Most people today perceive the World Wars as Germany's fault, identifying the wars as precipitated by the arrogant, blustering Wilhelm II's use of an unrelated issue to justify an invasion of Belgium. Most people today are still stuck in the Anglo-American biases that are also the cause of most of the world's present problems, and fail to consider the broader scope of history.
For most of its history, England has been a poor, backward country, largely irrelevant to continental Europe and all but unknown to the rest of the world. While continental Europeans were doing amazing things, from building cathedrals and aqueducts to inventing sheet music, chivalry, philosophy and science, the British got pretty much nothing done (besides inventing calculus, and that only because a genius happened to be born to a wealthy family). It is worth noting that although the British frequently made a point of meddling in continental affairs - the Spanish/Dutch Wars, the Hundred Years' War, the Crusades, the Napoleonic Wars - Europe, for the most part, left England alone.
The story of England, like every culture, is contained in its epics: Robin Hood, Shakespeare, Milton. The basic theme of all those epics, and is really what British culture is all about, is England's stifling class system. The wealthy aristocracy has a stranglehold on England, its economy and society, and everyone else struggles to get by.
The reality described in Robin Hood really hasn't changed a thousand years later, except that Sherwood Forest was cut down to make furniture and pirate ships. Milton and Shakespeare were brilliant writers, but the themes they wrote about were the only song the British know: plodding obeisance to the unquestioned wisdom of the status quo (Henry VIII, Caesar, or God). Even writers like Hobbes or Locke or More or Smith don't really offer any brilliant insight into human existence the way continental writers do - there is no real philosophy there. Smith and Hobbes justify the way things are (the "market mythos"), and Locke and More wish the "how things are" just happened to be perfect. Orwell complains about the dangers of Communism, but he doesn't have any ideas either; his cliche observation that "the world would be decent if people were decent," is nothing more than "bah humbug" by other means.
Again, that's not to say that any or all of those writers didn't have brilliant insights or were geniuses in their own right. It's simply a fact that a culture's destiny lies with its values, and for the British, their values have always been positively banal.
England finally began to become relevant and powerful in the 18th century, due to two things: the invention of more effective sailing ships, and the Industrial Revolution. Both were ultimately products of England's class system: the wealthy investing in a new way of extracting more wealth from an impoverished people and exhausted land, and new ways of importing wealth and exporting poverty.
While England polluted its land and enslaved or exported its own people to further enrich the aristocracy, France and Germany solved their problems, or at least made a passable attempt to deal with them, through revolution - questioning "the way things are" - or through further refinements to the aristocratic system, demanding discipline and service to society from the privileged few, and granting a significant degree of meritocracy and improvement in living standards for the many.
Calgacus (who was British) might have well been describing his descendants' empire when he said:
"...the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a solitude and call it peace..."
Such was the story of the British Empire. Through violence and skullduggery, the British robbed India, Ireland and Egypt of their wealth, and flooded America and Australia with their starving millions. England, like present-day Mexico, preferred to export the problems it refused to solve.
So what does this have to do with the World Wars?
The answer is really quite simple. One cannot build an empire on racism, violence and exploitation, then deny others the right to do the same.
England's entire quarrel with Germany, was that the Germans dared try on the British, what the British had done to the rest of the world. So it was that Gandhi made his glib remark that he didn't think Hitler "was as bad as they say": what's it to the enslaved Indian that the butcher of countless Native Americans and Irish should now find a bully a few pounds heavier than him?
So what does it matter to us today? The British Empire is gone, the World Wars are long over, so why should we care who enslaved who?
The reason we should care, why it matters to understand the dysfunctional nature of British society and how their problems were exported on such a scope that they ultimately engulfed the whole world in war, is that those basic problems are still with us today.
The British Empire is gone. No longer able to survive by exploiting the rest of the world, England is gradually going back to being what it has always been: a poor, backward country, looking jealously across the Channel. Meanwhile, France, Germany and the rest of continental Europe are gradually working their problems out. No shortage of grief along the way; yet slowly and surely, Europe is on course for "Anywhere But Here".
This is also why although the British Empire is gone, England insists on sticking to the Pound Sterling instead of adopting the Euro: because the pound-based financial architecture, the inefficiency and barriers to commerce it creates, along with powerful domestic institutions, is the once and future stronghold of the British aristocracy.
Nothing has changed since the days of Mary Poppins. The British aristocracy knows that if England joins the Euro, their control over the country will broken by influxes of capital from more efficient economies on the continent, buying up their factories, their estates, the talents of the British people. With nothing to offer their country or the world at large, the British aristocracy will sink to the level of everyone else. And yet the British people remain lost in their own banal jingoism, so the class system, an albatross around the windpipe of the British people, will ensure for yet another generation.
The difference - the big difference, that makes all the world of difference - between the continental Europeans, and the British, that is the basis of England's stagnant class society, three-party government, and jingoistic outlook, and continental Europe's multiparty parliaments, socialist societies, and the founding of the EU, is the unwillingness of British and willingness of Europeans to turn "how things are" into "how they should be". It is a fundamental difference in attitudes & values - the fork in the road to destiny.
We Americans should care, because, 300 years ago, we landed on what was a virgin continent, brought Anglo-American civilization with us, and now we are well on our way to recreating England and all its problems here. Same tired old story; class divisions emerge, exhausting natural resources, foreign wars to enrich the wealthy, refusal to invest in the land or the people, the steady downhill spiral into third-world status that is the historically and mathematically guaranteed natural outcome of the Anglo-American outlook on life.
There is no difference at all between American poor white trash or ghetto blacks, or British degenerates hanging out on Dole St., dressed in ridiculous clothes, barely able to form a sentence, keeping themselves amused with hoodlumery and unprotected sex. Both are the natural end result of a society that refuses to invest in itself. If you have seen one, you have seen the other. It is that simple.
Britons and Americans react in the same ways to the same spectacle: Social Security and the dole; "bah humbug", and similarly dismissive American remarks; complaining everything would be well if they would just be willing to "work hard", as if the world's wealth is wanting for hard work.
Although it is not obvious, this is also why Feminism is a uniquely Anglo-American phenomenon. While other cultures have more or less "gotten over" Feminism - achieved female enfranchisement without political intrusion into daily life - radical Feminism maintains its singular hold on Anglo-American societies. Not for nothing was Germaine Greer Australian.
Feminism is a sibling ideology of Libertarianism and the direct lineal descendant of Capitalism. The common element to this ideological gens, is Anglo-American society's stubborn efforts to treat human beings as individual economic units, who should live their lives in service to their economic needs and themselves, rather than natural creatures who depend on each other and social conditions to ensure their well-being.
It is that STUBBORN REFUSAL to re-examine the flawed premise at the root of Anglo-American society - that humans are individual economic units who should be looking out for themselves; and that the best thing is slavish acceptance of the status quo - that is the basic cause of both the failure of British and American society, and the rise of Feminism.
As Hobbes observed, human beings will not accept a world at odds with their nature; and since Anglo-Americans will not accept socialist policies or fundamental re-examination of society, Feminism and Imperialism split the difference - offer flawed compromises to preserve those things that cannot be done without, the profit motive, and the protection of women & children.
Bismarck (and later FDR, who is tolerated in American history only because of WW2) defeated Communism by yanking the carpet out from under its feet. Ideologies of evil, like Communism, Feminism, Nazism and Imperialism, always, always, draw their vitality, their legitimacy, from unaddressed social ills. (It is worth noting that an oft-overlooked historical fact, is that Feminism, and not World War I or anti-Semitism, was the true cause of the rise of Nazism - this will be explained in greater depth later).
The message I wish to leave readers with is this: The only way forward for America (and England, "as if"), is to evolve our society and its underlying values beyond its present limitations. Americans must reject their deterministic view of life and society and adopt an "in it together" mentality.
I use phrases like "society investing in itself", or "in it together" a lot. What does that mean, in tangible terms? Does it mean tax the middle class then cut checks for corporate and poor welfare recipients? No. What I mean is, the planting of forests (to provide cheap raw materials, prevent flash flooding, retain groundwater, protect agriculture), building road and rail, nationalizing power, water, telecom and banks (basic utilities that don't need to be run efficiently, they just need to make their services available as inexpensively as possible so the secondary aspects of the economy, where enterprenurialism can wreak its magic, can thrive), and making medical care, meritocratic education, quality food and well-adjusted entertainment available cheaply.
The connection between free skate parks and free medical care and social mobility is not immediately obvious. To grasp the connection, one must observe poor degenerates, understand what makes them different from people who are capable of overcoming life.
More significant to a man than his body or mind, is his personality. What is common to people of a given culture, a given social class, is not their strength or skill or intelligence, but their confidence, their outlook on life. The cause of both crime and enterpreneurialism is a sense, or absence, of social enfranchisement. The thing one notices most about criminals - or people who live in high crime areas - is that crime is not seen as socially stigmatic. This is the natural and logical result of man's social character - the flip side of the Hobbesian coin. The perception of society as guarantor of health, safety, security, and sociability, itself defeats crime, by establishing criminal acts as "against the grain". This perception is not created by police presence, or by welfare (although they can blunt outpourings of mass rage, at least in the short run), but by social institutions. Hence the necessity of entertainment, healthcare and meritocracy to reform the minds of the people - to change the culture - and in doing so, guarantee national prosperity.
I again make reference to observation of degenerates who are not criminal. Poor people are typically physically ugly because they do not get proper medical care, and they suffer from preventable diseases and tooth decay. How this affects humans is best understood by observation of other animals, such as rats and dogs. Animals that have had a raw existence can never be socialized or domesticated, because as with humans, physical condition has a profound impact on psychodynamics. Creatures that have spent their lives perceiving the world as adversarial, can never break out of the "ghetto mentality". The bromide of the "Prince and the Pauper" still applies.
Going back to my observations about the nature of Anglo-American society, it is for this reason that Americans are unable to solve the riddle of "what exactly it means to be Middle Class" in this country. What being Middle Class in America truly means, is a series of social mores and expectations that are dependent on certain social conditions. Because of the continued economic and social degeneration of this country, those conditions - security, stability, ease of life, personal freedom, etc - are unstable, and hence our descent into mass poverty, White suburbia giving way to White favelas.
And that is why, for America to prosper, to overcome its "test of a culture", the lesson contained in my initial observation - why the World Wars were really England's fault - must be internalized.
I really hope someone bothered to read this =P who cares I like to write...
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