A good way to assess a country's true psychology is to look at how it treats other nations.
The UK's relations with Europe and the rest of the world are currently going through a radical reconfiguration, thanks to Brexit. But equally, the way that the UK government is handling Brexit and its relations with its near neighbours in Europe is also highly-revealing in telling us the true nature of the country's leaders, and their motivations. As a result of this, European observers of the negotiation process between the UK and the EU are having to sharply re-evaluate their preconceptions about Britain's sense of morality. They are beginning to realise that Britain's honesty and transparency can no longer be taken for granted. They realise that Britain is behaving like a "troublemaker".
Divide and rule
When the chips are down, Britain's government has an instinct for devious behaviour (in particular towards its own population).The British government's negotiation strategy with the EU (if it can be coherently said to have one), seems to follow on from the same tactics, which Britain also once used when it was an Imperial power.
Back in the day, the British government's strategy for keeping the colonies under control was one of "divide and rule". In India, this was about balancing the different ethnic sides off against each other. The tensions between those sides (e.g. Hindu versus Muslim) were then stoked by Britain as a deliberate policy to sabotage the growing independence movement. This then made post-independence violence all the more certain; as we know, millions died in violence during those population exchanges. Earlier in Britain's rule over India, we had the Indian Mutiny, which caused widespread devastation, and also numerous famines over time that caused the deaths of millions, to the general indifference of its British rulers.
Closer to home, and another example of "divide and rule" that is often forgotten by Britain's population, was the treatment of Ireland: the land "across the (St George's) channel" that was effectively Britain's colony, with much of its Catholic population treated as virtual slave labour. Institutional indifference led to the potato famine, causing the deaths of millions, and the widespread depopulation of Ireland. Meanwhile, there was Northern Ireland, where again, Britain's ignorance of its bloody past and persecution towards the Ulster Catholic minority, is widespread. As we see, the policy of "divide and rule" is still at the heart of how the government runs the country even today, thanks to the DUP. And that doesn't even mention the current government's arrogant attitude towards the Irish government as part of its negotiations with the EU (more on that later).
The same could be said of Britain's rule over Palestine, where the Arab majority were played off against the Jewish minority. As the violence between them and their British overlords got increasingly out of hand, the British left the whole mess to the newly-created UN, who were totally unable to deal with the situation. As with "divide and rule" in Ireland, the Middle East is still dealing with the after effects of that today.
Britain, as an Imperial power, therefore had a long reputation for dealing with its colonies in a Machiavellian manner. The three mentioned, India, Ireland and Palestine, are just a few of the more glaring examples. There are many others. Of course, this strategy was common among all "Imperial powers", and Britain was very far from the worst in this regard. However, the cases of India, Ireland and Palestine are three stains on Britain's colonial record - in terms of the collective human impact of their policies - that stand out even among other acts of colonial infamy by other powers. Britain may not have used torture on an mass scale like some other Imperial powers, but it would be naive in the extreme to think of Britain as a paragon on Imperial virtue, like as it has been with some, nostalgic over the past.
The manner in which the UK government has dealt with the EU during the negotiations follows the same path. On one hand, Britain's Prime Minister talks of wanting a "deep and special partnership" with the EU based on trust and co-operation. But on the other, while negotiations are ongoing with the EU as a whole, her government (and the PM herself) seeks to drive clefts within the nations of the EU itself. Firstly, Theresa May and her ministers engage in the type of diplomacy that looks for issues that individual members of the EU might agree with Britain on, separately from the rest of the EU; the purpose of this is to build some kind of "inner coalition" within the EU that might be more supportive towards Britain's goals. Secondly, in the case of Germany, David Davis seems to be on a strategy to win over the support of its industrialists that would then act a some kind of "lobby" to pressure Angela Merkel on Britain's behalf. In this case, it is like developing a "cleft within a cleft". His comments just recently, where he blamed France and Germany for holding up the negotiations, support the view that Britain's strategy is to drive wedges between nations, as well as even wedges between interest groups in the nations themselves.
These two examples show not only the glaring lack of tact of Britain's government, but also reveal its government's true motivations: treating Europe as a kind of "colony" that can be manipulated and exploited to achieve its goals.
Looking at this objectively, it paints a very poor picture for Britain as a nation to be trusted. Not only is it being devious; it is being tactless. And everyone can see it.
It is almost reminiscent of the tactless behaviour and self-defeating diplomatic strategy of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II. When he came to power, he wanted Germany to be a great power, but also one that had good relations with its neighbours. Through a series of misjudgments, Germany fell out of favour with Britain, Russia and France, leading the Kaiser to look for alliances with nations that others were wary to be close to. This left Germany diplomatically-isolated from the major Imperial powers, leading its government to seek self-reliance as the best form of defence. We know where that ended.
In a different context, Britain's government seem to be repeating many of the same kind of blunders: making enemies where it should be making friends; while in seeking to divide existing alliances, the only effect this has is to unite them against itself as their common agitator. This kind of "imperialistic approach" will only end in failure, while showing to others that Britain's motivations are antagonistic in nature.
"Special treatment"
Apart from the Imperialistic strategy of "divide and rule", there is the UK government's (equally Imperialistic) mindset of expecting the EU to do everything for them, give in to all their demands, while offering little in return.
This is the lazily-entitled mindset that Britain had seen in remission during its membership of the EU. In many ways, joining the EU was an admission of Britain's relative weakness in the post-Imperial world. As it was not in a position to make demands, it allowed Britain an opportunity to reshape its own sense of identity. Brexit represents a backwards step to the entitled, patronising attitude that the country had during its colonial past: nothing is ever Britain's fault.
David Davis seems to summarise this mentality well: a monoglot who is incapable of understanding even the basics of his brief, or seeming to care. To him, Brexit all seems like a bit of a lark. As far as he sees it, Britain has already offered "compromises" (I struggle to think of any), and so the onus is on the EU to do the same. This attitude ignores the fact that the EU is simply following its own rules, as clearly laid out in statute in the Lisbon treaty. This has been explained repeatedly to Davis, who never seems to listen. The EU is not setting out to "punish" Britain; it is simply explaining the rules as they stand, and what is and isn't possible within that framework. But Britain's government wants the EU to ignore its own rules in order to indulge its wishes. In its lazily-entitled thinking, Britain has all the bearing of a haughty Imperialist of yesteryear that expects "foreign lackeys" to do all its work for it, while it wallows in its own self-satisfaction, ordering others around.
For some reason, Britain thinks it should be entitled to some kind of extra-legal cloud-cuckoo land where it gets "special treatment" from the rest of the world.
Expecting "special treatment" on one hand, while enacting a strategy of "divide and rule" on the other, Britain's government has simply slipped back into the lazy Imperialistic pretensions of a hundred years ago, but minus the Empire.
While the negotiations with the EU continue, the rest of the world (who Britain expects to have preferential trade agreements with) must look on with a mixture of bemusement and bafflement. If Britain can't even negotiate properly with its supposed "friends and allies", what chance has it got against anyone else?
Showing posts with label Kaiser Wilhelm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kaiser Wilhelm. Show all posts
Saturday, November 18, 2017
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Donald Trump: Is he the Kaiser Wilhelm of our time?
This isn't the first article to be written on the subject (one of the earliest articles, from more than a year ago, is seen here). There have been numerous articles written on the personality and psychology of Donald Trump, claiming that he is a narcissist or, worse, a potential sociopath. The author instead looks to explore the personality and psychological parallels between Donald Trump and Kaiser Wilhelm in more detail, and let the parallels speak for themselves.
The author wrote a piece on Kaiser Wilhelm's personality a few years ago, in particular looking at the relationship that developed between him and Enver Pasha, a like-minded belligerent in effective control of the Ottoman Empire's war machine.
Observers and historians have noted some of the personality similarities between these two leaders, separated a hundred years apart, highlighting the similar tendencies in character towards arrogance, boorishness, shallowness, exuberance and unpredictability. Other similar details of both their life histories are worthy of study.
In some senses, these two men came of age at around the same time: Donald Trump becoming the figurehead of his family's company in his late twenties, and Wilhelm II becoming Kaiser of the German Empire around the same age. Likewise, they also had some similar traits in childhood and while growing up. Both Donald and Wilhelm were troublesome children during their schooling, showing some violent tendencies, as had been recorded about Wilhelm, and as Donald himself has openly alluded to. Equally, both took a period of military schooling to iron out these anti-social traits into something more productive. In Donald's case, it could be argued that the disciplinarian atmosphere helped to channel his energies into focusing on the family business; with Wilhelm, the military aspect took on a wholly-absorbing character, which stayed with him for the rest of his life.
In other ways, it can be argued how each person's relationship with their parents affected their personality as an adult.
Wilhelm's parents - his father, the heir to the throne (who would later die after only a few months as Kaiser), and his English mother, a daughter of Queen Victoria - cared very much for their son, who was tragically disfigured with a withered left arm from a botched birth. However, it appears that Wilhelm did not return the sentiment, seeing his parents as soft liberals. In particular, he had a very troubled relationship with his mother, which later would become evolve into a conflicted relationship with the land of her birth.
So we see that Wilhelm's embrace of the military and his "strong" Prussian sense of identity could be traced to the rejection of his father's perceived "softness"; equally, his love-hate relationship with Britain, and ultimately an integral part of Germany's foreign policy, arguably came from his rejection of his mother. He initially wanted Britain as a strong German ally, and when that failed, Britain had to be beaten.
Donald Trump's parentage is also interesting, as he is of German stock on his father's side, while his mother is Scottish. In other words - and by strange coincidence - Trump, like Kaiser Wilhelm II, is from a "German" father and a "British" mother.
However, it is clear that Donald's relationship to his parents was much more conventional. His mother and father were seen as nothing if not role models, once Donald had developed into a more disciplined adult. The drive he developed for business seems to have come from his innate competitive spirit, and the desire to make a name for himself. He has in the past called himself a "warrior", and talked of his formative experiences with his father's business as a youngster being key to developing his dog-eat-dog view of the world. In that sense, it could be argued that his drive to expand the Trump Corporation into Manhattan from its roots laid by his father in Brooklyn and Queen was the wish to supersede the successes of his father: he would use the "good name" that his father had established to create an empire of his own. In that respect, he certainly succeeded. In Frank Trump, Donald Trump had the kind of father figure that someone like Kaiser Wilhelm probably wished would have had: instead of wanting to emulate his father, like Donald Trump did, Wilhelm turned to the military and his own Prussian identity to make up for what he perceived as his own father's "failings".
In this comparison, we can see that the roots of Wilhelm's insecurities and malignant narcissism may well have come from this aspect of his childhood; on the other hand, Donald Trump's gross narcissism may well simply have been something that was always there.
Donald Trump's relationship with his mother's home country is also worth mentioning, as it can be argued that, at least to some extent, he shares the same "love-hate" relationship that Wilhelm had for Britain. Trump's property empire is international in scope, and includes golf courses in Scotland. He famously has had controversies with the building of a golf course in Aberdeenshire, which can also be seen as a result of Trump's driven personality. More recently, he traveled to Scotland a few days after the Brexit vote to congratulate Scotland, seemingly not realising that Scotland had, in fact, mostly voted to remain in the EU. Since becoming President, his relationship with Britain as a whole has become even more tortuous: receiving the attention of the British Prime Minister for trade talks and an official invite, while receiving an "un-invite" by the British Speaker of parliament. Such grating diplomatic blunders and mis-steps were also characteristic of Kaiser Wilhelm.
We have talked about the driven aspects to both Donald Trump and Kaiser Wilhelm's personalities. Both share a strong desire to lead, and to be seen to be a leader. In Wilhelm's case, this was seen with his admiration for the the Russian Tsar and the autocratic model, going so far as to wish to become allies (he abjectly failed in this mission). While Germany was not an autocracy, the Kaiser still had personal control of the military and the cabinet, if not the parliament. It was due to this that he was able to personally mould German foreign policy without oversight, and surround himself with like-minded belligerents.
It could be argued that Donald Trump sees his Presidency (or would like to see it) as being able to mould the country and the world as he sees fit, as the de facto "leader of the world". To an extent, all Presidents may like to see it this way, though the US Constitution clearly marks out the limits of a President's mandate. However, it is also evident that Donald Trump sees himself as different: he has all the hallmarks of being a demagogue in the mould of, for example, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan. So far, his slew of "executive orders" indicate a desire to trample on the limitations that ordinarily restrict presidential powers, even if that is unconstitutional or even illegal.
Like Wilhelm, Donald Trump's political role models appear to be "strongmen": Trump has professed respect for Vladimir Putin and his manner of ruling, and seems to have adopted a flexible ("realpolitik"?) approach to Russia. His policy of "America First" is in the mould of many other authoritarian leaders, while also shadowing some of the foreign policy aims that Kaiser Wilhelm had, such as protectionism, military might and defense of national interests.
Lastly, both these individuals seem to have shared a chaotic and impulsive style of governing. We have already looked at how Kaiser Wilhelm took personal control of military and diplomatic affairs, even against the advice of his generals and diplomats. The same signs can be seen in the first weeks of Donald Trump's administration, with his senior staff seemingly unable to keep up with his frequent contradictory statements.
With these unpredictable personalities as leaders, both saw the result being that individuals like-minded to the leader would prosper; Wilhelm surrounded himself with belligerents, while Trump seems to have as his key advisers those who share in his, at times apocalyptic and fatalistic, world-view.
It's early days in the Trump Presidency, and already people on his own side are wondering if (or rather, when) it will all end in tears...
The author wrote a piece on Kaiser Wilhelm's personality a few years ago, in particular looking at the relationship that developed between him and Enver Pasha, a like-minded belligerent in effective control of the Ottoman Empire's war machine.
Observers and historians have noted some of the personality similarities between these two leaders, separated a hundred years apart, highlighting the similar tendencies in character towards arrogance, boorishness, shallowness, exuberance and unpredictability. Other similar details of both their life histories are worthy of study.
In some senses, these two men came of age at around the same time: Donald Trump becoming the figurehead of his family's company in his late twenties, and Wilhelm II becoming Kaiser of the German Empire around the same age. Likewise, they also had some similar traits in childhood and while growing up. Both Donald and Wilhelm were troublesome children during their schooling, showing some violent tendencies, as had been recorded about Wilhelm, and as Donald himself has openly alluded to. Equally, both took a period of military schooling to iron out these anti-social traits into something more productive. In Donald's case, it could be argued that the disciplinarian atmosphere helped to channel his energies into focusing on the family business; with Wilhelm, the military aspect took on a wholly-absorbing character, which stayed with him for the rest of his life.
In other ways, it can be argued how each person's relationship with their parents affected their personality as an adult.
Wilhelm's parents - his father, the heir to the throne (who would later die after only a few months as Kaiser), and his English mother, a daughter of Queen Victoria - cared very much for their son, who was tragically disfigured with a withered left arm from a botched birth. However, it appears that Wilhelm did not return the sentiment, seeing his parents as soft liberals. In particular, he had a very troubled relationship with his mother, which later would become evolve into a conflicted relationship with the land of her birth.
So we see that Wilhelm's embrace of the military and his "strong" Prussian sense of identity could be traced to the rejection of his father's perceived "softness"; equally, his love-hate relationship with Britain, and ultimately an integral part of Germany's foreign policy, arguably came from his rejection of his mother. He initially wanted Britain as a strong German ally, and when that failed, Britain had to be beaten.
Donald Trump's parentage is also interesting, as he is of German stock on his father's side, while his mother is Scottish. In other words - and by strange coincidence - Trump, like Kaiser Wilhelm II, is from a "German" father and a "British" mother.
However, it is clear that Donald's relationship to his parents was much more conventional. His mother and father were seen as nothing if not role models, once Donald had developed into a more disciplined adult. The drive he developed for business seems to have come from his innate competitive spirit, and the desire to make a name for himself. He has in the past called himself a "warrior", and talked of his formative experiences with his father's business as a youngster being key to developing his dog-eat-dog view of the world. In that sense, it could be argued that his drive to expand the Trump Corporation into Manhattan from its roots laid by his father in Brooklyn and Queen was the wish to supersede the successes of his father: he would use the "good name" that his father had established to create an empire of his own. In that respect, he certainly succeeded. In Frank Trump, Donald Trump had the kind of father figure that someone like Kaiser Wilhelm probably wished would have had: instead of wanting to emulate his father, like Donald Trump did, Wilhelm turned to the military and his own Prussian identity to make up for what he perceived as his own father's "failings".
In this comparison, we can see that the roots of Wilhelm's insecurities and malignant narcissism may well have come from this aspect of his childhood; on the other hand, Donald Trump's gross narcissism may well simply have been something that was always there.
Donald Trump's relationship with his mother's home country is also worth mentioning, as it can be argued that, at least to some extent, he shares the same "love-hate" relationship that Wilhelm had for Britain. Trump's property empire is international in scope, and includes golf courses in Scotland. He famously has had controversies with the building of a golf course in Aberdeenshire, which can also be seen as a result of Trump's driven personality. More recently, he traveled to Scotland a few days after the Brexit vote to congratulate Scotland, seemingly not realising that Scotland had, in fact, mostly voted to remain in the EU. Since becoming President, his relationship with Britain as a whole has become even more tortuous: receiving the attention of the British Prime Minister for trade talks and an official invite, while receiving an "un-invite" by the British Speaker of parliament. Such grating diplomatic blunders and mis-steps were also characteristic of Kaiser Wilhelm.
We have talked about the driven aspects to both Donald Trump and Kaiser Wilhelm's personalities. Both share a strong desire to lead, and to be seen to be a leader. In Wilhelm's case, this was seen with his admiration for the the Russian Tsar and the autocratic model, going so far as to wish to become allies (he abjectly failed in this mission). While Germany was not an autocracy, the Kaiser still had personal control of the military and the cabinet, if not the parliament. It was due to this that he was able to personally mould German foreign policy without oversight, and surround himself with like-minded belligerents.
It could be argued that Donald Trump sees his Presidency (or would like to see it) as being able to mould the country and the world as he sees fit, as the de facto "leader of the world". To an extent, all Presidents may like to see it this way, though the US Constitution clearly marks out the limits of a President's mandate. However, it is also evident that Donald Trump sees himself as different: he has all the hallmarks of being a demagogue in the mould of, for example, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan. So far, his slew of "executive orders" indicate a desire to trample on the limitations that ordinarily restrict presidential powers, even if that is unconstitutional or even illegal.
Like Wilhelm, Donald Trump's political role models appear to be "strongmen": Trump has professed respect for Vladimir Putin and his manner of ruling, and seems to have adopted a flexible ("realpolitik"?) approach to Russia. His policy of "America First" is in the mould of many other authoritarian leaders, while also shadowing some of the foreign policy aims that Kaiser Wilhelm had, such as protectionism, military might and defense of national interests.
Lastly, both these individuals seem to have shared a chaotic and impulsive style of governing. We have already looked at how Kaiser Wilhelm took personal control of military and diplomatic affairs, even against the advice of his generals and diplomats. The same signs can be seen in the first weeks of Donald Trump's administration, with his senior staff seemingly unable to keep up with his frequent contradictory statements.
With these unpredictable personalities as leaders, both saw the result being that individuals like-minded to the leader would prosper; Wilhelm surrounded himself with belligerents, while Trump seems to have as his key advisers those who share in his, at times apocalyptic and fatalistic, world-view.
It's early days in the Trump Presidency, and already people on his own side are wondering if (or rather, when) it will all end in tears...
Monday, July 20, 2015
The Queen's Nazi salute: what it tells us about the establishment
The leaking of private royal footage from the early 1930s has shown the then seven-year-old Elizabeth Windsor prompted to give a Nazi salute with her mother and the future King Edward, her uncle.
Criticism of the actions of a seven-year-old girl seems silly and nonsensical. What the footage does show however, is the private behaviour of the elders of the royal family. It was well-known at the time that a wide number of people in the royal family and the establishment in general, were sympathetic to the Nazi regime and its ideas. The future King Edward was the most high-profile member of the royal family to be openly supportive of the Nazi regime, even during the war and afterwards. For this reason, if he had remained as the monarch at the outbreak of war, the UK would surely have faced a constitutional crisis unlike anything it had ever seen; the actual "abdication crisis" would have felt like a walk in the park by comparison.
Further revelations have revealed (or more exactly, been re-told) that not only were many of the future Queens' relatives sympathetic to the Nazis, but her future husband's family were, in anything, even more interlinked with Hitler's party. Due to his family's German roots, Prince Philip's sisters were married to Nazi officers at the time. So while there may be the view that the UK had "dodged a bullet" by the abdication of King Edward, Philip's Nazi links through his family simply looked to have swapped one imbroglio for another.
In reality, the onset of war changed everything, and the vast majority of those in the royal family (on both Elizabeth's and Philip's sides) distanced themselves very quickly from anything to do with the Nazis. Philip's sisters, of course, could do nothing about being married to Nazis. This was something they had to live with for the rest of their lives. But the pre-war links to the Nazis and the British establishment are something that now look like very uncomfortable reminders of a different time.
Britain and Germany: "best frenemies"?
Large parts of the British establishment became fascinated by the Nazis during their rise to power. Like the higher echelons of the then British Empire, the Nazis were fiercely anti-Communist, saw strikers as a Third Column for Stalin, and were instinctively anti-Semitic. What's often forgotten is that many of the Bolshevik elite were themselves Jews, and the "internationalist" nature of communism was partially what drew some Jewish intellectuals to the Bolshevik cause. For some Jews who did not have a real nation to call their own, Communism fitted the bill. For the same reason, this was why this was seen by some as a mortal threat to the "established order" around the world at the time: "Godless" Communism was therefore a "Jewish conspiracy" at world domination. At the time of Hitler's rise to power, plenty of the great and the good in the UK and the USA saw the Nazis as, at least, a "necessary evil"; others, as we have seen with the future King Edward, actively supported their ideas.
This "moral support" with the British establishment may not only have come about through the "shared goal" of aggressively fighting Communism, but also through a sense of injustice inflicted on the "sister country". Britain's royal family is of German origin, with many of its members married to members of the (former) German royal family in the years after the First World War.
The schism that occurred between Britain and German relations in the year immediately prior to the First World war was down to a variety of reasons. Up to the early 1890s, relations were very friendly, not least because of the extremely close family ties (Kaiser Wilhelm was Queen Victoria's nephew - more on his personality here). It was the poor choices that the Kaiser and his advisers made in foreign policy after this point that led to the collapse in good relations with the British government; in that sense, Germany and Britain became "best frenemies" in those last, fateful years before the war.
In the aftermath of the war and the punishing terms of the Treaty of Versailles, there were probably many in the British establishment that must have felt pity for what went wrong with Germany. So by the time of the Nazi's rise to power, those same people would have felt relief that the country was back on the road to recovery that it should never have been forced to take. Whatever misgivings they might have had about the Nazi's methods of this "recovery" would probably have either been put at the back of their minds or dismissed as Communist propaganda.
Seen in this way, the royal family's distancing from the Nazis as the march to war got ever louder by the end of the 1930s would probably have re-ignited the same sense of disillusionment that the British royal family must have felt at the outbreak of the First World War. Germany and Britain had become "best frenemies" once again. The "love-in" that Germany and Britain's establishment once shared had turned into a "mutual loathing" - for a second time.
Controlling "assets"
Apart from the historical context, the establishment's reaction to the publishing of these "revelations" is perhaps more telling than the revelations themselves. The palace has become highly-defensive about the nature of the footage revealed, and is highly-protective of the royal's privacy, for their past private behavior and actions as much as currently.
As the adage goes "information is power". The author recently discussed how technological advances have allowed government the "control of information" in ways never before possible. These days, the "establishment", in the guise of the security services, has the capability to know almost everything that is happening. At the very least, this allows them to have a very good idea about where "threats" may come from.
The phrase "national security" is used a lot by the government to justify its mass surveillance: they cite the now "unpredictability" of the world and the "new techniques" that dangerous groups and individuals pose.
But "security" has a double meaning in reality: officially, it means the security of the nation-state (and by extension, its citizens); unofficially, it also means the security of the government (and its assets).
The reaction that Buckingham Palace has had to the release of the "damaging" footage is the same the reaction that the British government had when Edward Snowden revealed the way that GCHQ work with the NSA to make mass collection of people's communications. The palace sought to punish the leaker of the "damaging" footage, discredit the implications of the footage, and to strongly defend the head of state's right to "privacy" (this last point is an odd stance to take, which we'll look at more in a moment).
When the government discovered "The Guardaan" newspaper had information disclosing how it used mass surveillance, its reaction was to have the newspaper destroy it - which it did under government supervision, even after being told there were other copies outside the UK the government could do nothing about. Later, it used anti-terror laws to arrest the Brazilian partner of a "Guardian" freelancer who was in transit at Heathrow airport, and confiscated his laptop to try and find out what information the "Guardian" had on them. Meanwhile, it strongly discouraged other newspapers from writing any negative coverage about the whole issue.
There's the old saying that you only really know someone when they're really tested. The same can be said of governments and institutions. When tested (using the examples above of Buckingham Palace and the UK government), the establishment's instinct has been shown to be authoritarian and secretive. It behaves so even when it is probably against its longer-term interests. While on the surface the establishment makes a show of respecting "democracy", "oversight" and "freedom of speech", when the chips are down, these ideas are swiftly disregarded.
As seen earlier, the British government gave itself some awful press for the sake of pointlessly destroying a newspaper's computers, and pointlessly (and almost certainly illegally) arresting and detaining a foreigner because they wanted to see what was in his computer and flash drives. Buckingham Palace protects the royal families "privacy" and longer-term legacy with fearsome possessiveness. Some royal experts even argue that it would be better for the royals if more private correspondence was made public, to show that the royal family is, indeed, just a fairly average family in many ways. There have been some good people and bad people in it; people make mistakes and do foolish and horrible things from time to time. This is normal. But by their instinct of wanting to keep many things private, it simply feeds the conspiracy theorists that the royals have a host of "skeletons in the cupboard"
Information is an "asset" for governments; outside information is precious to obtain; inside information is even more precious to keep hold of. Unfortunately, this is also the same thinking used by authoritarian regimes around the world. The establishment, by following this nature, has done itself no favours over the years. It is due to this climate of secrecy that the child abuse scandal has been so damaging. Bad people swarm to a "climate of secrecy" like moths to a flame, for they know they will be protected at all costs, no matter what they do. This is innate, corrupting power of "the establishment": it is corrupt because there is no accountability. If one card falls, they all fall: this is the self-justifying logic of the establishment.
It explains by the infamous MP Cyril Smith was never prosecuted (because of who he knew), and also why Jimmy Savile got away with his behaviour for decades (because of who he was).
Criticism of the actions of a seven-year-old girl seems silly and nonsensical. What the footage does show however, is the private behaviour of the elders of the royal family. It was well-known at the time that a wide number of people in the royal family and the establishment in general, were sympathetic to the Nazi regime and its ideas. The future King Edward was the most high-profile member of the royal family to be openly supportive of the Nazi regime, even during the war and afterwards. For this reason, if he had remained as the monarch at the outbreak of war, the UK would surely have faced a constitutional crisis unlike anything it had ever seen; the actual "abdication crisis" would have felt like a walk in the park by comparison.
Further revelations have revealed (or more exactly, been re-told) that not only were many of the future Queens' relatives sympathetic to the Nazis, but her future husband's family were, in anything, even more interlinked with Hitler's party. Due to his family's German roots, Prince Philip's sisters were married to Nazi officers at the time. So while there may be the view that the UK had "dodged a bullet" by the abdication of King Edward, Philip's Nazi links through his family simply looked to have swapped one imbroglio for another.
In reality, the onset of war changed everything, and the vast majority of those in the royal family (on both Elizabeth's and Philip's sides) distanced themselves very quickly from anything to do with the Nazis. Philip's sisters, of course, could do nothing about being married to Nazis. This was something they had to live with for the rest of their lives. But the pre-war links to the Nazis and the British establishment are something that now look like very uncomfortable reminders of a different time.
Britain and Germany: "best frenemies"?
Large parts of the British establishment became fascinated by the Nazis during their rise to power. Like the higher echelons of the then British Empire, the Nazis were fiercely anti-Communist, saw strikers as a Third Column for Stalin, and were instinctively anti-Semitic. What's often forgotten is that many of the Bolshevik elite were themselves Jews, and the "internationalist" nature of communism was partially what drew some Jewish intellectuals to the Bolshevik cause. For some Jews who did not have a real nation to call their own, Communism fitted the bill. For the same reason, this was why this was seen by some as a mortal threat to the "established order" around the world at the time: "Godless" Communism was therefore a "Jewish conspiracy" at world domination. At the time of Hitler's rise to power, plenty of the great and the good in the UK and the USA saw the Nazis as, at least, a "necessary evil"; others, as we have seen with the future King Edward, actively supported their ideas.
This "moral support" with the British establishment may not only have come about through the "shared goal" of aggressively fighting Communism, but also through a sense of injustice inflicted on the "sister country". Britain's royal family is of German origin, with many of its members married to members of the (former) German royal family in the years after the First World War.
The schism that occurred between Britain and German relations in the year immediately prior to the First World war was down to a variety of reasons. Up to the early 1890s, relations were very friendly, not least because of the extremely close family ties (Kaiser Wilhelm was Queen Victoria's nephew - more on his personality here). It was the poor choices that the Kaiser and his advisers made in foreign policy after this point that led to the collapse in good relations with the British government; in that sense, Germany and Britain became "best frenemies" in those last, fateful years before the war.
In the aftermath of the war and the punishing terms of the Treaty of Versailles, there were probably many in the British establishment that must have felt pity for what went wrong with Germany. So by the time of the Nazi's rise to power, those same people would have felt relief that the country was back on the road to recovery that it should never have been forced to take. Whatever misgivings they might have had about the Nazi's methods of this "recovery" would probably have either been put at the back of their minds or dismissed as Communist propaganda.
Seen in this way, the royal family's distancing from the Nazis as the march to war got ever louder by the end of the 1930s would probably have re-ignited the same sense of disillusionment that the British royal family must have felt at the outbreak of the First World War. Germany and Britain had become "best frenemies" once again. The "love-in" that Germany and Britain's establishment once shared had turned into a "mutual loathing" - for a second time.
Controlling "assets"
Apart from the historical context, the establishment's reaction to the publishing of these "revelations" is perhaps more telling than the revelations themselves. The palace has become highly-defensive about the nature of the footage revealed, and is highly-protective of the royal's privacy, for their past private behavior and actions as much as currently.
As the adage goes "information is power". The author recently discussed how technological advances have allowed government the "control of information" in ways never before possible. These days, the "establishment", in the guise of the security services, has the capability to know almost everything that is happening. At the very least, this allows them to have a very good idea about where "threats" may come from.
The phrase "national security" is used a lot by the government to justify its mass surveillance: they cite the now "unpredictability" of the world and the "new techniques" that dangerous groups and individuals pose.
But "security" has a double meaning in reality: officially, it means the security of the nation-state (and by extension, its citizens); unofficially, it also means the security of the government (and its assets).
The reaction that Buckingham Palace has had to the release of the "damaging" footage is the same the reaction that the British government had when Edward Snowden revealed the way that GCHQ work with the NSA to make mass collection of people's communications. The palace sought to punish the leaker of the "damaging" footage, discredit the implications of the footage, and to strongly defend the head of state's right to "privacy" (this last point is an odd stance to take, which we'll look at more in a moment).
When the government discovered "The Guardaan" newspaper had information disclosing how it used mass surveillance, its reaction was to have the newspaper destroy it - which it did under government supervision, even after being told there were other copies outside the UK the government could do nothing about. Later, it used anti-terror laws to arrest the Brazilian partner of a "Guardian" freelancer who was in transit at Heathrow airport, and confiscated his laptop to try and find out what information the "Guardian" had on them. Meanwhile, it strongly discouraged other newspapers from writing any negative coverage about the whole issue.
There's the old saying that you only really know someone when they're really tested. The same can be said of governments and institutions. When tested (using the examples above of Buckingham Palace and the UK government), the establishment's instinct has been shown to be authoritarian and secretive. It behaves so even when it is probably against its longer-term interests. While on the surface the establishment makes a show of respecting "democracy", "oversight" and "freedom of speech", when the chips are down, these ideas are swiftly disregarded.
As seen earlier, the British government gave itself some awful press for the sake of pointlessly destroying a newspaper's computers, and pointlessly (and almost certainly illegally) arresting and detaining a foreigner because they wanted to see what was in his computer and flash drives. Buckingham Palace protects the royal families "privacy" and longer-term legacy with fearsome possessiveness. Some royal experts even argue that it would be better for the royals if more private correspondence was made public, to show that the royal family is, indeed, just a fairly average family in many ways. There have been some good people and bad people in it; people make mistakes and do foolish and horrible things from time to time. This is normal. But by their instinct of wanting to keep many things private, it simply feeds the conspiracy theorists that the royals have a host of "skeletons in the cupboard"
Information is an "asset" for governments; outside information is precious to obtain; inside information is even more precious to keep hold of. Unfortunately, this is also the same thinking used by authoritarian regimes around the world. The establishment, by following this nature, has done itself no favours over the years. It is due to this climate of secrecy that the child abuse scandal has been so damaging. Bad people swarm to a "climate of secrecy" like moths to a flame, for they know they will be protected at all costs, no matter what they do. This is innate, corrupting power of "the establishment": it is corrupt because there is no accountability. If one card falls, they all fall: this is the self-justifying logic of the establishment.
It explains by the infamous MP Cyril Smith was never prosecuted (because of who he knew), and also why Jimmy Savile got away with his behaviour for decades (because of who he was).
Saturday, December 29, 2012
Kaiser Wilhelm's personality, Enver Pasha and World War One
Elsewhere, I wrote an article about psychopathy, its common characteristics, and its effect on society as a whole. In a previous post I also used the example of Stalin here to describe the nightmare of what happens when a psychopath gains power.
World War One has often been described as "a family affair" between the monarchies of Germany, Britain and Russia, whose monarchs were all cousins. The rivalry between Britain and Germany during the run-up to the war is also of the contributing factors, but the direct personality politics of the monarchs themselves has in the past been under-investigated.
British propaganda often demonised Kaiser Wilhelm II as some kind of monster intent on devouring the world. The irony is that, to some extent, these exaggerations were surprisingly close to the truth. To understand how this is possible, and why the First World War came to happen, you only need to look more closely at Wilhelm's personality. As described here:
" superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and success,—as Bismarck said early on in his life, he wanted every day to be his birthday—romantic, sentimental and theatrical, unsure and arrogant, with an immeasurably exaggerated self-confidence and desire to show off, a juvenile cadet, who never took the tone of the officers’ mess out of his voice, and brashly wanted to play the part of the supreme warlord, full of panicky fear of a monotonous life without any diversions, and yet aimless, pathological in his hatred against his English mother"
Looking at Wilhelm's personality (and the above description is averagely representative of the various analyses undertaken by biographers), it bears an unnerving correspondence to the common characteristics found in extreme narcissists and psychopaths. While it is unfair to call him a "monster" in the same breath as Hitler or Stalin, his many character flaws played a large part in leading Germany into a self-destructive path to war.
Wilhelm was born into a doting family, but grew a huge complex about competing with his cousins in Russia and Britain, and was determined to make "his Germany" into a power to compete and supersede other European powers. With a tortured relationship with his English mother's heritage and family, this resulted in him using his German-Prussian half of his identity as a crutch for his own fragile and unstable ego. In other words, he used nationalism as a vehicle for his own bloated sense of self-esteem. To make matters worse, he was born with a stunted and deformed left arm, which gave him a huge inferiority complex on top of the unceasing praise he got from his elders. His personality was therefore a ticking time-bomb unlike any of his European contemporaries, waiting for the time when it would inherit the reins of supreme power.
By the time his grandfather, Wilhelm I died in 1888, Wilhelm junior was determined to make his mark, as well as being arrogantly sure of his own capabilities.
The German Empire had grown out of the Prussian Empire, the largest part of a German-speaking Confederation (itself a successor to the former Holy Roman Empire, separate from the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire). In that sense, Germany was very much the "new kid on the block" compared to its rivals, forming into the German Empire after Wilhelm I (a sane and sensible ruler, compared to his grand-son) defeated France in 1871. But by the time of Wilhelm II's succession, the German Empire was still a largely agricultural society; an industrial pipsqueak compared to Britain. Germany's status had nevertheless grown significantly under Bismark, Wilhelm I's chancellor and architect of foreign policy. A natural diplomat, Bismark had tended Germany's initial relative weakness into a position of carefully-worked stability in a few short years. Wilhelm II, cocksure and keen to make his mark, was determined to see Germany rise yet further .
With two years, Bismark had been sacked by Wilhelm II, and quickly attracted the attentions of like-minded amoral extremists, opportunists, sycophants, and misfits.
Surrounded by such a gathering of dangerous personalities, the degradation of Wilhelm's court became well-known, including elements of fetishism, sado-masochism and other perversions. His court, the longer he was in power, became more and more dysfunctional, combining collective insanity with moral depravity. Wilhelm himself was eventually to face a scandal of his own, with rumours swirling about his own sexuality.
Eager to make a colonial empire to rival the other European powers, he decided to build on Bismark's meagre gains in Africa and the Pacific (who had never taken colonies very seriously). Assured of his own capabilities, he often took personal control of diplomacy, and made German foreign policy a see-sawing hostage to his fickle whims; initially he courted the favour of the British Empire, seeing them as natural allies against France. However, when this backfired he turned instead to the autocratic Russian tsar as a natural ally (and personal role model to Wilhelm's singular style of leadership). Again, when this similarly backfired, leaving Germany increasingly marginalized and short on allies, Wilhelm looked elsewhere.
Wilhelm II began to court the Ottomans, who had lost the respect of Britain by the end of the 19th century due to their persecution of the Armenians. Wilhelm had no such scruples, whose grand idea was an empire to rival Britain's in India; more exactly, to build links with the Turks, Persians and Afghans, and instigate an Indian revolt against the British, with Wilhelm as their overlord. This was the purpose of the "Drang Nach Osten", or "drive to the east". Wilhelm's fantasies of being a master of the East while ruling from Berlin was just one symptom of his gross narcissism and unstable character.
To rational eyes, this kind of plot looks mad, unrealistic, and competely ruthless. But many of Wilhelm's ideas were hare-brained and crack-potted. To achieve this, Wilhelm orchestrated the German-financed "Berlin-Baghdad Railway" with the Ottomans, took advantage of Persia's distrust of the Russians and the British (who had effectively made spheres of influence out of parts of the Persian Empire), and organised a vast conspiracy with Indian nationalists. Wilhelm wanted to sow chaos in the British Empire's jewel in order to destroy it as a world power. Although Wilhelm did not want war, it seemed impossible to sane eyes that these aims could be achieved without it. Nonetheless, Wilhelm and his clique did what they could to undermine the British and Russians through a network of conspiracies and spies.
In 1908, Wilhelm received a further boost when the Ottoman Sultan was overthrown in a coup by German-backed militarists, headed by Enver Pasha (a former envoy to Berlin) replacing the old Sultan with his puppet-like brother as the successor. Enver, like Wilhelm, showed signs of mental instability/psychopathy, as he had a dream of a greater Turkish Empire that took in everything between Constantinople and Ulan Bator - equally as mad and unrealistic as Wilhelm's plan, not to mention contradictory to his erstwhile ally's. This conflict of interests, though, would not reveal itself until later.
When the First World War started, Enver was initially cautious about getting involved, but Wilhelm encouraged a "holy war" (Jihad) by the Muslims against the Christians, which was then supported by Enver.
The purpose of this extraordinary step was to invoke those Muslims living under British and Russian rule (in India and Central Asia/ Caucasus respectively) to rise up against their Christian masters, thus knocking them out of the war and putting Wilhelm and Enver in a position of authority. What was the first "Jihad" of the modern age was not fully thought-through in its consequences by Wilhelm, as he somehow imagined himself to be a future Caliph of the Muslims, spreading rumours he had converted to Islam.
Meanwhile, Enver Pasha's regime was becoming pathologically amoral in its war aims and "Jihad", as Enver orchestrated the mass killing and forced marches of the minority Christian Armenian population in the empire. Fearing that they would side with the Russians (some, indeed, had already done so), and taking the message of "holy war" to its logical conclusion, the Armenians became the first (and primary) victims to the the "Drang Nach Osten" policy of Wilhelm, as implemented through Enver's "Jihad". The legacy that these two men sown was the defeat of the Russian Empire in the war, bringing about the conditions that brought the Bolsheviks to power.
Indeed, we can see that not only was World War Two the child of the First World War, but the Second World War's leading dictators, Hitler especially, seemed to share the same psychopathic personalities as Kaiser Wilhelm and Enver Pasha. Hitler's talk of "Lebensraum" or living space for the Germans, echoes much of the earlier dreams of Wilhelm's "Drang Nach Osten" (Drive To The East") at the expense of Russia and Britain, and Enver's dreams of a pan-Turkic empire.
In the end, in the short term at least, both Wilhelm and Enver got off relatively lightly at the end of the war. Wilhelm was accepted exile in Holland, and died there of natural causes; Enver and his cohorts escaped Turkey before they could be hung by the new, pro-Western Sultan in 1918 - to be eventually killed by Armenian nationalists a few years later.
In that sense, we can see that Germany and Turkey's involvement in the First World War (as well as its build-up) was by and large due to the personalities of two men: Wilhelm and Enver.
Both mentally unstable and psychopathic, their countries' share in the horrors of the First World War can be primarily attributed to them. As we know now that the longer-term effects of that war led to the rise of Nazi Germany and (indirectly) to Bolshevik Russia/ The Soviet Union, these two men have a long, dark legacy.
There are many factors that fed the tensions that led up to the First World War, which resulted in a Balkan crisis caused by Serbian terrorists spiraling out of control. However, the chaos that ensued within their nations' own boundaries, and the chaos they caused to others, are primarily the result of these two men's personalities: Wilhelm for ruling the German Empire with a cohort of like-minded amoral megalomaniacs; Enver for hijacking the Ottoman Empire to satisfy his personal vanity and reckless thirst for conquest, taking his country, like Wilhelm, to its self-destruction.
These two deeply-flawed individuals were therefore shared much of the blame for four years of chaos; along with two other psychopaths, Hitler and Stalin, these four were primarily to blame for the majority of human misery caused in the twentieth century: a century of historical events ultimately caused by the "criminal" mind.
World War One has often been described as "a family affair" between the monarchies of Germany, Britain and Russia, whose monarchs were all cousins. The rivalry between Britain and Germany during the run-up to the war is also of the contributing factors, but the direct personality politics of the monarchs themselves has in the past been under-investigated.
British propaganda often demonised Kaiser Wilhelm II as some kind of monster intent on devouring the world. The irony is that, to some extent, these exaggerations were surprisingly close to the truth. To understand how this is possible, and why the First World War came to happen, you only need to look more closely at Wilhelm's personality. As described here:
" superficial, hasty, restless, unable to relax, without any deeper level of seriousness, without any desire for hard work or drive to see things through to the end, without any sense of sobriety, for balance and boundaries, or even for reality and real problems, uncontrollable and scarcely capable of learning from experience, desperate for applause and success,—as Bismarck said early on in his life, he wanted every day to be his birthday—romantic, sentimental and theatrical, unsure and arrogant, with an immeasurably exaggerated self-confidence and desire to show off, a juvenile cadet, who never took the tone of the officers’ mess out of his voice, and brashly wanted to play the part of the supreme warlord, full of panicky fear of a monotonous life without any diversions, and yet aimless, pathological in his hatred against his English mother"
Looking at Wilhelm's personality (and the above description is averagely representative of the various analyses undertaken by biographers), it bears an unnerving correspondence to the common characteristics found in extreme narcissists and psychopaths. While it is unfair to call him a "monster" in the same breath as Hitler or Stalin, his many character flaws played a large part in leading Germany into a self-destructive path to war.
Wilhelm was born into a doting family, but grew a huge complex about competing with his cousins in Russia and Britain, and was determined to make "his Germany" into a power to compete and supersede other European powers. With a tortured relationship with his English mother's heritage and family, this resulted in him using his German-Prussian half of his identity as a crutch for his own fragile and unstable ego. In other words, he used nationalism as a vehicle for his own bloated sense of self-esteem. To make matters worse, he was born with a stunted and deformed left arm, which gave him a huge inferiority complex on top of the unceasing praise he got from his elders. His personality was therefore a ticking time-bomb unlike any of his European contemporaries, waiting for the time when it would inherit the reins of supreme power.
By the time his grandfather, Wilhelm I died in 1888, Wilhelm junior was determined to make his mark, as well as being arrogantly sure of his own capabilities.
The German Empire had grown out of the Prussian Empire, the largest part of a German-speaking Confederation (itself a successor to the former Holy Roman Empire, separate from the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire). In that sense, Germany was very much the "new kid on the block" compared to its rivals, forming into the German Empire after Wilhelm I (a sane and sensible ruler, compared to his grand-son) defeated France in 1871. But by the time of Wilhelm II's succession, the German Empire was still a largely agricultural society; an industrial pipsqueak compared to Britain. Germany's status had nevertheless grown significantly under Bismark, Wilhelm I's chancellor and architect of foreign policy. A natural diplomat, Bismark had tended Germany's initial relative weakness into a position of carefully-worked stability in a few short years. Wilhelm II, cocksure and keen to make his mark, was determined to see Germany rise yet further .
With two years, Bismark had been sacked by Wilhelm II, and quickly attracted the attentions of like-minded amoral extremists, opportunists, sycophants, and misfits.
Surrounded by such a gathering of dangerous personalities, the degradation of Wilhelm's court became well-known, including elements of fetishism, sado-masochism and other perversions. His court, the longer he was in power, became more and more dysfunctional, combining collective insanity with moral depravity. Wilhelm himself was eventually to face a scandal of his own, with rumours swirling about his own sexuality.
Eager to make a colonial empire to rival the other European powers, he decided to build on Bismark's meagre gains in Africa and the Pacific (who had never taken colonies very seriously). Assured of his own capabilities, he often took personal control of diplomacy, and made German foreign policy a see-sawing hostage to his fickle whims; initially he courted the favour of the British Empire, seeing them as natural allies against France. However, when this backfired he turned instead to the autocratic Russian tsar as a natural ally (and personal role model to Wilhelm's singular style of leadership). Again, when this similarly backfired, leaving Germany increasingly marginalized and short on allies, Wilhelm looked elsewhere.
Wilhelm II began to court the Ottomans, who had lost the respect of Britain by the end of the 19th century due to their persecution of the Armenians. Wilhelm had no such scruples, whose grand idea was an empire to rival Britain's in India; more exactly, to build links with the Turks, Persians and Afghans, and instigate an Indian revolt against the British, with Wilhelm as their overlord. This was the purpose of the "Drang Nach Osten", or "drive to the east". Wilhelm's fantasies of being a master of the East while ruling from Berlin was just one symptom of his gross narcissism and unstable character.
To rational eyes, this kind of plot looks mad, unrealistic, and competely ruthless. But many of Wilhelm's ideas were hare-brained and crack-potted. To achieve this, Wilhelm orchestrated the German-financed "Berlin-Baghdad Railway" with the Ottomans, took advantage of Persia's distrust of the Russians and the British (who had effectively made spheres of influence out of parts of the Persian Empire), and organised a vast conspiracy with Indian nationalists. Wilhelm wanted to sow chaos in the British Empire's jewel in order to destroy it as a world power. Although Wilhelm did not want war, it seemed impossible to sane eyes that these aims could be achieved without it. Nonetheless, Wilhelm and his clique did what they could to undermine the British and Russians through a network of conspiracies and spies.
In 1908, Wilhelm received a further boost when the Ottoman Sultan was overthrown in a coup by German-backed militarists, headed by Enver Pasha (a former envoy to Berlin) replacing the old Sultan with his puppet-like brother as the successor. Enver, like Wilhelm, showed signs of mental instability/psychopathy, as he had a dream of a greater Turkish Empire that took in everything between Constantinople and Ulan Bator - equally as mad and unrealistic as Wilhelm's plan, not to mention contradictory to his erstwhile ally's. This conflict of interests, though, would not reveal itself until later.
When the First World War started, Enver was initially cautious about getting involved, but Wilhelm encouraged a "holy war" (Jihad) by the Muslims against the Christians, which was then supported by Enver.
The purpose of this extraordinary step was to invoke those Muslims living under British and Russian rule (in India and Central Asia/ Caucasus respectively) to rise up against their Christian masters, thus knocking them out of the war and putting Wilhelm and Enver in a position of authority. What was the first "Jihad" of the modern age was not fully thought-through in its consequences by Wilhelm, as he somehow imagined himself to be a future Caliph of the Muslims, spreading rumours he had converted to Islam.
Meanwhile, Enver Pasha's regime was becoming pathologically amoral in its war aims and "Jihad", as Enver orchestrated the mass killing and forced marches of the minority Christian Armenian population in the empire. Fearing that they would side with the Russians (some, indeed, had already done so), and taking the message of "holy war" to its logical conclusion, the Armenians became the first (and primary) victims to the the "Drang Nach Osten" policy of Wilhelm, as implemented through Enver's "Jihad". The legacy that these two men sown was the defeat of the Russian Empire in the war, bringing about the conditions that brought the Bolsheviks to power.
Indeed, we can see that not only was World War Two the child of the First World War, but the Second World War's leading dictators, Hitler especially, seemed to share the same psychopathic personalities as Kaiser Wilhelm and Enver Pasha. Hitler's talk of "Lebensraum" or living space for the Germans, echoes much of the earlier dreams of Wilhelm's "Drang Nach Osten" (Drive To The East") at the expense of Russia and Britain, and Enver's dreams of a pan-Turkic empire.
In the end, in the short term at least, both Wilhelm and Enver got off relatively lightly at the end of the war. Wilhelm was accepted exile in Holland, and died there of natural causes; Enver and his cohorts escaped Turkey before they could be hung by the new, pro-Western Sultan in 1918 - to be eventually killed by Armenian nationalists a few years later.
In that sense, we can see that Germany and Turkey's involvement in the First World War (as well as its build-up) was by and large due to the personalities of two men: Wilhelm and Enver.
Both mentally unstable and psychopathic, their countries' share in the horrors of the First World War can be primarily attributed to them. As we know now that the longer-term effects of that war led to the rise of Nazi Germany and (indirectly) to Bolshevik Russia/ The Soviet Union, these two men have a long, dark legacy.
There are many factors that fed the tensions that led up to the First World War, which resulted in a Balkan crisis caused by Serbian terrorists spiraling out of control. However, the chaos that ensued within their nations' own boundaries, and the chaos they caused to others, are primarily the result of these two men's personalities: Wilhelm for ruling the German Empire with a cohort of like-minded amoral megalomaniacs; Enver for hijacking the Ottoman Empire to satisfy his personal vanity and reckless thirst for conquest, taking his country, like Wilhelm, to its self-destruction.
These two deeply-flawed individuals were therefore shared much of the blame for four years of chaos; along with two other psychopaths, Hitler and Stalin, these four were primarily to blame for the majority of human misery caused in the twentieth century: a century of historical events ultimately caused by the "criminal" mind.
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