Category: Civilization, History, and Anthropology

WHY THE WORLD WARS?
(a heterodox but correct explanation)

The Classical Restoration begins first in Italy then in England and culminated in the Muslim conquest of Byzantium and the blocking of ports. This caused the west to create the age of sail, followed by the literacy, legal, political, commercial, financial, industrial, and technological sequence of revolutions.

Just as agrarianism spread out of Anatolia and the levant, this series of revolutions spread out of England and created a series of wars of adaptation in Europe both intellectual, political, economic, military, and religious.

Every single civilization and sub-civilization and state, rebelled against the English invention of the modern state, the European restoration of greco-roman cognitive tradition of empiricism and agency over nature, and heroism as contribution to the commons.

The french with Rousseau and napoleon, the germans with Kant and Hegel et al, the Jews with Marx et al, the Chinese with mao, etc. Islam and Judaism are now processing that transition. Iran, some of islam, all of China and the government of Russia are attempting to reverse it, and India is still stuck in soviet bureaucratic corruption, incompetence, and delay.

The core of europe for over a thousand years was the HOly ROman Empire of the Germanic Peoples. That empire slowly ‘domesticated’ the people to the east, largely by trade followed by some migration.

Napoleon destroyed the HRE, forcing the organization of the german state out of self defense – from imperial france and Russia. World war one was the attempt of the germans to regain their sovereignty and safety, and limit both France and Russia from aggression. This turned out to be rather tragic because it was the first fully industrial war.

In WWII the germans were surrounded again, by the growth of liberalism, socialism, marxism and communism. They felt boxed between what they considered the decadence of liberalism and french socialism, and the decadence and tyranny of communism. So they adopted an ethnocentric, military, total-war, state model as had Napoleon and the French, as well as the Russians. Fundamentally it wasn’t an innovation over the monarchy other than the philosophical justification for modern political rule rather than ancestral inheritance and traditional rule.

When they discovered that the Russians would act, they acted first. And in retrospect it appears that the germans were pragmatically and morally correct in both wars- we were wrong. Were they more wrong than the communists? Obviously not. Were they more wrong than the classical liberals and french socialists? They had a much harder political problem then, just as Russia and China have a much harder problem today – multiethnic empires can’t tolerate the democracy of small homogeneous, ethnocentric, protestant, northern European states.

So as I’ve said, history will get over the war and postwar propaganda and study the evidence and incentives and determine that we killed Europe when we killed its heart – Germany.

And history will judge us fools for it.

So that’s my answer. And it’s the correct one.
But like many correct answers, they often tell us we were wrong, and we don’t like it.