A year or so after George W. Bush invaded Iraq, there was an election where Iraqis voted for the first time. Bush proclaimed how great this was because “the universal desire of mankind is freedom.” My all-time favorite history professor via The Great Courses responded “Hogwash. The universal desire of men is POWER.”
Throughout human history, men (and a very few women) have invested their all to be seen as The Leader. And they have invested the all of their followers to make it happen. The most visible sign of power has been the amount of land and number of people one can dominate. The “great men” in history have essentially been those who were most effective at killing and overpowering other human beings. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan and Napolean all come to mind. Julius Caesar, for example, estimated that the forces he commanded killed some 1.2 million people, mainly in his 8-year campaign to conquer Gaul (France). At its peak, the Roman Empire extended over 3,000 miles east to west and contained about 1.9 million square miles (MSqM). In a period of 120 years, the Muslim Empire went from the control of a single city to an empire that was 4,000 miles wide and some 2.5 MSqM). The alltime empire winner was Ghengis Khan who started with nothing and in 90 years, the Mongol Empire dominated 9 MSqM) and slaughtered approximately 10% of the population of the world. (Napolean only managed to conquer 0.81 MSqM.)
During the second half of the 19th and early 20th century, several factors combined to abnormally slake the lust for empire and were factors in bringing on WWI. First was the philosophy of Darwinism about the survival of the fittest. The full title of his book is: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races. So which nation or people were the fittest favored race? There were three jealous cousins who were all monarchs at the same time. One in particular, Wilhelm II, the Kaiser of Germany, believed his people were the best of the bunch. (So, that concept did not start with Adolph Hitler.) His cousin, George V of Great Britain was the king of the largest empire in the history of the world (over 13 MSqM.) So, George certainly had some bragging rights. The third cousin, Nicolas, was the Tsar of the proud Russians. How to prove who was the favored race? Go to war and let the best man and his team win. A third unusual factor was the Ottoman Empire. At one time, the OE had controlled over 2 MSq M including much of Central Europe up to the outskirts of Vienna. During the 19th century it began unravelling. The British and French had plucked off parts of the OE, particularly in North Africa. Other areas such as Greece declared and won their independence. But the heart remained in tack and the absolute jewel was the bridge between Europe and Asia – Istanbul on the Bosporus. Every Russian leader since Peter the Great had yearned to control the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. It was their only warm water sea lane to the rest of the world and well worth fighting for. Of course, Germany and Great Britain did not want Russia to have it.
Something else worth mentioning is the Franco Prussian War in 1870-71. It was a disaster for France – Emperor Napoleon III was captured and Paris taken. The two men who scored biggest on the empire building power game were Prussian Chancellor Bismark and Prussian King Wilhelm I. They brought under Prussia’s control essentially all of the small kingdoms in what is now Germany, and they also took from France the region of Alsace-Lorraine. To boot, they made France pay a huge indemnity. How sweet and intoxicating winning the empire game must have been for Otto and Wilhelm. How jealous it made their rivals.
Meanwhile, the lethality of the weapons of war were exponentially increasing. When egos would eventually come to blows, over 15 million people would be killed.
Go to home page of this blog to find additional essays: https://respectfulpointsandcounterpoints.com/
To return to my Facebook page and make comments: https://www.facebook.com/David.Treppendahl