29 ms·

they elected the people who put them in a war. It didn't happen in a vacuum

082349872349872 6y ago
For the abhorred vacuum before the Great War, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio... and the Creel Report. (it was not novel at the time, "Remember the Maine!" having occurred in the previous century) Orwell's "two minutes hate" was descriptive, not predictive. (His wife did work in the Ministry of Information during WWII, after all.) p.178 of The World of Yesterday https://ia601609.us.archive.org/21/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.176552/2015.176552.The-World-Of-Yesterday_text.pdf https://ia601609.us.archive.org/21/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.1... describing germanophone Zwei Minuten Hass in 1914: > "Limited in their experience of Europe as a whole, and living entirely within the German circle of thought, most of our writers believed that their best contribution was to strengthen the enthusiasm of the masses and support the supposed beauty of war with poetic appeals or scientific ideologies. ... Poems poured forth that rhymed Krieg with Sieg and Not with Tod. Solemnly the poets swore never again to have any cultural association with a Frenchman or an Englishman ; they went even further, they denied overnight that there had ever been any French or English culture. It was insignificant and valueless in comparison with German character, German art, and German thought. But the savants were even worse. The sole wisdom of the philosophers was to declare the war a “bath of steel” which would beneficially preserve the strength of the people from enervation. The physicians fell into line and praised their prosthesis so extravagantly that one was almost tempted to have a leg amputated so that the healthy member might be replaced by an artificial one. The ministers of all creeds had no desire to be outdone and joined in the chorus, at times as if a horde of possessed were raving, and yet all of these men were the very same whose reason, creative power, and humane conduct one had admired only a week, a month, before." (sometimes two minutes hate doesn't pay off: Bismarck used the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ems_Dispatch#Incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ems_Dispatch#Incident leak to sucker[1] the french into declaring war, in much the same way that a toreador waves the cape to citar, to provoke a charge from the amygdala, not the cortex, or the same way that Kenobi suckered Vader by turning off his light sabre) [1] in his student days, Bismarck practiced provoking the attacks of a single opponent. Baiting nations in his mature career would then only have been a matter of scale. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck_als_Student#Corpsstudent https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck_als_Student#... Schlagerpartys > Schlägerpartien. At least they're much less of a sausagefest.

For the abhorred vacuum before the Great War, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Information https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informatio... and the Creel Report. (it was not novel at the time, "Remember the Maine!" having occurred in the previous century) Orwell's "two minutes hate" was descriptive, not predictive. (His wife did work in the Ministry of Information during WWII, after all.) p.178 of The World of Yesterday https://ia601609.us.archive.org/21/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.176552/2015.176552.The-World-Of-Yesterday_text.pdf https://ia601609.us.archive.org/21/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.1... describing germanophone Zwei Minuten Hass in 1914: > "Limited in their experience of Europe as a whole, and living entirely within the German circle of thought, most of our writers believed that their best contribution was to strengthen the enthusiasm of the masses and support the supposed beauty of war with poetic appeals or scientific ideologies. ... Poems poured forth that rhymed Krieg with Sieg and Not with Tod. Solemnly the poets swore never again to have any cultural association with a Frenchman or an Englishman ; they went even further, they denied overnight that there had ever been any French or English culture. It was insignificant and valueless in comparison with German character, German art, and German thought. But the savants were even worse. The sole wisdom of the philosophers was to declare the war a “bath of steel” which would beneficially preserve the strength of the people from enervation. The physicians fell into line and praised their prosthesis so extravagantly that one was almost tempted to have a leg amputated so that the healthy member might be replaced by an artificial one. The ministers of all creeds had no desire to be outdone and joined in the chorus, at times as if a horde of possessed were raving, and yet all of these men were the very same whose reason, creative power, and humane conduct one had admired only a week, a month, before." (sometimes two minutes hate doesn't pay off: Bismarck used the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ems_Dispatch#Incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ems_Dispatch#Incident leak to sucker[1] the french into declaring war, in much the same way that a toreador waves the cape to citar, to provoke a charge from the amygdala, not the cortex, or the same way that Kenobi suckered Vader by turning off his light sabre) [1] in his student days, Bismarck practiced provoking the attacks of a single opponent. Baiting nations in his mature career would then only have been a matter of scale. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck_als_Student#Corpsstudent https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck_als_Student#... Schlagerpartys > Schlägerpartien. At least they're much less of a sausagefest.