The Long Run

How do you defeat an ideologically-driven movement?
 
Why is it, for example, that in the world today, no government espouses National Socialism?  Why was there a second German war, but not a third?  Why is it that Nazi aggression is not a problem – or even a conceivable problem – in the world today?  Let us not imagine that it is because these were ideas that never commanded any popularity.  Hitler came to power, originally at least, through entirely constitutional means, and at the time, right-wing governments sympathetic to National Socialism.  The invasion of the Soviet Union was a multilateral effort supported, not only by Germans, but by Austrians, Romanians, Spaniards, Finns, Poles, Italians, and Hungarians, among others.  And yet, by the end of the war, Nazism had been repudiated by the German populace, every German government since 1945 has banned its advocacy, and no other world government has taken up Nazism, no matter how hostile to the United States or Western Europe.  What explains this?
 
The unhappy truth, or so I would argue, is that National Socialism was destroyed and renounced because, during the course of the Second World War, it became associated in the popular mind with death and devastation.  By the end of the war, with the Allies in Berlin, the message had been sent: if you espouse Nazism, your cities will be bombed, your countries will be destroyed, invaded, and occupied, and your leaders will be tried and executed.  It did not matter whether any individual German happened to support the Nazi regime: they became guilty by association.  The mere toleration of Nazism became associated with military retaliation on an overwhelming scale. 
 
Why, for example, was there no Nazi “insurgency” after the German surrender?  The reason is this: it was clear to everyone in Germany that if a discontented Nazi had dared to pick up a rifle and start taking shots at Allied soldiers, then the war would simply had been renewed and that disgruntled Nazi, along with everyone around him, would have been wiped out.  It should not imagined that every German was reconciled or happy with defeat and occupation.  But what they had learned was that the consequences of using Nazism as a weapon of resistance were infinitely more terrible than what was being resisted.  Militant fascism was renounced because it had become synonymous, for the average German, with complete defeat: as an ideology, it had been humiliated and discredited.
 
Imagine, then, the following scenario.  The United States announces a new policy: any village or town in Afghanistan suspected of harboring Taliban will be destroyed without discrimination.  Any village or town in Afghanistan that cooperates with the United States in suppressing the Taliban will be helped.  How many villages would be wiped out by B-52s before the Taliban would become pariahs, and people were chasing them out of town with pitchforks?  How long until the fear of American airpower became much greater than the appeal of anything the Taliban might have to offer, just as fear of the American Third Army had become stronger than fear of the Gestapo in Germany by 1945?
 
In reaction to all my talk of ruthlessness and total war, some will no doubt say the following: “But that is inhuman, what you are suggesting.  That we, the most affluent, educated society in world history should have found a better way of destroying our ideological enemies is only to be expected.  For, you see, it is we who are to blame for terrorism.  In its essentials, after all, terrorism is a grassroots reaction to social despair.  We are talking about societies where poverty is endemic, where tragedy and crime present constant threats, where lack of education creates intellectual vacuums for fundamentalist ideologies.  Of course such societies will breed the kind of discontent that will manifest itself in violent attacks upon those who are perceived to be responsible for the deleterious conditions, namely, the wealthy nations whose economic and political policies drive the forces of globalization.  Therefore, in order to root out terrorism, we must work to eliminate poverty and raise the general standards of human health and development in these countries.”
 
I reply: faced with a country whose rulers have ideological objections to every accepted method of human development and social modernization, be it the emancipation of women, access to modern medicine, birth control, secular education, open markets, freedom of religion and expression, democratic government – how is one to stimulate human development?  Other than a ruthless association of the ruling ideology with military destruction – the only method, so far as I can see, which has worked in the past – what is to be done?
 
War is organized murder: here, more than anywhere, one can least afford to be romantic.  One does not wage organized murder against people “for their own good.”  The Allies did not go to war with Germany to “liberate the German people from Nazism.”  They went to war with Germany in order to destroy whatever appeal Nazism had by imparting the idea that the only fruits of Nazism were complete defeat and humiliation.  Once that message had been sent, then Germany was democratized and made prosperous with Allied humanitarian aid. 
 
But then, we have become better than that.  We have become more civilized, more humane.
 
Let us only hope that the Taliban have as well.

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