Deadly Formula

Hopelessness(as a function of indifference) + poverty + time = genocide

Read the headlines and it’s there. Killing and more killing. 5 soldiers died today in Kabul. We hear of the small deaths and are only sometimes shocked when the totals are occasionally revealed. But the carnage is so far away that we don’t understand it and the individual deaths are only small drops of blood that don’t mean anything to us. We are steeped in the worst of conditions: indifference. We are the cause of global woe because by doing nothing, we indicate to the leadership that the situation is acceptable.

The reality remains. Our indifference is, was, and will be the cause of suffering; and eventually that suffering will come to visit us on our front stoop.

To understand the aforementioned formula for genocide, I humbly ask you to consider the following historical events and economic concepts. As these are not taught in our school systems, I have provided recommended reading if you’d like to expand your awareness of this sadly unknown part of World History. Our current oil woes and military debacle in Iraq are directly inherited from WWI and WWII. Iraq as a killing field is not a new thing. Us not knowing history has doomed us to repeat it.

· How much do you know about the Treaty of Versailles? Get some background on Wikipedia; it’s enough to help you see the big picture.
· Do you know what daily life became in Post WWI Germany? Do you understand the economics of the Weimar Republic and how its collapse affected the rest of Europe? Read Roth’s What I saw: reports from Berlin 1920-1933.
· Do you understand that all parties of the war bankrupted themselves and their citizenry and the devastation and ruin of WWI lead to the Great Depression?
· Do you understand the economic concepts of Sunk Cost and Lost Opportunity and how these costs become alarmingly magnified by wars and cause economic havoc for decades if not centuries? Read Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson.
· Do you understand the folly of WWI and why the stupidest, largest waste of human life (if you include WWII as a continuation) even started? Read Tuchman’s Guns of August
· Do you understand why “Peace without Victory” could not stop the conflict?
· Do you understand Imperial politics and that Globalization existed in many disgusting forms that the English, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgian and French governments exploited for centuries? Any decent textbook on European History will cover this.

Our educational system doesn’t allow us to connect the dots. How does genocide get started? Is this a phenomenon just of WWII or did it happen before? Can it happen again?

Genocide is always a risk when you have weapons of mass destruction and an attitude of indifference in surrounding nations.

We are taught to be indifferent because our erroneous value system encourages us to believe that wars are good for the economy. This false notion is planted early, mainly by what we are taught about WWII.

As the “victors” we got to write the history (read Churchill’s excellent history on WWII). A typical American is taught minimally about WWI and WWII is presented in an American classroom as a “good war”. It is presented as an economic “cure” for the Great Depression. There is no such thing as a good war. And as long as we view wars as economic stimulus packages, then we are doomed to be perpetually at war, in constant conflict because we lack the ingenuity and faith to build a sustainable economic way of being. Read Vidal’s Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace

The reality of the World Wars is this: WWI was a pissing contest that went out of control between France and Germany. By its end, WWI became a relentless oil grab that had to cease due to both sides running out of men and money. They needed the 25 years in between the wars to grow more men and to raise or steal the money needed to continue the conflict and the oil grab.

But whom should we blame? If blame must be assigned, and there is plenty of idiocy to satisfy multiple theories, let us rest the bulk of it on France’s leadership. France had a global empire for centuries and pissed it away through poor stewardship and inbred management principles. Her people wised up and during the French Revolution got rid of one of the worst governments to ever curse a populace.

But the culture of ruling with the passions was instilled in France and she continued to wage war, most famously with Napoleon. (The Napoleonic wars technically were the First World War because the wars were global conflicts. America famously avoided it by not getting sucked into either side; we merely sold arms to the fighters. We sought to emulate this model for WWI, but couldn’t stay out of the fray.)

Napoleon really pissed off the Teutonic tribes by invading them, humiliating them and stealing their land. But since warfare in those days was dictated by Sea Power, the Teutonic Tribes didn’t stand a chance as they were not united and were hopelessly landlocked. This lesson was not lost on Hitler and his generals.

So now we can lay the blame on France for not being the grown-up in the Franco-Prussian/German relationship. It was up to France to bind up the wounds after the Napoleon fiasco and make friends with her embittered neighbor. This did not happen and we are stuck with the grisly inheritance of 2 World Wars with millions of dead people; death on such a vast scale that we are unable to understand or place proper value to the loss.

Since France and Germany were unable to come to a satisfactory settlement of their issues on the battlefield, the fighting continued at the Peace Conference (what an ironic thing to call it!) in 1919. Since all the European powers were bled dry to the point where they couldn’t afford to bury the dead soldiers and left the many hundred thousands of bodies to rot where they fell, one has to wonder why France got to dictate the Terms of Surrender for Germany. Both countries lost that war, but since Germany was narrowly outmanned by the combined armed forces of Britain, France and the US the war was called in The Triple Alliance’s favor.

If you are familiar with the Great Disservice to Humanity cooked up in 1919, you’ll understand the cruel and stupid terms that Germany had to agree to after the war. These terms, as you know, were not tenable and resulted in the collapse of Germany’s economy, which triggered the Great Depression. Thank you, France!

To fully grasp how bad things were in Germany before Hitler’s rise to power, I beseech you to read Read Roth’s What I saw: reports from Berlin 1920-1933. This horrifying account of the economic devastation suffered by the Germans will open your eyes to the depths that people can sink even in the “modern” world. Her neighbors were also broke, so no one tried to bail Germany out except for the US. And when Weimar failed, we ignored Germany’s plight as we sank into the Great Depression.

Isaac Newton observed that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is true of physics and of human interactions.

The economics of Post-WWI Germany was a breeding ground for war mongering. The violence of global indifference to the plight of the average German was turned into Potential Energy. This Potential Energy was turned into the Kinetic Energy of War when a man like Hitler came to power and sanctioned and focused the despair and hatred that average Germans felt because they had been treated with the worst of all human emotions: indifference.

It was indifference that allowed the stupidity of Versailles to prevail; indifference that left Germany alone so she could re-arm; indifference that lead to global pacification; indifference that allowed Germany to kill millions of her own citizens; indifference that allowed Germany to annex Austria and roll into Czechoslovakia; indifference that allowed America to be sidelined until it was nearly Germany’s game. And we only came into the war because the Japanese dared to encroach on “our” ocean ironically named the Pacific. For more in indifference, read Johnson’s What we knew: terror, mass murder and everyday life in Nazi Germany.

We all pay the price as young men who grow up in dire, hopeless poverty, turn into hating, killing machines. This is happening today on our continent in the Inner Cities of the US, and in Mexico’s drug cartels. It is happening all over the world. The Kamikazi fighting mentality is reborn in the men and women who will blow themselves up in endlessly futile gestures of violence that results in more violence.

This same economic foment is going on in Darfur, it existed for years in Somalia and Rwanda, and now in Iraq and Afghanistan. We must learn this deadly formula over and over:

Hopelessness(as a function of indifference) + poverty + time = genocide