The self-pitying world conquerors
In his account of the final months of the conquest of Berlin, ‘The Downfall’, Anthony Beevor writes: ‘Many civilians would talk with self-pity of Germany’s suffering, especially from bombing. They fell resentfully silent when reminded that it was the Luftwaffe which had invented the mass destruction of cities as a shock tactic.’ Thus the profoundly anti-Kantian ethics of us modern people: deeds are good or bad not according to their nature, but according to by whom and to whom they are done. When what goes around comes around, we are outraged. There we were, minding our only business in peace, and they attack us for no reason! The application to the popular American understanding of 911 is obvious.
Also comparable is the geopolitical ignorance, for Beevor continues: ‘Civilians could not understand why the United States ever declared war on Germany. When told that in fact it was Germany which had declared war on the United States, they were incredulous. It contradicted their conviction that Germans were the true victims of the war.’ Finally, we may wonder whether the two countries share national flaws. Beevor writes: ‘Both officers and civilians tried to lecture their conquerors on the need for the United States and Britain to ally themselves with Germany against the common danger of ‘Bolschewismus’, which they knew only too well. The fact that it was Nazi Germany’s onslaught against the Soviet Union in 1941 which had brought Communism to all of central and south-east Europe – something which all the revolutions between 1917 and 1921 had completely failed to do – remained beyond their understanding. Rather as the minority Bolsheviks had managed to exploit ruthlessly the Russian conditioning to autocracy, so the Nazis had seized on their own country’s fatal tendency to confuse cause and effect.’ In the same way, the USA imagined it had to occupy and remain in Iraq to combat Islamic terrorism.
One Response to “The self-pitying world conquerors”
I do like where you are taking this chapter, Hugo. Special Pleading is the root of a staggering chunk of the evil in the world. One could make a strong case for ALL evil. Kant’s is a noble effort, but even a cursory glance at the state of human affairs demonstrates how completely he failed.
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