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• W4214508144 abstract "Confusion of ‘end’ and ‘means’ is a classic problem in human affairs. The Greek philosophers, the Chinese, Indian philosophy, and, more recently, writers such as Machiavelli and Clausewitz dealt with this problem. The specific contexts in which this confusion occurs are many. War is one of the most common and most important. The reason is simple and profound: unlike most human social activities, war deals with death, usually on a large scale. Death undergirds and animates the organizations that pursue it – known as armies – and the individuals who engage in it – called soldiers. Armies are large public organizations created and maintained primarily to compete against each other on future battlefields. At the uttermost bounds of this competition, one or both of the organizations will suffer some degree of death. Because armies serve as instruments of death, a point that cannot be overemphasized, and because of their size and the extent and manner in which they command the loyalties of their societies, armies are unique among the organizations of human society. Because soldiers deal, sooner or later, in their mind or in practical experience, with large-scale death, their occupation is different from all others in society. Militarism in all its guises arises from the confusion these relationships enforce. Organizations and individuals when confronted with the anxieties, real or imagined, caused by the possibility and threat of death fall into confusions and mental disturbances. To avoid death, they sometimes succumb. Any means becomes a legitimate escape. Often invisibly, insidiously, the means become the end. During the era of modern war, roughly between 1796 and 1989, this juxtaposition was again and again threatened. It is no accident that the definition and usage of the term ‘militarism’ accompanied these events. But perhaps this is too simple. If we examine the term from Machiavelli’s point of view, we see an inversion: the sheer terror at the start of war that ends in the exuberance of victory or the despair of defeat and the political order or anarchy that results. Again it is a question of degree. In the shift from the agricultural elite armies of the eighteenth century to the industrial mass armies of the late nineteenth and the entire twentieth century, the possibility of military victory over an opponent changed from the terrible double carnage of Frederick the Great’s wars – 40% casualties on both sides so that neither could really do anything after fighting – to the lightning victories of Napoleon and Moltke with their ensuing political transformations, the terrible stalemates of the Great War (1914–18), the mobile battles of the Good War (1939–45), and four decades of Cold War with its Koreas, Vietnams, and Afghanistans. Each of these war and peace scenarios resulted in rhetorical storms and civil–military inversions. Most of those who have written about this problem – beginning with their response to the French Revolutionary armies of Napoleon – have responded viscerally to what they perceived to be a monstrosity of the modern age. Nothing could be further from the truth. Among human animals the problems caused by the inversion of end and means within the specific context of war and death begins virtually at the beginning. Also from the time of Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, there has been a consistent intellectual response. Societies in which armies played an important part were criticized as morally inferior to modern industrial society. Societies in which the military performed important political, economic, and social roles were regarded as cruder, more ‘barbaric’ forms, destined to be replaced as ‘civilization’ progressed to more liberal and more rational structures. As one reads the literature of ‘militarism’, mainly from the twentieth century, one senses immediately that industrial mass war has given the term its fundamental meaning. For example, take Alfred Vagts’ 1937 classic, A history of militarism, which was on the New York Times bestseller list and got its author a stint on the Harvard faculty. Vagts – writing from his own experiences in World War I and the postwar Weimar years in Berlin – wrote that every war and every army has both a military and a militaristic way. The military way is characterized by the primary attention of men and material on political victory with the least casualties. It is, Vagts says, limited, confined, and scientific: in other words, rational. Militarism, in contrast, is a vast array of customs, interests, prestige, caste, cult, and belief: it is an irrational sham. But death, the central foundational concept undergirding war, is an irrational event that humans cannot describe for themselves. Its looming threat often forces inversions that overwhelm the rational mind. Therein lies the problem that Vagts in 1937 did not see. It is the mind/body dualism, the one part rational, thinking, the other part emotional, visceral, feeling. Confronting death, which is what war and armies are about, attacks the human animal in both places. But in worst-case scenarios, it is the visceral, feeling, and irrational that often overwhelms. In death agony and fear of it, mental control slips beneath physical necessity. Under normal conditions these relationships are not absolutes, but they can become so. They often play themselves out and develop like yin/yang. As the Taoist argues, there is a tendency for every existing object or arrangement to continue to be what it is. Interfere with its existence and it resists, as a stone resists crushing. If it is a living creature, it resists actively, as a wasp being crushed will sting. But the kind of resistance offered by a living creature is unique. It grows stronger as the interference grows stronger up to the point where the creatures’ capacity for resistance is destroyed. Somewhere along this continuum the rational always threatens to give way to the irrational in all but the strongest individuals and nation-states." @default.
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• W4214508144 date "2008-01-01" @default.
• W4214508144 modified "2023-10-16" @default.
• W4214508144 title "Militarism" @default.
• W4214508144 doi "https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-012373985-8.00105-7" @default.
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