Is Kaiser Bill alive and well in the White House?
The Trump/Kaiser parallels are quite
unnerving…
by
Gordon Campbell
The
Passchendaele centenary commemorations were held last week.
Amid the military rituals, there was a notable lack of
commentary on the imperial platitudes that sent those young
soldiers off to kill and be killed. That seems unacceptable,
today. Even by October 1917 all of that King and Country,
duty and honour stuff had worn desperately thin on the
Western Front. At the very least, why doesn’t anyone ever
read a few Wilfred Owen poems at these Passchendaele/Anzac
Cove kind of events? Either this poem
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47393/anthem-for-doomed-youth
or this one would seem appropriate.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46560/dulce-et-decorum-est
Meaning : if we want to remember the fallen, we could at least spend a memorial moment or two berating - on their behalf - the leaders who betrayed them and the community that pressured them to go. On such occasions however, you can rely on the military establishment to deck these endeavours in glory – and primarily for recruitment purposes, with the next killing ground in mind.
By and large, that is what we got
at the commemoration rituals last week. Surprisingly, the
chief of the NZ Defence Force chose to speak at the
Passchendaele event about how absolutely awful it had all
been for the commanders.
http://www.nzdf.mil.nz/news/media-releases/2017/20171013-moving-commemorations-mark-nzs-worst-military-disaster.htm
In
his address on the “weight of command”, Lieutenant
General Keating noted that New Zealand First World War
battlefield commanders laboured under a burden that few can
truly appreciate.
“They knew that in
this dreadful war, no matter how well they planned and
executed an attack, many of their men, often their friends
and neighbours, would die.”
Hmmm. “ No
matter how well they planned and executed an attack”?
He’s talking about the central battle in a foolhardy
Flanders offensive (led by Sir Douglas Haig) that was
opposed by other commanders and by his own Prime Minister
even at the time. Did First World War commanders
truly labour under a burden ‘few can truly appreciate’
- or did they embrace deadly delusions that everyone should
now roundly condemn? It would not be a case of modern
peacenik revisionism to do so. In his memoirs in 1938,
former Prime Minister David Lloyd George wrote :
"Passchendaele was indeed one of the greatest disasters of
the war.. No soldier of any intelligence now defends this
senseless campaign .."
Yet, last week, Keating
seemed less intent on the cautionary lessons of history, and
more inclined to treat similar sacrifices as being virtually
inevitable in future :
“All that can be
done is for the Defence Force to do our utmost to prepare
them and those they command for the challenges they will
face while serving our country, and ask their families to be
courageous in the absence of their loved ones – sometimes
forever.”
Thankfully, this is no longer
“all that can be done.”
The Kaiser, and
Trump
Talking of First
World War lessons and parallels, who does this sound like?
“….Superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax,
without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire
for hard work or drive to see things through to the end,
without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries,
or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and
scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for
applause and success — as Bismarck said early on in his
life, he wanted every day to be his
birthday.”
No, that’s not Donald
Trump. This is Kaiser Wilhelm II – who led Germany into
the Great War - as described by the historian Thomas
Nipperdey, one of the sources for this fascinating recent
article in Foreign Policy magazine.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/12/the-donald-trump-kaiser-wilhelm-parallels-are-getting-scary/
Another
distinguished historian, the late Gordon Craig of Stanford,
offered a similar appraisal, writing that “[Wilhelm] had as much
intelligence as any European sovereign and more than most,
but his lack of discipline, self-indulgence, his
overdeveloped sense of theatre, and his fundamental
misreading of history prevented him from putting it to
effective use.”
The Kaiser/Trump personality
comparisons just keep on coming :
Craig also describes
Wilhelm as “never having learned anything thoroughly”
and “constantly on the move,” and German Army Chief of
Staff Alfred von Waldersee described Wilhelm in the 1890s as
having “a certain understanding of parade-ground
movements, not, however, of real troop-leading.… He is
extraordinarily restless, dashes back and forth, …
intervenes in the leadership of the generals, gives
countless and often contradictory orders, and scarcely
listens to his advisers. He always wants to win and when the
decision … is against him, takes it
ill.”
Unfortunately for the world, the
comparisons don’t stop at the mere personality
foibles:
Berlin consistently exaggerated the actual
dangers it faced…. Even worse, Germany repeatedly acted in
ways that solidified the alliance that opposed them, instead
of working assiduously to undermine it. When exaggerated
German fears about a hypothetical future decline led its
leaders to launch a preventive war in 1914, they were (as
Bismarck might have put it), “committing
suicide for fear of death.”
One sees
a similar pattern in the United States today, where
threat-inflation is endemic, the utility of force is
exaggerated, and the role of diplomacy is neglected or
denigrated. Professional militaries have powerful tendencies
to inflate threats, because worrying about remote dangers is
part of their job and doing so helps justify a bigger
budget…. They are also prone to think that force can solve
a multitude of problems, when it is in fact a crude
instrument that always produces unintended
consequences.
Consistent with this
pattern, the United States routinely views third-rate powers
like Serbia, Iraq, Iran, and others as if they were mortal
dangers, treats problems like the Islamic State as if they
were existential threats, and tends to assume these
difficulties can be solved by blowing more stuff up or
sending in another team of special forces. The results of
these efforts have been mostly disappointing, yet hardly
anyone in Washington is willing to question this approach or
even ask our commanders why “the world’s best
military” isn’t winning more
often.
During the prelude to war, Kaiser
Wilhelm professed himself to be the friend of all
peace-loving nations, and of England in particular. Like
Trump today, the Kaiser felt angry and aggrieved that his
intentions just weren’t being appreciated by England’s
leaders, by its media or by the general public. The Kaiser
found this very vexing. His annoyance was evident in this
fascinatingly petulant interview the Kaiser gave to the
Daily Telegraph back in 1908.
https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/The_Daily_Telegraph_Affair
What
more can I do than I have done? I declared with all the
emphasis at my command, in my speech at Guildhall, that my
heart is set upon peace, and that it is one of my dearest
wishes to live on the best of terms with England. Have I
ever been false to my word? Falsehood and prevarication are
alien to my nature. My actions ought to speak for
themselves, but you listen not to them but to those who
misinterpret and distort them. That is a personal insult
which I feel and resent. To be forever misjudged, to have my
repeated offers of friendship weighed and scrutinized with
jealous, mistrustful eyes, taxes my patience severely. I
have said time after time that I am a friend of England, and
your press -- at least, a considerable section of it -- bids
the people of England refuse my proffered hand and
insinuates that the other holds a dagger. How can I convince
a nation against its will?
Fake news!
Especially when all Germany wanted to do was make the world
safe for its commerce! As in :
….Germany is a young and growing empire. She has a worldwide commerce which is rapidly expanding, and to which the legitimate ambition of patriotic Germans refuses to assign any bounds. Germany must have a powerful fleet to protect that commerce and her manifold interests in even the most distant seas. She expects those interests to go on growing, and she must be able to champion them manfully in any quarter of the globe..”
And talking of Kaiser
Bill…
Clearly, it
wasn’t all sex, drugs and rock’n’roll back in the
1960s, though this video does its best with Whistling Jack
Smith :