrifying lengths. America, the lands inhabited by the Negro, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc., were at the time of their discovery considered by these civilized intruders as lands without owners, for they counted the inhabitants as nothing. In East India (Hindustan), under the pretense of establishing economic undertakings, they brought in foreign soldiers and used them to oppress the natives, excited widespread wars among the various states, spread famine, rebellion, perfidy, and the whole litany of evils which afflict mankind.
China and Japan (Nippon), who have had experience with such guests, have wisely refused them entry, the former permitting their approach to their shores but not their entry, while the latter permit this approach to only one European people, the Dutch, but treat them like prisoners, not allowing them any communication with the inhabitants. The worst of this (or, to speak with the moralist, the best) is that all these outrages profit them nothing, since all these commercial ventures stand on the verge of collapse, and the Sugar Islands, that place of the most refined and cruel slavery, produces no real revenue except indirectly, only serving a not very praiseworthy purpose of furnishing sailors for war fleets and thus for the conduct of war in Europe. This service is rendered to powers which make a great show of their piety, and, while they drink injustice like water, they regard themselves as the elect in point of orthodoxy.
Since the narrower or wider community of the peoples of the earth has developed so far that a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world, the idea of a law of world citizenship is no high-flown or exaggerated notion. It is a supplement to the unwritten code of the civil and international law, indispensable for the maintenance of the public human rights and hence also of perpetual peace. One cannot flatter oneself into believing one can approach this peace except under the condition outlined here.
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Selection #6:
Excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1856):
chapter 22: WHY DEMOCRATIC NATIONS NATURALLY DESIRE PEACE, AND DEMOCRATIC ARMIES, WAR
The same interests, the same fears, the same passions that deter democratic nations from revolutions deter them also from war; the spirit of military glory and the spirit of revolution are weakened at the same time and by the same causes. The ever increasing numbers of men of property who are lovers of peace, the growth of personal wealth which war so rapidly consumes, the mildness of manners, the gentleness of heart, those tendencies to pity which are produced by the equality of conditions, that coolness of understanding which renders men comparatively insensible to the violent and poetical excitement of arms, all these causes concur to, quench the military spirit. I think it may be admitted as a general and constant rule that among civilized nations the warlike passions will become more rare and less intense in proportion as social conditions are more equal....
Chapter 26: SOME CONSIDERATIONS ON WAR IN DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITIES
When the principle of equality is spreading, not only among a single nation, but among several neighboring nations at the same time, as is now the case in Europe, the inhabitants of these different countries, notwithstanding the dissimilarity of language, of customs, and of laws, still resemble each other in their equal dread of war and their common love of peace.(n.1) It is in vain that ambition or anger puts arms in the hands of princes; they are appeased in spite of themselves by a species of general apathy and goodwill which makes the sword drop from their grasp, and wars become more rare.
As the spread of equality, taking place in several countries at once, simultaneously impels their various inhabitants to follow manufactures and commerce, not only do their tastes become similar, but their interests are so mixed and entangled with one another that no nation can inflict evils on other nations without those evils falling back upon itself; and all nations ultimately regard war as a calamity almost as severe to the conqueror as to the conquered.
Thus, on the one hand, it is extremely difficult in democratic times to draw nations into hostilities; but, on the other, it is almost impossible that any two of them should go to war without embroiling the rest. The interests of all are so interlaced, their opinions and their wants so much alike, that none can remain quiet when the others stir. Wars therefore become more rare, but when they break out, they spread over a larger field. Neighboring democratic nations not only become alike in some respects, but eventually grow to resemble each other in almost all.(n. 2) This similitude of nations has consequences of great importance in relation to war. If I inquire why it is that the Helvetic Confederacy made the greatest and most powerful nations of Europe tremble in the fifteenth century, while at the present day the power of that country is exactly proportioned to its population, I perceive that the Swiss have become like all the surrounding communities, and those surrounding communities like the Swiss; so that as numerical strength now forms the only difference between them, victory necessarily attends the largest army. Thus one of the consequences of the democratic revolution that is going on in Europe is to make numerical strength preponderate on all fields of battle and to constrain all small nations to incorporate themselves with large states, or at least to adopt the policy of the latter. As numbers are the determining cause of victory, each people ought of course to strive by all the means in its power to bring the greatest possible number of men into the field. When it was possible to enlist a kind of troops superior to all others, such as the Swiss infantry or the French horse of the sixteenth century, it was not thought necessary to raise very large armies; but the case is altered when one soldier is as efficient as another.
When the members of a community are divided into castes and classes, they not only differ from one another, but have no taste and no desire to be alike; on the contrary, everyone endeavors, more and more, to keep his own opinions undisturbed, to retain his own peculiar habits, and to remain himself. The characteristics of individuals are very strongly marked.
When the state of society among a people is democratic--that is to say when there are no longer any castes or classes in the community and all its members are nearly equal in education and in property--the human mind follows the opposite direction. Men are much alike, and they are annoyed as it were, by any deviation from that likeness; far from seeking to preserve their own distinguishing singularities, they endeavor to shake them off in order to identify themselves with the general mass of the people, which is the sole representative of right and of might to their eyes. The characteristics of individuals are nearly obliterated.
In the ages of aristocracy even those who are naturally alike strive to create imaginary differences between themselves, in the ages of democracy even those who are not alike seek nothing more than to become so and to copy each other, so strongly is the mind of every man always carried away by the general impulse of mankind.
Something of the same kind may be observed between nations: two nations having the same aristocratic social condition may remain thoroughly distinct and extremely different, because the spirit of aristocracy is to retain strong individual characteristics; but if two neighboring nations have the same democratic social condition, they cannot fail to adopt similar opinions and manners, because the spirit of democracy tends to assimilate men to each other.
The same cause that begets this new want also supplies means of satisfying it; for, as I have already observed, when men are all alike they are all weak, and the supreme power of the state is naturally much stronger among democratic nations than elsewhere. Hence, while these nations are desirous of enrolling the whole male population in the ranks of the army, they have the power of effecting this object; the consequence is that in democratic ages armies seem to grow larger in proportion as the love of war declines.
In the same ages, too, the manner of carrying on war is likewise altered by the same causes. Machiavelli observes, in The Prince, "that it is much more difficult to subdue a people who have a prince and his barons for their leaders than a nation that is commanded by a prince and his slaves." To avoid offense, let us read "public officials" for "slaves," and this important truth will be strictly applicable to our own time.
A great aristocratic people cannot either conquer its neighbors or be conquered by them without great difficulty. It cannot conquer them because all its forces can never be collected and held together for a considerable period; it cannot be conquered because an enemy meets at every step small centers of resistance, by which invasion is arrested. War against an aristocracy may be compared to war in a mountainous country; the defeated party has constant opportunities of rallying its forces to make a stand in a new position.
Exactly the reverse occurs among democratic nations: they easily bring their whole disposable force into the field, and when the nation is wealthy and populous it soon becomes victorious; but if it is ever conquered and its territory invaded, it has few resources at command; and if the enemy takes the capital, the nation is lost. This may very well be explained: as each member of the community is individually isolated and extremely powerless, no one of the whole body can either defend himself or present a rallying point to others. Nothing is strong in a democratic country except the state; as the military strength of the state is destroyed by the destruction of the army, and its civil power paralyzed by the capture of the chief city, all that remains is only a multitude without strength or government, unable to resist the organized power by which it is assailed. I am aware that this danger may be lessened by the creation of local liberties, and consequently of local powers; but this remedy will always be insufficient. For after such a catastrophe not only is the population unable to carry on hostilities, but it may be apprehended that they will not be inclined to attempt it.
According to the law of nations adopted in civilized countries, the object of war is not to seize the property of private individuals, but simply to get possession of political power. The destruction of private property is only occasionally resorted to, for the purpose of attaining the latter object. When an aristocratic country is invaded after the defeat of its army, the nobles, although they are at the same time the wealthiest members of the community, will continue to defend themselves individually rather than submit; for if the conqueror remained master of the country he would deprive them of their political power, to which they cling even more closely than to their property. They therefore prefer fighting to submission, which is to them the greatest of all misfortunes; and they readily carry the people along with them, because the people have long been used to follow and obey them, and besides have but little to risk in the war.
Among a nation in which equality of condition prevails, on the contrary, each citizen has but a slender share of political power, and often has no share at all. On the other hand, all are independent, and all have something to lose; so that they are much less afraid of being conquered and much more afraid of war than an aristocratic people. It will always be very difficult to convince a democratic people to take up arms when hostilities have reached its own territory. Hence the necessity of giving to such a people the rights and the political character which may impart to every citizen some of those interests that cause the nobles to act for the public welfare in aristocratic countries.
It should never be forgotten by the princes and other leaders of democratic nations that nothing but the love and the habit of freedom can maintain an advantageous contest with the love and the habit of physical well-being. I can conceive nothing better prepared for subjection, in case of defeat, than a democratic people without free institutions.
Formerly it was customary to take the field with a small body of troops, to fight in small engagements, and to make long regular sieges. Modern tactics consist in fighting decisive battles and, as soon as a line of march is open before the army, in rushing upon the capital city in order to terminate the war at a single blow. Napoleon, it is said, was the inventor of this new system; but the invention of such a system did not depend on any individual man, whoever he might be. The mode in which Napoleon carried on war was suggested to him by the state of society in his time; that mode was successful because it was eminently adapted to that state of society and because he was the first to employ it. Napoleon was the first commander who marched at the head of an army from capital to capital; but the road was opened for him by the ruin of feudal society. It may fairly be believed that if that extraordinary man had been born three hundred years ago, he would not have derived the same results from his method of warfare, or rather that he would have had a different method.
I shall add but a few words on civil wars, for fear of exhausting the patience of the reader. Most of the remarks that I have made respecting foreign wars are applicable a fortiori to civil wars. Men living in democracies have not naturally the military spirit; they sometimes acquire it when they have been dragged by compulsion to the field, but to rise in a body and voluntarily to expose themselves to the horrors of war, and especially of civil war, is a course that the men of democracies are not apt to adopt. None but the most adventurous members of the community consent to run into such risks; the bulk of the population remain motionless.
But even if the population were inclined to act, considerable obstacles would stand in their way; for they can resort to no old and well-established influence that they are willing to obey, no well-- known leaders to rally the discontented, as well as to discipline and to lead them, no political powers subordinate to the supreme power of the nation which afford an effectual support to the resistance directed against the government.
In democratic countries the moral power of the majority is immense, and the physical resources that it has at its command are out of all proportion to the physical resources that may be combined against it. Therefore the party which occupies the seat of the majority, which speaks in its name and wields its power, triumphs instantaneously and irresistibly over all private resistance; it does not even give such opposition time to exist, but nips it in the bud. Those who in such nations seek to effect a revolution by force of arms have no other resource than suddenly to seize upon the whole machinery of government as it stands, which can better be done by a single blow than by a war; for as soon as there is a regular war, the party that represents the state is always certain to conquer.
The only case in which a civil war could arise is if the army should divide itself into two factions, the one raising the standard of rebellion, the other remaining true to its allegiance. An army constitutes a small community, very closely knit together, endowed with great powers of vitality, and able to supply its own wants for some time. Such a war might be bloody, but it could not be long; for either the rebellious army would gain over the government by the sole display of its resources or by its first victory, and then the war would be over; or the struggle would take place, and then that portion of the army which was not supported by the organized powers of the state would speedily either disband itself or be destroyed. It may therefore be admitted as a general truth that in ages of equality civil wars will become much less frequent and less protracted.(n. 3)
Footnotes
1 It is scarcely necessary for me to observe that the dread of war displayed by the nations of Europe is not attributable solely to the progress made by the principle of equality among them. Independently of this permanent cause, several other accidental causes of great weight might be pointed out, and I may mention, before all the rest, the extreme lassitude that the wars of the Revolution and the Empire have left behind them.
2 This is not only because these nations have the same social condition but it arises from the very nature of that social condition, which leads men to imitate and identify themselves with each other.
3 It should be borne in mind that I speak here of sovereign and independent democratic nations, not of confederate democracies, in confederacies, as the preponderating power always resides, in spite of all political fictions, in the state governments and not in the federal government, civil wars are in fact nothing but foreign wars in disguise.
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Selection #7
Bits from writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)
WAR IS WILL TO POWER
War has always been the great wisdom of all spirits who have become too inward, too profound; even in a wound there is the power to heal ....
Your enemy you shall seek, your war you shall wage -- for your thoughts. And if your thought be vanquished, then your honesty should still find cause for triumph in that. You should love peace as a means to new wars--and the short peace more than the long. To you I do not recommend work but struggle. To you I do not Recommend peace but victory! One can be silent and sit still only when one has bow and arrow: else one chatters and quarrels. Let your peace be a victory!
You say it is the good cause that hallows any cause. War and courage have accomplished more great things than love of the neighbor....
In the political realm too, hostility has now become more spiritual -- much more sensible, much more thoughtful, much more considerate....
The valuation that is today applied to the different forms society entirely identical with that which assigns a higher value to peace than to war: but this judgment is antibiological, is itself a fruit of the decadence of life. Life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war....
WAR IS INDISPENSABLE! It is nothing but fanaticism and beautiful soulism to expect very much (or even, much only) from humanity when it has forgotten how to wage war. For the present we know of no other means whereby the rough energy of the camp, the deep impersonal hatred, the cold-bloodedness of murder with a good conscience, the general ardor of the system in the destruction of the enemy, the proud indifference to great losses, to one's own existence and that of one's friends, the hollow, earth-like convulsion of the soul, can be as forcibly and certainly communicated to enervated nations as is done by every great war. ADVANCE \d 0
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Selection #8
Vladimir Lenin, The Principles of Socialism and the War of 1914–1915 (1915)
The Attitude of Socialists Towards Wars
Socialists have always condemned war between nations as barbarous and brutal. But our attitude towards war is fundamentally different from that of the bourgeois pacifists (supporters and advocates of peace) and of the Anarchists. We differ from the former in that we understand the inevitable connection between wars and the class struggle within the country; we understand that war cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and Socialism is created; and we also differ in that we fully regard civil wars, i.e., wars waged by the oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave-owners, serfs against land-owners, and wage-workers against the bourgeoisie, as legitimate, progressive and necessary. We Marxists differ from both the pacifists and the Anarchists in that we deem it necessary historically (from the standpoint of Marx’s dialectical materialism) to study each war separately. In history there have been numerous wars which, in spite of all the horrors, atrocities, distress and suffering that inevitably accompany alt wars, were progressive, i.e., benefited the development of mankind by helping to destroy the exceptionally harmful and reactionary institutions (for example, autocracy or serfdom), the most barbarous despotisms in Europe (Turkish and Russian). Therefore, it is necessary to examine the historically specific features of precisely the present war.
Historical Types of Wars in Modern Times
The Great French Revolution ushered in a new epoch in the history of mankind. From that time to the Paris Commune, from 1789 to 1871, one of the types of wars were wars of a bourgeois-progressive, national-liberating character. In other words, the chief content and historical significance of these wars were the overthrow of absolutism and feudalism, the undermining of these institutions, the overthrow of alien oppression. Therefore, those were progressive wars, and during such wars, all honest, revolutionary democrats, and also all Socialists, always sympathised with the success of that country (i.e., with that bourgeoisie), which had helped to overthrow, or sap, the most dangerous foundation of feudalism, absolutism and the oppression of other nations. For example, the revolutionary wars waged by France contained an element of plunder and conquest of alien territory by the French, but this does not in the least alter the fundamental historical significance of these wars, which destroyed and shattered feudalism and absolutism in the whole of old, serf-ridden Europe. In the Franco-Prussian war, Germany plundered France, but this does not alter the fundamental historical significance of this war, which liberated tens of millions of German people from feudal disintegration and from the oppression of two despots, the Russian tsar and Napoleon III.
The Difference Between Aggressive and Defensive War
The epoch of 1789-1871 left deep tracks and revolutionary memories. Before feudalism, absolutism and alien oppression were overthrown, the development of the proletarian struggle for Socialism was out of the question. When speaking of the legitimacy of “defensive” war in relation to the wars of such an epoch, Socialists always had in mind precisely these objects, which amounted to revolution against medievalism and serfdom. By “defensive” war Socialists always meant a “just” war in this sense (W. Liebknecht once expressed himself precisely in this way). Only in this sense have Socialists regarded, and now regard, wars “for the defence of the fatherland”, or “defensive” wars, as legitimate, progressive and just. For example, if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be “just”, “defensive” wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every Socialist would sympathise with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slaveowning, predatory “great” powers....
The Present War is An Imperialist War
Nearly everybody admits that the present war is an imperialist war, but in most cases this term is distorted or applied to one side, or a loophole is left for the assertion that this war may, after all, have a bourgeois-progressive, national-liberating significance. Imperialism is the highest stage in the development of capitalism, reached only in the twentieth century. Capitalism now finds the old national states, without the formation of which it could not have overthrown feudalism, too tight for it. Capitalism has developed concentration to such a degree that whole branches of industry have been seized by syndicates, trusts and associations of capitalist billionaires, and almost the entire globe has been divided up among the “lords of capital, either in the form of colonies, or by enmeshing other countries in thousands of threads of financial exploitation. Free trade and competition have been superseded by the striving for monopoly, for the seizure of territory for the investment of capital, for the export of raw materials from them, and so forth. From the liberator of nations that capitalism was in the struggle against feudalism, imperialist capitalism has become the greatest oppressor of nations. Formerly progressive, capitalism has become reactionary; it has developed the forces of production to such a degree that mankind is faced with the alternative of going over to Socialism or of suffering years and even decades of armed struggle between the “great powers for the artificial preservation of capitalism by means of colonies, monopolies, privileges and national oppression of every kind....
[M]ost of the nations which fought at the head of others for freedom in 1798-1871, have now, after 1876. on the basis of highly developed and “overripe” capitalism, become the oppressors and enslavers of the majority of the populations and nations of the globe. From 1876 to 1914, six “great” powers grabbed 25 million sq. kilometres, i.e., an area two and a half times that of Europe! Six powers are enslaving over half a billion (521 million) inhabitants of colonies. For every four inhabitants of the “great” powers there are five inhabitants of “their” colonies. And everybody knows that colonies are conquered by fire and sword, that the populations of colonies are brutally treated, that they are exploited in a thousand ways (by exporting capital, concessions, etc., cheating when selling them goods, subordination to the authorities of the “ruling” nation, and so on and so forth). he Anglo-French bourgeoisie are deceiving the people when they say that they are waging war for the freedom of nations and for Belgium; actually they are waging war for the purpose of retaining the colonies they have inordinately grabbed. The German imperialists would free Belgium, etc., at once if the British and French would agree “fairly” to share their colonies with them. The peculiarity of the situation lies in that in this war the fate of the colonies is being decided by war on the Continent. From the standpoint of bourgeois justice and national freedom (or the right of nations to existence), Germany would be absolutely right as against England and France, for she has been “done out” of colonies, her enemies are oppressing an immeasurably far larger number of nations than she is, and the Slays who are oppressed by her ally Austria undoubtedly enjoy far more freedom than those in tsarist Russia, that real “prison of nations”. But Germany is fighting not for the liberation, but for the oppression of nations. It is not the business of Socialists to help the younger and stronger robber (Germany) to rob the older and overgorged robbers. Socialists must take advantage of the struggle between the robbers to overthrow them all. To be able to do this, the Socialists must first of all tell the people the truth, namely, that this war is in a treble sense a war between slave-owners to fortify slavery. This is a war firstly, to fortify the enslavement of the colonies by means of a “fairer” distribution and subsequent more “concerted exploitation of them; secondly, to fortify the oppression of other nations within the “great” powers, for both Austria and Russia (Russia more and much worse than Austria) maintain their rule only by such oppression, intensifying it by means of war; and thirdly, to fortify and prolong wage slavery, for the proletariat is split up and suppressed, while the capitalists gain, making fortunes out of the war, aggravating national prejudices and intensifying reaction, which has raised its head in all countries. even in the freest and most republican....
“War is the Continuation of Politics by Other [i.e., Violent] Means.” This famous aphorism was uttered by one of the profoundest writers on the problems of war, Clausewitz. Marxists have always rightly regarded this thesis as the theoretical basis of views concerning the significance of every given war. It was precisely from this viewpoint that Marx and Engels always regarded different wars.
Apply this view to the present war. You will see that for decades, for almost half a century, the governments and the ruling classes of England, and France, and Germany, and Italy, and Austria, and Russia, pursued a policy of, plundering colonies, of oppressing other nations, of suppressing the working-class movement. It is this, and only this policy that is being continued in the present war. In particular, the policy of both Austria and Russia peace-time as well as in war, is a policy of enslaving and not of liberating nations. In China, Persia. India and other dependent countries, on the contrary, we have seen during the past decades a policy of rousing tens and hundreds of millions of people to national life, of liberating them from the oppression of the reactionary “great” powers. A war on such a historical ground can even today be a bourgeois-progressive, national-liberation war.
It is sufficient to glance at the present war from the viewpoint that it is a continuation of the politics of the great powers, and of the principal classes within them, to see at once the howling anti-historicalness, falsity and hypocrisy of the view that the “defence of the fatherland” idea can be justified in the present war....
Lenin, The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution (1916)
Among the Dutch, Scandinavian and Swiss revolutionary Social-Democrats who are combating the social-chauvinist lies about “defence of the fatherland” in the present imperialist war, there have been voices in favour of replacing the old Social-Democratic minimum-program for a “militia” or the “Armed nation” with a new demand: “disarmament.”...
Their principal argument is that the disarmament demand is the clearest, most decisive, most consistent expression of the struggle against all militarism and against all war.
But in this principal argument lies the disarmament advocates' principal error. Socialists cannot, without ceasing to be socialists, be opposed to all war.
Firstly, socialists have never been, nor can they ever be, opposed to revolutionary wars. The bourgeoisie of the imperialist 'Great' Powers has become thoroughly reactionary, and the war this bourgeoisie is now waging we regard as a reactionary, slave-owners' and criminal war. But what about a war against this bourgeoisie? ...
To deny all possibility of national wars under imperialism is wrong in theory, obviously mistaken historically, and tantamount to European chauvinism in practice: we who belong to nations that oppress hundreds of millions in Europe, Africa, Asia, etc., are invited to tell the oppressed peoples that it is 'impossible' for them to wage war against' our' nations!
Secondly, civil war is just as much a war as any other. He who accepts the class struggle cannot fail to accept civil wars, which in every class society are the natural, and under certain conditions inevitable, continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle. That has been confirmed by every great revolution. To repudiate civil war, or to forget about it, is to fall into extreme opportunism and renounce the socialist revolution.
Thirdly, the victory of socialism in one country does not at one stroke eliminate all war in general. On the contrary, it presupposes wars. The development of capitalism proceeds extremely unevenly in different countries. It cannot be otherwise under commodity production. From this it follows irrefutably that socialism cannot achieve victory simultaneously in all countries. It will achieve victory first in one or several countries, while the others will for some time remain bourgeois or pre-bourgeois. This is bound to create not only friction, but a direct attempt on the part of the bourgeoisie of other countries to crush the socialist state's victorious proletariat. In such cases a war on our part would be a legitimate and just war. It would be a war for socialism, for the liberation of other nations from the bourgeoisie. Engels was perfectly right when, in his letter to Kautsky of September 12, 1882, he clearly stated that it was possible for already victorious socialism to wage' defensive wars'. What he had in mind was defence of the victorious proletariat against the bourgeoisie of other countries.
Only after we have overthrown, finally vanquished and expropriated the bourgeoisie of the whole world, and not merely of one country, will wars become impossible. And from a scientific point of view it would be utterly wrong-and utterly unrevolutionary-for us to evade or gloss over the most important thing: crushing the resistance of the bourgeoisie-the most difficult task, and one demanding the greatest amount of fighting, in the transition to socialism. The 'social' parsons and opportunists are always ready to build dreams of future peaceful socialism. But the very thing that distinguishes them from revolutionary Social-Democrats is that they refuse to think about and reflect on the fierce class struggle and class wars needed to achieve that beautiful future.