For those FReepers who missed your reference and long ago forgot their "sword drills" (VBG)
Posted on 01/26/2020 1:55:29 PM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
...I have long maintained – and the film 1917 brought it vividly back to mind – that one of the causes of the collapse of religion in Europe, and increasingly in the West generally, was the moral disaster of the First World War, which was essentially a crisis of Christian identity. Something broke in the Christian culture, and we’ve never recovered from it.
...For five awful years, an orgy of violence broke out among baptised people – English, French, Canadian, American, Russian and Belgian Christians slaughtering German, Austrian, Hungarian and Bulgarian Christians. And this butchery took place on a scale that still staggers us. The 58,000 American dead in the entire course of the Vietnam War would be practically a weekend’s work during the worst days of the Great War. If we add up the military and civilian deaths accumulated during the war, we come up, conservatively, with a figure of around 40 million.
...As witnessed to by so many thinkers and writers who participated in it – Paul Tillich, JRR Tolkien, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ernest Hemingway, etc – the First World War represented, as did no other war to that date, a collapse, a sea change, a cultural calamity.
...I wonder whether we might take the feast of the Baptism of the Lord as an opportunity to think more deeply about the moral implications of being a son or daughter of God, and hence a sibling to everyone else in the Mystical Body of Jesus. And I wonder whether we might look long and hard at this wonderful and disturbing film in order to see what happens when Christians forget who they are.
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicherald.co.uk ...
The “warlike societies” of Europe had not truly contended with the Industrial Revolution.
Half a million dead in six months without victory (France in 1914), or 60,000 casualties in one morning to no benefit (the British at the Somme), would likely have made even Caesar or Napoleon blanch.
In fact, Germany, before WWI was problably the least anti-semitic country on the continent. Many Jews fought for the Kaiser and earned Iron Crosses. Hitler even served with some Jews during the war.
The Great War gave a Saturn V boost to trends developing at the turn of the century.
True to an extent, but Britain was willing to at least allow for some revision of the Versailles treaty once the depression hit Europe. Britain recognized that keeping Germany down was not conducive to either stability or prosperity in Europe. France would have none of it, however. France insisted on continued full enforcement of the treaty. It’s certainly understandable— France didn’t have a Channel protecting them from German aggression that they thought might occur if the treaty revision occurred. Ironically though full enforcement wound up producing a militaristic Nazi party in Germany resulting in precisely the outcome France hoped to avoid by enforcement of the treaty.
My old watchmaker (a 37th Division veteran of WW2) also cited that as a reason why he would never watch any war movie after he came home from the war. Not just the smells, but things like stripping the dead of their equipment and uniforms because your own were rotting apart in the field.
The mood did start to change after France fell, because up to that point most Americans just assumed it was going to be another long war of attritrion without either side gaining an advantage.
But once France fell, and it looked like the Germans were getting the upper hand, most Americans realized that we’d better start getting prepared.
That’s why I hope that Hitler and Clemenceau are permanently chained together in Hell.
There were instances of men that served the Kaiser in WW1, and then served in Allied uniform in WW2.
Even more so, France had a chip on its shoulder dating from 1871, and was looking for the first opportunity to exercise its vengeance.
“they didn’t want to be warlike anymore”
We make fun of the French but that is exactly why they did not want to fight WWII - my wifes great grandfather was killed at Verdun two weeks before his son was born, the monuments to the men, boys and brothers killed that are in the small villages of France is staggering.
Very true. Why did Britain decide to ally with her tradition ally, France is beyond me. You’d think they would have been more comfortable with their fellow Anglo-Saxons.
s/b Why did Britain decide to ally with her tradition enemy, France
Of course. But the question is whether genetics were the reason for the change or whether it was a natural moral and emotional revulsion to what happened.
Losses were high in WWI. WWII as well, but I don't think Germany changed after 1945 because the warrior gene pool was diminished. In WWII many unwarlike and unfit people died, and the country had high birthrates before the war, so many of those warlike men who died had already reproduced.
I'd say, yes, it takes time for a warlike society to bounce back, but it also would take a long period of heavy losses to really kill off the "alpha male" gene if there is such a thing. So I think the change was cultural, not genetic.
We (or those elites) have not learned how to square democracy and liberty.
Agree, things you can’t unsee and undo. Why dredge those locked vaults of the mind?.
I suppose if a real movie of the horrors of war were to be shown, people would cry out for peace? I would hope so.
For those FReepers who missed your reference and long ago forgot their "sword drills" (VBG)
Wilson was the single most destructive Potus in history, but I don’t think his entry, a wrong as it was, lengthened the fighting. After three years of slaughter how could the Allies or Central Powers just say “ Never mind.”?
Back in 1999 great debate raged about the Man of the Century...Churchill, John Paul II, Lenin. I always thought it was Gavril Princip. But suppose the Archduke’s car doesn’t make that turn in Princip’s sights. Does war find another spark?
History is filled with What ifs. Harry Turtledove and Robert Conroy made literary careers out of them. I have always thought the most interesting what if was what if the Christmas Truce had spread and lasted? Faced with refusal to fight by their armies might the leaders have said “ Enough “ and what kind of world would have follwed.
Karin Enstrom - Swedish Defense Minister, 2012-2014 (her successor was a man)
Anne-Grete Strøm-Erichsen - Norwegian Defense Minister, 2012-2013 (her successor was also a woman)
Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert - Netherlands Defense Minister, 2012-at least 2016
Ursula von der Leyen - German Defense Minister, 2013-at least 2016
Sergei Shoigu - Defense Minister of Russia, 2012-at least 2016
All that was left was the "social" Christianity. Which is nice but about as strong as cobwebs when the time comes when you need it.
Christianity was the state religion and the government had it's fingers all over it. That meant that the seminaries were run by the government indirectly and the pastorships and leadership positions in the church were handed out on the basis of who you were related to.
The Church was not a calling but a profession.
Most of the pastors and priests did not believe the tenets of their own faith. And they held those of the laity who did in contempt.
I’d say, yes, it takes time for a warlike society to bounce back, but it also would take a long period of heavy losses to really kill off the “alpha male” gene if there is such a thing. So I think the change was cultural, not genetic.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.