Post WWII Europe

I found Ross's article on Berlin after the war, and before the wall, to be fascinating. As we discussed in class, I was like a lot of people and had always been under the impression that the Russian backed GDR locked down immigration from their sector to the West almost immediately following the war. The period of "mass exodus" until the wall went up, does not get much attention in any of the history books that I have read. I knew that Germans fled in droves as the Russians approached Berlin, because they feared Russian retribution for the way their military had prosecuted the war in the East. I assumed that once actual combat died down, people that were not trying to return home from some sort of diaspora remained static, as they tried to recover and rebuild.

I always find it amazing how quickly people adapt to new situations and circumstances, in order to not only survive but get ahead. In this case the manipulation of the GDR through threats of, and actual, immigration to the West is a unique and interesting historical example. I'm honestly kind of surprised that people had the guts to make these sorts of gambles after going through the life shattering experience of the war. I guess I am underestimating the resiliency of the human race, but I have seen far less extreme examples of warfare and strife causing a population to dig their heels in, and cling to whatever they are given to get by on. However, there are vast cultural differences in these individual cases, which I believe has a great effect on how people deal with warfare, harsh economic times, etc.

I also found it interesting how everyone in class that has traveled through Germany or eastern Europe, can mark the end of the capitalist West and the beginning of the old Communist Bloc countries, just by the scenery. I have been in and out of eastern Europe since the turn of the century, and I believe it is still a very different place than western Europe. Some places have scrambled and modernized to a great degree, but you can still pick out the remnants of the Cold War. The blocks of prison-like apartment buildings, rusting industrial parks mixed in with newly revitalized areas of cities, and western style luxuries housed in very austere architecture, are all signs you have crossed that invisible line. The closest look at major differences between eastern and western Europe that I have been able to take and compare is between the various countries armies. Most of the western countries have small, modern, well equipped, and well trained armies. The old communist satellite countries I have been exposed to were completely different stories. Almost universally they have obsolete, poorly maintained equipment, which is sad because some of them take great pride in their training and discipline. Others ridiculous bureaucracy and training standards are lacking, to say the least. It will be interesting to see how the global recession will effect these countries progress in catching up with the their western counterparts.

Nazi Germany

In class, we talked about how Germany wasn't by any means homogeneously in support of the Nazi party coming to power, but how the country quickly got behind their ideologies and tactics. Even if the Nazi party did help to bring about a period of great prosperity from the pit of depression and war, I still don't see how a fairly educated and worldly citizenry let themselves be a party to the evils their country would commit. I always come back to the same question of how much did the German people know about the atrocities going on during the Nazis' reign? I hope they didn't know that much, or they would have tried to stop it, but maybe they were just afraid of becoming a victim of the fascist state as well. The Nazi security apparatus made sure to crush any dissenters that were discovered, in one way or another. A good example of the German people failing to act is the lack of resistance or revolt to the Nazi war campaign, even though so many Germans were against it. It's just hard for me to believe that most of the population didn't have a fairly good idea of what was happening in the concentration camps, especially towards the end of the war, when the brakes came off the "final solution," and Hitler wasn't trying to hide his true intentions anymore.

I lived for a brief period in Germany, and the seeming lack of public regret or acknowledgement for the things that happened under the Nazi regime always bothered me. I'm sure the German people wanted to move on as fast as possible after the war, and the Cold War facilitated that to an extent, but references to that period are conspicuously absent throughout the country. I realize the same could be said about our country and some of its former institutions, but I feel discussion and study about them are more open and available. I worked with my counterparts in the German army, and they were great soldiers and good guys. I found it interesting that they, more than anyone else, were open to talking about the days of the Nazi regime. It was mainly from a military standpoint, and how much the Nazi war machine revolutionized modern warfare, but I still found it refreshing that they didn't shy away about talking about any aspect of that time period.

I've read varying opinions on how much the German public knew, and about how the Nazi era was dealt with after the war. I'm hoping that a little more light can be shed on it for my own curiosity during the time we spend on it in class.

WWI

In our class discussion today we touched on the aristocratic roots of most of the European powers' officer ranks. Looking back on WWI, it's obvious to us that a high birth should not have been the main qualification for the job of commanding troops in something so deadly. The failure to adapt, and more importantly the failure to conserve the lives of their troops, of commanders on both sides of the Great War is simply mass murder through negligence. Even if some of the troops did passively and sometimes mutinously resist the killing fields, their commanders should have never let it come to that point. This detachment from reality up the chain of command is still present in our own military today, but to a much less harmful degree. In our time, we are much quicker to hold accountable those who would send our sons and daughters to their possible deaths. I wish the same could be said for citizens of Europe from 1914-1918. I'm honestly surprised that the families of the boys being fed into the meat grinder didn't rise up against their governments and stop the war on their own. I wouldn't think any amount of homegrown propaganda would be able to cover up the horror that was actually taking place.

It didn't happen that way, so we ended up with a massacred generation of young men, Europe in shambles, and the seeds planted for another war to end all wars go round. I'm interested to see how Europe did, if at all, piece itself back together after the war. The only country you normally hear about is Germany, because of what happened in the next two decades that allowed the Nazis to come to power. What does France, England or Russia do in those two decades of uneasy peace? Are they even fully functioning nations? They're so broken and shell shocked, that they don't even dare to step in and stop the tide of fanaticism rising in Germany. Considering the circumstances, I can't say that I blame them.

The effects of a war like WWI are so foreign to us now, that I wonder if the world as we know it could even survive such a thing anymore. People are so detached from the two wars our own country is currently fighting, that I wonder if we could ever join together as a nation and face something so horrible, and still come out the other side. The European powers were never the same after WWI, but they survived. We haven't had to deal with blood on our own soil for so long, I'm not sure what would happen under such dire circumstances. Hopefully the world, and the human race, has evolved enough that we never have to find out, but something tells me we're not there yet.

I think one of the interesting things concerning consumer consumption, that we didn't talk that much about the other day in class, is how it differs in our country from subculture to subculture. Our society is not only stratified by economic means, but the development of leisure time and conspicuous consumption has created an entirely new class structure within different interest groups. Whatever you're into doing with your free time, there's the haves, have nots, and somewhere in between. You can find it in everything from mountaineering to adventure racing. I used to do a lot of both of those activities, and it was crazy how much your experience could differ depending on the amount of money you had to spend.

Take mountaineering for example. You can spend an easy thousand dollars just to get started with your basic gear and kit set up. If you want to start doing actual expeditions, where you spend multiple nights out camping, etc., you really start piling the money on. Most people I know that are into this type of activity, accumulated their equipment over time, as their experience and ability levels grew. What always pissed me off is that on the flip side of this you have people with way too much disposable income who saw something on TV, or got invited to go climbing one weekend, and they go out and spend thousands of dollars on equipment that they may use once or twice. Now obviously they may take to a sport or activity, but in my experience most people like this jump from one thing to the next, mainly so they can say they've done everything under sun. Nothing aggravates a bunch of people, who scrape everything little bit of money together to pursue their passion, more than some idiot who shows up decked out in the latest and most expensive gear, but yet knows absolutely nothing. That's also how people typically end up getting hurt or dying. I've seen some incredibly stupid things occur, because somebody thought their expensive equipment would make up for a lack of experience and ability. Unfortunately that's not how it works.

In our culture of instant gratification people don't want to wait on a slow Internet connection, much less years of practice and determination to become good at something. I find this a sad state of affairs, because no matter how much money you have to throw around, most things that are worth doing take a long time to become even somewhat good at them. I hope this type of behavior is not enculturating us to become a nation of quitters, or people that always look for the easy way out. I also hope our increasingly short attention spans won't prevent the next generation of Americans from making progress in solving the problems that we've already created. If we lose our respect and support for those who take the difficult path with the best of intentions, we're going to be in serious trouble.

Made in China

While we were talking and writing about "The Communist Manifesto", I kept thinking about China. The big question for me, is how much longer can the Chinese brand of Communism last? I know that, like Russia in the past, they don't practice anything close to actual Marxism, but I'm still amazed that their system has held on for so long after the collapse of European Communism. I suppose it has something to do with the fact that so much of their population is disorganized and lives in rural areas. Another factor could be that China is still growing up technologically and economically.

A huge portion of their population doesn't have extensive, or any, contact with the outside world, or any means of organizing themselves into social or political groups, etc. Many of them live a feudal-like existence, working for different state or industrial lords. Still, they have massive modern and industrialized cities scattered about within their borders, with the technological means for theses urbanites to look at the world beyond what their government wants them to see. With a population that large, what would happen if enough of them got together and decided they didn't like the current system anymore? It's scary to think of China embroiled in a bloody civil war, especially with all of the nuclear missiles they have placed throughout their countryside.

I wonder if China's more upwardly mobile citizens will stay satisfied with the fact that they are making a ton of money off the rest of the world, and have an incredibly cheap, indigenous labor force readily available to them? Will this Chinese bourgeoisie ever wake up and seek more than just wealth? Will they ever want the freedom to create a government where they have a voice?

I know there are already opposition groups in China, but when is one going to really stick its neck out there and try to make some changes? Who will it consist of? Almost certainly the intellectual and economic elites will have to play a role because of their access and influence. It is possible that China won't have a revolution of any kind; instead, they might just stay on this path of controlled capitalism until the political, social, and economic systems have transformed themselves into more citizen friendly institutions without a fight.

Whether it happens gradually or abruptly, I think it is inevitable in this age of globalization for China's current system of government to be replaced with something closer to capitalism rather than Communism.

While we study the French Revolution I can't help but think how conditions have to be just right for sweeping social and political changes of that kind to take place in a society or country. Even then it usually results in a huge mess that takes decades to really sort itself out into a system that can be sustained. Our own revolution was no different. Once we had our independence it still took us a long time to develop a sense of of nationalism, and for us to figure out how our system of government was going to work. That's why I don't think our attempts at nation building in our own image in places like Iraq and Afghanistan will ever be what we would consider successful.

Ignoring the issue of whether we should have gone to war in either country, what we are basically trying to do in Iraq and Afghanistan is force a form of cultural and political revolution in the hopes that it will prevent both countries from becoming rogue nations that breed things like terrorism. All of this of course is on top of the fact that they give us strategic access to a region of the world where we desperately want to project U.S. power and influence. The question is before we came a knocking down their doors, did the citizens of either country want to live in a western style democracy? Granted, the majority of people in both countries weren't exactly happy with who was in charge at the time when we showed up, but they also weren't secretly pining away for political party fundraisers, conventions and equality among all of their citizens either.

My point (I think I have one) is that I believe the people have to be ready for a revolution of that magnitude to take place, and for it to be what we would consider successful and sustainable. Iraq has a better shot at having a stable, lasting government because it was a much more modern country to begin with. A lot of the infrastructure needed to sustain a democracy was already in place (of course we blew a lot of that up), and everyone knows we've spent billions on trying to rebuild and improve Iraq. I'm just not sold on having a small group of Western educated elites trying to run and maintain a democracy whose citizenry is composed of three distinct groups that, to put it mildly, don't get along. Most of them have a greater sense of loyalty to their ethnic/religious groups than they do to the country of Iraq. Only time and the interests of other nations, such as Iran and ourselves, will tell if Iraq can become a truly independent democracy, able to stand on its own. It could just as easily become a puppet state or mired in a horrible civil war.

Afghanistan is an entirely different story. Tribal loyalty is everything to most of its citizenry, and I believe the majority of them don't care anything about having the right to vote or a strong centralized form of government. They just want to be left alone in what they consider their inherited tribal territories, and continue to live a lifestyle that hasn't changed much in the last 100 years. So God help them now that all of that mineral wealth has been found within their borders. Now every world power will want in, regardless of whether they have some kind of flaccid democracy propped up by our support or just a strongman who keeps things together through fear and punishment. Once our support is gone I don't see any form of strong central government lasting there. That's why we may be in Afghanistan, in some form or another, for at least our lifetimes.

At the heart of all of this is that I don't think we actually stopped and took the time to ask the people of Iraq or Afghanistan what they wanted in the ways of a government and social reforms. Even though we were supposedly "liberating" them, we just went ahead and crammed our style of government and values down their throat. In the end I just don't think an outside power can manufacture a social and political revolution that serves its own interests and not those of the people it's supposedly trying to help.

My Fear of Fanaticism

One of the topics brought up by the philosophes in our reading for Thursday that we didn't talk about that much in class was fanaticism. I have a personal interest in this area because I feel like fanaticism is again getting out of control in our own time. I have dealt with fanatics abroad during my time in the service, but I also feel like we have populous sects of our society here at home that are becoming more and more fanatical on one end of the religious and political spectrum or the other.

Religious fanatics scare me the most because I have seen up close and personal what they are capable of when properly motivated. Voltaire said that "he who reinforces his madness by murder is a fanatic." I saw it over and over again in different conflicts where a powerful Muslim cleric would call on his people to murder others or sacrifice themselves in the name of God. Of course these "holy men" weren't going to volunteer to do the dirty work themselves, but instead some barely out-of-adolescence male would usually be the one served up for the cause. One sect even strapped suicide vests on three 14 year old girls, who, believe me, didn't volunteer for the job. Thankfully, they were stopped before anything happened. Besides the wars we're entangled in, I fear Islamic fanaticism on a global scale. Many of these terrorist leaders are themselves just pawns being used by greater powers who see an easily manipulated and expendable fighting force they can use to achieve anything but these so-called "religious" goals. For what usually lies behind all of this religious bluster is the thirst for wealth and power. Unfortunately, our own country and others created weapons that, in the wrong hands, can change the world in a few seconds. I hope we can resolve our conflicts with Islam and cool the fires of fanatical hatred before it's too late.

I don't want to just pick on Islam, because I have great Muslim friends and I have fought side by side with very devout Muslims who feel disgraced by the way fanatics abuse their faith. More and more of what frightens me are the fundamentalist Christian sects in our own country that are bordering on or have already crossed into fanaticism. While cases of murdering in the name of their god aren't as prevalent in our society, it still amazes me in a country as open as ours that so called "followers" of a man who is portrayed as the most tolerant man to ever walk the earth, can be so closed-minded and hateful. I have friends who are bright and kind people, but if you disagree or don't share their same beliefs about Jesus, then you're wrong about not only that, but just about everything else too. When you question their beliefs, they react in one of two ways - either with anger or like a five year old who plugs his ears and stomps his feet. Politics seems to have helped stoke these new fanatical fires and polarize some people in our country into opposing groups that can't seem to find the middle ground of compromise at all. Two such groups are people who base everything they do in their lives off of their faith, as opposed to people who look down on the deeply religious as being shallow or backward. I am neither, but I do feel that more and more of these fringe groups are carrying way too much political clout because of their ability to organize with new media, etc. It doesn't help either with the talking heads who are constantly present on TV trying to inflame the passions of one group against another. I guess the point I'm trying to get at with my rambling is that our country is at one of those pivotal moments in it's history. We can either come together, solve our problems, and move forward, or splinter apart and then blame each other during the aftermath. I personally believe we can and will come together, but only after those of our fellow citizens who quake with anger and the mere mention of one another, can find the middle ground of what's best for our country.