Quite a tour de force! Europe is interesting as a confluence of savage barbarism and Christian spirituality. By the time of WW1 the latter had, as you say, worked an effect and European men and women were civilized, respectable and sometimes pious. But not the leaders. Nowhere, it seems , was it current to say that war was a barbaric relic. That what would be murder if done by an individual was still murder if done in the name of the state. That high sounding appeals to glory honour and weighty reasons of state could never sanctify bloodshed.
This moral failure, always a danger, became ever more difficult to correct as Europeans became enamored of the state to the point of deification, following the revolution in France.
Thank you for an educational and thought provoking piece.
I was surprised in reading around the assassination of The Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand of the youth and Tribal resolve of the assassin; Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip. Princip said " Žerajić (an earlier Serbian Nationalist Assassin who died for his cause) was my first model. When I was seventeen I passed whole nights at his grave, reflecting on our wretched condition and thinking of him. It is there that I made up my mind sooner or later to perpetrate an outrage."
Before his death in 1990 the last surviving participant in the conspiracy to kill Franz Ferdinand, Vaso Čubrilović said: "We destroyed a beautiful world that was lost forever due to the war that followed."
A good friend of mine, of mixed race, confided that he'd experienced some distasteful racist treatment in his earlier life. As I said to him, that's a symptom of fundamental flaws in human nature; there's always been some excuse for hostility between humans - ideological, territorial, religious, racial, tribal etc. And even if the whole world were one race, speaking one language, we'd find some excuse to beat the crap out of each other. As you say, hostility has to be opposed. And as Plato is reputed to have said: 'Only the dead have seen the end of war'.
Quite a tour de force! Europe is interesting as a confluence of savage barbarism and Christian spirituality. By the time of WW1 the latter had, as you say, worked an effect and European men and women were civilized, respectable and sometimes pious. But not the leaders. Nowhere, it seems , was it current to say that war was a barbaric relic. That what would be murder if done by an individual was still murder if done in the name of the state. That high sounding appeals to glory honour and weighty reasons of state could never sanctify bloodshed.
This moral failure, always a danger, became ever more difficult to correct as Europeans became enamored of the state to the point of deification, following the revolution in France.
Thank you for an educational and thought provoking piece.
I was surprised in reading around the assassination of The Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand of the youth and Tribal resolve of the assassin; Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip. Princip said " Žerajić (an earlier Serbian Nationalist Assassin who died for his cause) was my first model. When I was seventeen I passed whole nights at his grave, reflecting on our wretched condition and thinking of him. It is there that I made up my mind sooner or later to perpetrate an outrage."
Before his death in 1990 the last surviving participant in the conspiracy to kill Franz Ferdinand, Vaso Čubrilović said: "We destroyed a beautiful world that was lost forever due to the war that followed."
Thank you! An excellent article.
A good friend of mine, of mixed race, confided that he'd experienced some distasteful racist treatment in his earlier life. As I said to him, that's a symptom of fundamental flaws in human nature; there's always been some excuse for hostility between humans - ideological, territorial, religious, racial, tribal etc. And even if the whole world were one race, speaking one language, we'd find some excuse to beat the crap out of each other. As you say, hostility has to be opposed. And as Plato is reputed to have said: 'Only the dead have seen the end of war'.