General Friedrich
von Bernhardi, The Next War
Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849-1930) was a successful officer and
influential writer on military topics. Becoming increasing
impatient with the Kaiser’s government for not being even more
aggressive in the diplomatic crises that preceded the outbreak
of World War I in 1914, he echoed the positions of the extremely
nationalist and militarist Pan-German League. He repeats many
of the themes that occur in the passages from Treitzsche and
Moltke, but the arguments are now couched in terms of
pseudo-Darwinian ideas about the survival of the fittest that
presage the ideas of Hitler.
| This desire for
peace has rendered most civilized nations anemic, and marks
a decay of spirit and political courage such as has often
been shown by a race of Epigoni. "It has always been,"
H[einrich] von Treitschke tells us, "the weary, spiritless,
and exhausted ages which have played with the dream of
perpetual peace. . . .”
This aspiration is
directly antagonistic to the great universal laws which rule
all life. War is a biological necessity of the first
importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind
which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an
unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every
advancement of the race, and therefore all real
civilization. "War is the father of all things."
(Heraclitus) The sages of antiquity long before Darwin
recognized this.
The struggle for
existence is, in the life of Nature, the basis of all
healthy development. All existing things show themselves to
be the result of contesting forces. So in the life of man
the struggle is not merely the destructive, but the
life-giving principle. "To supplant or to be supplanted is
the essence of life," says Goethe, and the strong life gains
the upper hand. The law of the stronger holds good
everywhere. Those forms survive which are able to procure
themselves the most favorable conditions of life, and to
assert themselves in the universal economy of Nature. The
weaker succumb. This struggle is regulated and restrained by
the unconscious sway of biological laws and by the interplay
of opposite forces. In the plant |
|
|
world and the
animal world this process is worked out in unconscious
tragedy. In the human race it is consciously carried out,
and regulated by social ordinances. The man of strong will
and strong intellect tries by every means to assert himself,
the ambitious strive to rise, and in this effort the
individual is far from being guided merely by the
consciousness of right. The life-work and the life-struggle
of many men are determined, doubtless, by unselfish and
ideal motives, but to a far greater extent the less noble
passions--craving for possessions, enjoyment and honor, envy
and the thirst for revenge--determine men's actions. Still
more often, perhaps, it is the need to live which brings
down even natures of a higher mold into the universal
struggle for existence and enjoyment. . . . |
War will furnish such a
nation with favorable vital conditions, enlarged possibilities
of expansion and widened influence, and thus promote the
progress of mankind; for it is clear that those intellectual and
moral factors which insure superiority in war are also those
which render possible a general progressive development. They
confer victory because the elements of progress are latent in
them. Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke
the growth of healthy budding elements, and a universal
decadence would follow. . . .
Struggle is, therefore, a
universal law of Nature, and the instinct of self-preservation
which leads to struggle is acknowledged to be a natural
condition of existence. "Man is a fighter." Self-sacrifice is a
renunciation of life, whether in the existence of the individual
or in the life of states, which are agglomerations of
individuals. The first and paramount law is the assertion of
one's own independent existence. By self-assertion alone can
the state maintain the conditions of life for its citizens, and
insure them the legal protection which each man is entitled to
claim from it. This duty of self-assertion is by no means
satisfied by the mere repulse of hostile attacks; it includes
the obligation to assure the possibility of life and development
to the whole body of the nation embraced by the state.
Strong, healthy, and
flourishing nations increase in numbers. From a given moment
they require a continual expansion of their frontiers, they
require new territory for the accommodation of their surplus
population. Since almost every part of the globe is inhabited,
new territory must, as a rule be obtained at the cost of its
possessors--that is today, by conquest, which thus becomes a law
of necessity.
The right of conquest
is universally acknowledged. . . .
Source:
Friedrich von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War (New York,
1914), pp. 16-20, 85-105, 114,167-82. Translated by Allen H.
Powles.
|