[lit-ideas] Hanson's Thesis

[Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>]

Here's the short side of it:


Again, wars usually end when one side wins and one side loses. 
Look at World War I and World War II. At first glance their 
outcomes would seem to refute that thesis. Didn’t we defeat 
Germany in 1918? Yet if you look at the Versailles peace treaty, 
it combined the worst aspects of diplomacy, a harsh peace on an 
enemy that does not feel defeated, but rather cheated. It doesn’t 
matter what the winner thinks; it has to be the defeated who 
accepts defeat. If you look what people were writing in Germany 
in 1918 and 1919, it was exactly opposite of what Woodrow Wilson 
said they felt.

The German army was a magnificent, frightening machine; and 
although we thought it was beaten badly, and I think it was 
beaten, it didn’t always think it was so defeated. When Pershing 
suggested that he should march a million men — French, English 
and American — into Berlin and physically take that government 
and expel the Prussian autocrats, Wilson said that would be too 
costly. Well the problem is that when we didn’t do that, the 
German army surrendered in Belgium and France, not in Germany. It 
claimed that it still was on the move. It was stabbed in the back 
by Jews; it was stabbed in the back by Marxists; it was stabbed 
in the back by traitors. And so the legend grew that the German 
army was invincible, and the enemy could only stymie but not 
defeat it — and, worse still, perhaps even didn’t have the guts 
or the power to defeat it. World War II came along and the Allies 
did not make that mistake twice.

<snip>

Why, in conclusion, do we find all of this sort of bone-chilling? 
Why, when we mention the name William Tecumseh Sherman, do we all 
sort of shudder? I think I don’t need to tell you that people 
from this state of Ohio went down with Sherman in his 
thirty-seven day romp through Georgia and his two month swing 
through the Carolinas. Yet they killed only 600 Confederates in 
Georgia while that prior summer ten thousand were being killed in 
northern Virginia. They freed 40 thousand slaves; they lost about 
one hundred men. Yet to paraphrase what Machiavelli said, "A man 
can forgive you if you kill his father, but not if you damage his 
patrimony." And in Mr. Sherman’s way of thinking, the people who 
started the war were precisely the plantation class who were 
sending eighteen year olds who did not own slaves to their 
deaths; and he wanted to reverse that moral calculus by bringing 
humiliation to those reckless instigators who put such a high 
premium on honor.

In other words, the use massive force in a moral cause is in fact 
humane, and saves lives in the long run as it disabuses the enemy 
of its many false conceptions. What’s inhumane are long drawn out 
wars — often over entire decades — where people decide for 
political or ideological or religious reasons that they don’t 
want to seek victory and instead turn to processes that only 
prolong the killing. Then the corpses start to pile up.

Again, why do we find this so disturbing? I’ll just leave you 
with some propensities common in Western civilization that people 
have remarked upon from Plato to Hobbes to the German nihilists 
like Nietzsche and Hegel and Spengler.

[excerpt of 
http://www.ashbrook.org/publicat/onprin/v11n2/hanson.html]

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• Follow-Ups:
  • [lit-ideas] Re: Hanson's Thesis
    • From: Eric Yost

• References:
  • [lit-ideas] War and Panic
    • From: Orion Anderson
  • [lit-ideas] Re: War and Panic
    • From: Eric Yost

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[lit-ideas] Hanson's Thesis

[lit-ideas] Re: Hanson's Thesis