Yellow Group Flashcards
The Liberal National State,
Faces of War Content
Total War
Law
Aftermath
Pacifism
Move towards ‘Total War’ with the First World War
- in part due to dramatic increase in destructive power, also due to breakdown of ‘union sacree’ in society and radicalised ideologies
- mass ‘democratised’ warfare that demanded total and moral victory
Attempts to use morality and international law to control war - however, nuclear weapons, airstrikes and other aspects of modern war are really too indiscriminate
Aftermath of war - Blood, Treasure, Politics
- Decline in military casualties with professionalisation (still civie casualties), demographic deficit, family breakdowns (1.5mil orphans, widows and disabled)
- Enormous cost in modern war with loans, materiel, supplies - preparation (Cold War) - disruptions (workers, opportunity costs) - taxes, borrowing, inflation, reparations
- Legitimacy (E.g. Russia WW1, breakdown of Tsarist regime) & Sovereignty with forced regime change, occupation, lack of power (E.g. Germany WW2)
Pacifism - economic arguments pre-WW1, declines as national movement as war becomes more destructive and ideological - manifested now in institutions, e.g. UN, EU - shifts from strictly pacifist to non-aggressive - Angell: ‘I am not a non-resister’
Faces of War Primary Sources
Ludendorff
Picasso
Clausewitz
Hitler
‘Total War’ (1935), Erich Ludendorff - calls for the total mobilisation of the nation’s manpower and resources for war due to peace just being an interval between wars
Guernica (1937), Pablo Picasso - painted in response to the Spanish Civil War and the bombing of Guernica. Growing awareness of the destructive power of war
On War (1932), Clausewitz - 'war is the continuation of politics by other means' - calls for limitation of war to its targets - Gaddis on Eisenhower - nuclear weapons broke down this definition
Hitler’s Table Talk - Use of violence to purify Germany of her weakness
Pacifist Texts - ‘The Future of War’ (Ivan Bloch) & ‘The Great Illusion’ (Norman Angell)
- Bloch predicted the future of war was ‘not fighting, but famine, not the slaying of men, but the bankruptcy of nations and the breakup of the whole social organisation’ - accurately predicts nature of WW1
- Angell sees the interdependent and mass-producing world economy as reliant on peace and therefore a deterrent from war in and of itself
Faces of War Secondary Sources
Tooze
Hitchens
Beckett
Tilly
Sheehan
Snyder
‘The Deluge’ (2015), Adam Tooze - WW1 forced its participants into a cycle of demanding more resources and promising greater victory, totalising the war further
- Evidence of ‘peace’ as a construct, not just a lack of war
‘The Phoney Victory’ (2018), Peter Hitchens - false narratives around war to maintain morality, war seen by politicians as a method of aggrandisement
- failure to confront horrors of Allied bombing
- Halifax’s attempt to resecure imperial prestige
‘Total War’ (1989), Ian Beckett - total war as more limited, catalysed social change but didn’t cause it
- deaths in WW1 must factor in Spanish Flu
- social impacts normally limited to wartime and immediately afterwards (‘the wartime generation lasted “only as long as it was under fire”’ (quoting Richard Bessel))
Charles Tilly - ‘war makes states and states make war’ - the primary function of the state is a military one
- James Sheehan - disregards the shift from ‘garrison states’ to ‘civilian states’ - latter demand much greater social services and so won’t support much war
Snyder - links between anti-partisan warfare - inability of Germans to accurately target Belorussian partisans, so they targeted possible aides - similar to Vietnam
Challenges to Positivism Content
Freud & Nietzsche
Positivism
Nietzsche
Freud
Positivism - the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge
Nietzsche & Freud sceptical of modernity, civilisation and progress - yet still use Enlightenment methods
- Foucalt-esque critique
Nietzsche - Master/Slave morality, Will to Power, Uber/Untermensch, Death of God, Anti-Intellectual
Freud - Id/Ego/Superego, Limits of the Conscious, Eros(Life)/Thanatos(Death) - Repression/Drives, Oedipus/Electra Complex
Challenges to Positivism Content
Modernism
Modernism - challenge to homogonised culture, artistic revolution of 1880s due to cameras and cheap materials
- Cubism (3D, non-Western)
- Futurism (Death of Space/Time, Technology)
- Expressionism (World Inside Us)
- Surrealism (Limits of Reason, Subjectivity)
Challenge to Positivism Primary Sources
Nietzsche
Frankl
Freud
Paintings
Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1880s), Nietzsche - intellectuals as ‘giant ears’ - ‘too little of everything, and too much of one thing’
- the ‘madman’ with a lantern in the morning - God is Dead
Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), Frankl - Limits of Freud in treating people - Logotherapy
About Psychoanalysis (1957), Freud - limits of medical knowledge - enormous harm of psychological maladies
Modernist paintings - The Scream (Munch, felt a scream in nature, Expressionism), Metamorphosis of Narcissus (Dali, allowed the unconscious to guide him, Surrealism), The Rock Drill (Epstein, melding of man and machine, Futurism)
Challenges to Positivism Secondary Sources
Hicks
Peterson
A & H
Foucalt
Explaining Postmodernism (2011), Stephen Hicks - Nietzsche as counter-Enlightenment (against reason), Modern Art as a quest to discover what Art actually is
Maps of Meaning (1999), Jordan Peterson - Nietzsche as attempting to rediscover the value of religion, Jung as realising the need for more than just belief
The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno & Horkheimer - totalitarian nature of Enlightenment society, Nietzsche and Freud as correct but don’t go far enough
Foucalt - still speaking Enlightenment language, need to break out and use other values to explore these ideas
