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universe is not a republic. My specific attachment to the House of
Hohenzollern grew as I began to comprehend the Prussian/German way of
war and its vast difference from the Franco/American approach.
Maneuver warfare, aka Third Generation war, was created and developed
under the Prussian monarchy; it was conceptually complete by 1918.
That is not a mere accident of history. The Prussian monarchy was
willing to trust its officer corps and allow officers who were
difficult subordinates to rise to a far greater degree than most
other governments. It understood that Prussia, a poor country, needed
to be rich intellectually, including in ideas about war. There was an
intimate connection between the Prussian virtues, which have vanished
from the Brave New Federal Republic, and the evolution of maneuver
warfare. Old Kaiser Wilhelm I represented those virtues well: though
Emperor of Germany, when he wanted to go somewhere, he went down to
the railway station and bought a ticket.
Given the centrality of maneuver warfare to my work, this might be
explanation enough. But there is more. As both a cultural
conservative and an historian, I realize that the last chance of
survival our Western, Christian civilization may have had was a
victory by the Central Powers in World War I.
To most non-historians, World War I is a vague and distant memory,
faded photographs of guys in tin hats standing around in mud-filled
trenches. In fact, it was one of two cataclysmic disasters of Western
civilization in the modern period (the other was the French
Revolution). In 1914, the West put a gun to its collective head and
blew its brains out. No, it wasn't the fault of Kaiser Wilhelm II,
whom history has treated most unfairly. As Colonel House wrote to
President Woodrow Wilson after meeting with the Kaiser in 1915, it is
clear he neither expected nor wanted war. A World War became
inevitable when Tsar Nicholas II, not Kaiser Wilhelm, very
reluctantly yielded to the demands of his War and Foreign Ministers
and declared general mobilization instead of mobilization against
Austria alone.
Once war occurred, and the failure of the Schlieffen Plan guaranteed
it would be a long war, a disaster for Western civilization was
inevitable. Still, had the Central Powers won in the end, the
destruction of civilization might not have been so complete. There
would have been no Communism, nor a republic in Russia; a victorious
Germany would have never tolerated it, and unlike the Western Allies,
Germany was positioned geographically to do something about it.
Hitler would have remained a non-entity. Prior to World War I, the
best major European countries in which to be Jewish were Germany and
Austria; Kaiser Wilhelm would never have allowed a Dreyfus Affair in
Germany. The vast Jewish communities of Central and Eastern Europe
would have held their traditional places in multi-nation-empires,
instead of becoming aliens in new nation-states. It should not
surprise us that in World War I, American Jews attempted to raise a
regiment to fight for Germany.
Even more importantly, the Christian conservatism more accurately,
perhaps, traditionalism represented by the Central Powers would
have been greatly strengthened by their victory. Instead, the fall of
the German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian monarchies let the poisons
of the French Revolution loose unchecked upon the West and upon the
world. The Marxist historian Arno Mayer is correct in arguing that in
1914, the United States represented (as a republic, with France) the
international left, while by 1919 it was organizing the international
right. America had not changed; the spectrum had shifted around it.
Thus, when Americans and Europeans wonder today how and why the West
lost its historic culture, morals and religion, the ultimate answer
is the Allied victory in 1918. Again, the fact that World War I
occurred is the greatest disaster. But once that had happened, the
last chance the West had of retaining its traditional culture was a
victory by the Central Powers. The question should not be why I, as a
cultural conservative, remain loyal to the two Kaisers, Wilhelm II
and Franz Josef, but how a real conservative could do anything else.
Nor is this all quite history. Just as the defeat of the Central
Powers in 1918 marked the tipping point downward of Western
civilization and the real beginning of the murderous Twentieth
Century, so events in the Middle East today may mark the beginnings
of the 21st Century and, not so much the death of the West, which has
already occurred, but its burial. The shadows of 1914, and of 1918,
are long indeed, and they end in Old Night.
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A critical look at the results of the fall of monarchies around the world. As much as monarchies are often portrayed in a negative light, where the...
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Channel Comments
GOTT MIT UNS !
But i say this im not a Chist peroid.
But i still think we can agree on other things.