Re: Poor analogy (#35783)
by Daniel B. Larison on May 31, 2004 at 2:55 PM

The term Prussian was aimed at explaining the militarisation of society, which is widespread in this country's institutions and life. Research institutions and business are permeated with military links, and the domestic economy in many places is heavily dependent on military bases and research spending--that is what a militarised society looks like. Mr. Bischof's article was not an attempt to apply a one-to-one equivalence between all of the values of Prussia and all of the values of America. But now that you raise the issue, some Prussian elites did conceive of their militarism as an effort to spread progressive ideas throughout Europe, and they were carrying on a tradition of viewing their domination of the east in terms of liberalising these societies.

In fact, Prussia regarded itself as an engine of progress and social reform in what their elites viewed as a technically, economically and socially backward nation and region. National Liberals from Prussia, especially old Prussian Silesia, were some of those who believed, as some today believe, that German military strength and an expanded German sphere of influence would allow for the expansion of liberalism, and a high proportion of German liberals became extreme nationalists precisely because they associated German civilisation with the advance of freedom. (That this resulted largely in oppression, violence and destruction is not surprising--most wars waged under such auspices are aimed at the demonstration of power ahead of everything else.) The point is that Prussian militarists and German liberals both possessed the conviction that they were bringing progressive civilisation to benighted countries, and part of this civilisation was supposed to be German liberalism.

Baron von Stein's Prussians were vital at Waterloo in defeating Napoleon, one of the greatest megalomaniacs there had been to date. If you were to have asked some Flemish patriots during WWI, they would have argued that Germany was liberating them. If you were a French republican in 1871, you might recognise that the Germans had effectively toppled the great megalomaniac dictator of the second half of the 19th century, but somehow Germany gets no credit for the fall of the Second Empire. It is probably because Americans are taught to be Germanophobes that applying the term Prussian to them is taken to be a pejorative insult rather than a an accurate description of certain aspects of our culture.

Obviously, it is difficult to know what shape a Prusso-German dominated Europe would have looked like had the other side won WWI. The constituent nations of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire would probably have remained subject to their rulers, but on the other hand the British and French empires might have been dismantled, providing some measure of self-determination to millions and millions of people. The Germans did encourage a satellite Ukrainian nationalism to separate it from Russia and also helped Whites in the Baltics shore up their new republics, so one can see support for formerly subject peoples (it was, of course, for strategic reasons, just as Allied blather about self-determination was propaganda that served a geopolitical purpose). Since the Prussians in united Germany never won a war, and so had no opportunity to either liberate or oppress the defeated nations, it isn't a very fair test. The rhetoric of liberation was there: the Kaiser cast himself, however implausibly, as the friend of subject Muslim peoples all over the world (now where have we heard that one before?), and some German agents were even engaged in attempting to ignite rebellions in central Asia and India (though, obviously, to no effect whatever). Whether liberation would have remained rhetoric or not is hard to say.

The vital thing to remember is that no state ever fulfills the goal of "liberation" if the results of that liberation appear to be antithetical to the larger interests of the state. We are beginning to see a tilt back towards Sunni politicians in Iraq, because the Chalabi episode has made Washington deathly afraid of Iranian influence in Iraq. I predict that many more such compromises of the liberation idea will take place before our soldiers depart that miserable country.

For what it is worth, the Germany army also helped keep the Red Army at bay for a couple years and supported Finnish independence in the east until the peace treaty forced them to leave, so one could credit their military tradition with resistance to Bolshevik tyranny there as well.

But I grow a little weary of the American supremacism that makes some virtue out of the fact that we happen to get into wars with particularly nasty governments, which we then destroy and call it liberation. The Japanese were saving East Asia from colonialism, so they claimed, though it was mostly nonsense (I say mostly because they empowered Vietnamese nationalists who then turned against them). The Third Reich was partly saving eastern Europe and Russia from communism--so they would have claimed in their rhetoric. These sorts of deceptions are as old as Babylon, literally, and they are almost always deceptions. The only real liberations modern American armies achieved were in wars we didn't want to fight (WWII, Korea).

Of course, it is liberation in some cases, but liberation is not the reason why America fights the war. It is, at best, usually a happy coincidence, or in the case of the Philippines precisely what we don't want. In the current case, it was not a sufficient cause even for the administration to start the war, but now it has become sufficient justification now that everything else has blown up in their faces. Iraq was invaded for strategic reasons, and "liberation" helped dress it up.

Frankly, I dispute the assumption that Iraqis are more free today as a matter of fact than they were a year and three months ago. They can speak and demonstrate and print more or less what they like (as long as it's not anti-coalition!), but quite a lot of them are either under the power of local religious authorities and militias or in fear of being killed, kidnapped or robbed. The chance of being arbitrarily detained or detained for political crimes is not much less than it was before, and the treatment they have received heretofore has been mild only when compared to extreme horrors under the old regime. It might eventually get better, but right now our record of setting up a new, free government in the "liberated" land is not as good as that of the Germans in the east in 1918-19.