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They made a democracy and called it
peace
By Spengler
This
year's 60th anniversary of the Anglo-American
victory in World War II will call forth
innumerable orations about the triumph of liberty.
Ad nauseam, we will hear that the occupation of
Germany and Japan as well as the fall of communism
set a precedent for the birth  of democracy in
Iraq, leading to the spread of democracy
throughout the Middle East. If the experience of
World War II and the Cold War were any guide, the
Middle East would be well advised to shun
democracy at all costs.
That victory by
the United States replaced German, Japanese and
Russian tyranny with democracies is not in doubt.
The problem is: where are the Germans, Japanese
and Russians? If the United States had set out to
exterminate its erstwhile enemies, it could not
have done a more thorough job. Its adversaries of
World War II and the Cold War are dying out. In
the Islamic world, a breakup of traditional
society might produce similar results. Tacitus'
famous dictum ("they made a desert and called it
peace") comes to mind. I insist on the point not
because I think it should have been otherwise, but
to admonish Americans to steel themselves for
terrible times ahead.
The Dresden
firestorm of February 1945, and the nuclear attack
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year,
killed more than the few hundred thousand people
known to have died in those bombings. In a broader
sense, those attacks killed all the Germans and
Japanese who ever lived, and all the Germans and
Japanese who ever would live. Animals breed by
instinct, but faith in the future is a
precondition for the reproduction of human
society. Wounded animals crawl into a hole and
die; humiliated cultures turn sterile and pass out
of memory. Germany eschewed democracy for a
reason, believing that its hope for survival lay
in collective identity. In light of the facts, one
might say that this belief was not incorrect, but
merely evil and tragic. I do not believe that the
Islamic world, either, will succumb to
democratization along American lines without an
upheaval on the scale of World War II.
I
intend no criticism of Allied war methods. On the
contrary: even the Jewish diarist Viktor
Klemperer, with little access to information, knew
that military logic made Dresden an inevitable
target as German troops withdrew to Saxony from
the east. Nuclear bombardment of Japan may have
been a more humane alternative than a conventional
invasion. The consequences of these actions were
tragic in the true sense of the term, namely that
they could not be avoided.
In any case,
the former Axis powers and the former Soviet Union
and its satellites occupy every one of the top
positions on the death row of demographics. I
refer to the United Nations' report "World
Population Prospects: The 2004
Revision".
At the top of the death
list is Ukraine, whose population the UN projects
to fall from 46 million to 26 million between 2005
and 2050. Democracy may have triumphed in Victor
Yushchenko's Orange Revolution, but a generation
from now only half as many Ukrainians will be
around to talk about it.
Given the rate at
which Ukraine exports women of childbearing age,
that may be a special case, but by 2050 Bulgaria
will lose more than a third, and Russia itself
more than a fifth of its population. Japan (-12%)
and Germany (-5%) do not look quite as far along
the road to extinction, but the following
half-century will do for them. By 2100, Deutsche
Bank projects, only 25 million Germans will remain
of the 82 million alive today.
None of
this would have surprised the Nazis, who believed
with paranoid fervor that Germany's national
existence was in danger. One can hear the shade of
Adolf Hitler saying, "You see, that is just what I
anticipated and wanted to avoid! I warned the
Germans that their national existence was in
danger, and now you see that decadent democracy
has finished us off."
What the "decadent
democracies" of the United States and England
finished off was the delusion of German racial
superiority and chosenness as a master race.
Hitler wanted Germany to be a new Eternal People,
as I have written elsewhere (What the Jews won't tell you,
November 4, 2003), and for that reason became
obsessed with eliminating the Chosen People of
Christian scripture, namely the Jews. The trouble
is that Germany's desire to reproduce died with
its delusions.
No Jewish conspiracy
endangered Germany's national existence - German
Jews won decorations for heroism at twice the rate
of Christian Germans during World War I - but
rather Germany's own failure of heart. George
Bernard Shaw wrote in 1904 (in Man and
Superman) of Europe's coming population
crisis:
The day is coming when great nations
will find their numbers dwindling from census to
census; when the six-roomed villa will rise in
price above the family mansion; when the
viciously reckless poor and the stupidly pious
rich will delay the extinction of the race only
by degrading it; whilst the boldly prudent, the
thriftily selfish and ambitious, the imaginative
and poetic, the lovers of money and solid
comfort, the worshippers of success, of art, and
of love, will all oppose to the Force of Life
the device of sterility. In The
Decline of the West (1918), Oswald Spengler
quoted Shaw in predicting an "appalling
depopulation" of Europe:
It becomes possible for a Shaw to
say "that unless Woman repudiates her
womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her
children, to society, to the law, and to
everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate
herself". The primary woman, the peasant woman,
is mother. The whole vocation towards which she
has yearned from childhood is included in that
one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the
comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan
literature from Northern drama to Parisian
novel. Instead of children, she has
soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the
achievement of "mutual understanding." It is all
the same whether the case against children is
the American lady's who would not miss a season
for anything, or the Parisienne's who fears that
her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine's
who "belongs to herself" - they all belong to
themselves and they are all unfruitful
... Parenthetically, Henrik Ibsen's
"modern" dramas starting with A Doll's
House might be read as satire, a peevish
warning of the consequences of modern
sensibilities for society. Ibsen's programmatic
statement is found rather in Emperor and
Galilean (1873), in which the Byzantine
Emperor Julian the Apostate attempts to suppress
Christianity and revive paganism. Upon Julian's
death, Ibsen has a counselor of Julian's predict
the eventual triumph of paganism:
Yours is a wasteful god, Galileans!
He uses up many souls. Were you [Julian] not the
chosen one this time either, sacrificed on the
altar of Necessity? What is it worth, to have
lived? Everything's game and chance. To
will is to have to will ...The
third empire shall come! The spirit of
man shall reclaim its
birthright. Julian was Ibsen's hero;
his Nora was a horrible example of the
consequences of individualist sensibilities, as
Shaw and later Oswald Spengler recognized.
Emperor and Galilean persuades me that
Ibsen was something of a proto-fascist.
In
the cited passage, Oswald Spengler continues:
At this level all Civilizations
enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries,
of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of
cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the
summit, first the world-cities, then the
provincial forms, and finally the land itself,
whose best blood has incontinently poured into
the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At
the last, only the primitive blood remains,
alive, but robbed of its strongest and most
promising elements. This residue is the Fellah
type. Failure to breed first overtook
France, whose generals demanded an early war
against Germany for fear that France could not put
enough young men in the field one generation hence
(The sacred heart of darkness,
February 11, 2003). Hitler saw monsters encircling
Germany in his paranoid delusion, but the monster
sat in Germany's own breast and fed on her heart.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
and Hitler hallucinated a new Aryan heroism
anchored in the barbarian past as a remedy for
decadence and decline.
Oswald Spengler
himself was an unspeakable racist, fretful that
the colored races would overwhelm the whites. He
wrote in Decline, "The apparent increase of
the white population all over the world, little as
it is in comparison with the volume of the colored
increase, rests upon a temporary illusion: the
number of children grows ever smaller, and only
the number of adults increases, not because there
are more of them, but because they live longer."
To the end he insisted that man was a "beast of
prey". Nonetheless he recoiled in horror at the
Nazi solution. He wrote of "brave pessimism" and
the "tragic" courage to sacrifice for greatness,
but does not appear to have considered that the
tragic conclusion was destined for him and
everyone like him.
Those who seem to think
that such provocations as the murder of Theo van
Gogh by terrorists will revive Europe's will to
live, eg Victor Davis Hanson, sadly misestimate
the depth to which Europe has sunk. After World
War I, I wrote two years ago, "no shred of
credibility was left in the Christian idea of
souls called out of the nations for salvation
beyond the grave. In 1914 Europe's soldiers still
fought under the illusion of a God that favored
their nation. Germany fought World War II under
the banner of revived paganism. For today's
Europeans, there is no consolation, neither the
old pagan continuity of national culture, nor the
Christian continuity into the hereafter" (Why Europe chooses extinction,
April 8, 2003). Europe will offer no resistance to
Islam, which will triumph in that continent no
later than 2100, according to Bernard Lewis.
Even if Washington succeeded in
establishing friendly regimes in most of the
Middle East, an eventual Arab majority in Europe
will confront America with a hydra-headed beast
that cannot easily be thwarted.
For what
Spengler called "Faustian culture", an appropriate
epitaph is the one that Mephistopheles offered at
the grave of Faust:
Vorbei! ein dummes Wort. Warum
vorbei?
Vorbei und reines Nicht: vollkommnes
Einerlei! ...
"Da ists vorbei!" Was ist daran
zu lesen?
Es ist so gut, als waer es nicht
gewesen. ("It's over? A stupid
expression. Why, "It's past?" Past and pure
nothing - perfect sameness? "It's over" - how
should one understand that? It is just as good as
if it never existed.) Nowhere is it written that
all cultures should exist forever. Some of them
are quite unpleasant, and we are well rid of some
of them. No one misses the passing of German
culture more than I - no longer is it possible to
hear a straightforward rendering of the dramas of
Gotthold Lessing or Friedrich von Schiller - but
there is nothing to be done for it. Thomas Mann
explained why in Dr Faustus.
US
President George W Bush fell wide of the mark when
he declared in his second Inaugural Address, "We
have confidence because freedom is the permanent
hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the
longing of the soul." Human beings do not first of
all wish to be free, but to be remembered, that
is, to have lives that are significant. US
democracy depends upon a religious foundation; the
individual first must assume the yoke of
responsibility (to God, country, family and so
forth) in order to exercise freedom. In the vast
majority of other instances human beings prefer a
collective identity as a source of meaning; that
was the message of the most prestigious of
20th-century philosophers, the abominable Martin
Heidegger.
One can destroy collective
identity by main force, as US occupiers did in the
former Axis countries, or batter it down by
external pressure, as in the case of the Cold War.
Whether the adversary society resists to the end,
as in the case of Germany, or gives up without a
shot, as in the case of the Soviet Union, is a
matter of happenstance. In either case the result
has been to push these societies down the road to
extinction.
The United States has
sufficient power to persuade Iraq's religious and
tribal leaders to march their people to the polls
as a condition for sharing power in a new
government (The dotage of Iraq's
democracy, February 2), or for that matter to
extort a gesture toward multi-party elections out
of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. But I do not
believe that the Islamic world will abandon its
long-developed sense of collective identity in
favor of US-style democracy without tragic
consequences.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
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