The Enduring Insanity of Western and English Civilizations Post-WWI
Part two of two
Make no mistake, the very same forces which drove us to World War I and World War Two, into the Cold War and the GWOT after. Are the very same forces which have forced the war in Ukraine in which more than a million Ukrainian men have died and more than 100,000 Russian men. A fate these same Resentfuls’ forces are seeking for all the men of the Western and English Civilizations!
1. WWI as the Onset of Civilizational Insanity: A Psychological Cataclysm
Claim: The industrialized carnage of WWI shattered the collective psyche of Western and English Civilizations, inducing a state of metaphorical "insanity" marked by dissociation from rationality and morality.
Clarification:
The term "insanity" encapsulates a civilizational breakdown in the face of mechanized horror. Trenches, machine guns, and poison gas rendered war impersonal yet omnipresent, creating a dissonance between pre-war ideals of honor and the grotesque reality of mass death. This rupture is akin to individual trauma magnified across societies, where traditional narratives of progress and heroism collapsed.
In-Depth Analysis:
Psychological Frameworks:
Shell Shock and Collective Trauma: The war produced an epidemic of "shell shock" (now PTSD), a physical manifestation of psychological fracture. Historian Ben Shephard (A War of Nerves, 2000) argues that this condition symbolized a broader societal inability to process trauma. The term "shell shock" itself became a metaphor for civilizations "shocked" into dysfunction.
Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents: Freud’s post-war writings (1930) posited that civilization represses primal instincts, but WWI’s brutality exposed this repression as fragile. The war’s violence, he suggested, revealed humanity’s latent savagery, destabilizing faith in Enlightenment rationality.
Cultural Responses:
Modernist Art and Fragmentation: Movements like Dadaism and Surrealism rejected coherence, mirroring the fractured psyche. Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto (1918) declared, “I destroy the drawers of the brain,” reflecting a rejection of pre-war logic.
Literary Disillusionment: Beyond All Quiet on the Western Front, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) depicted a world "falling apart," its fragmented structure mirroring societal disintegration.
Historical Nuance:
Contrast with Pre-War Optimism: The 1910 Encyclopædia Britannica hailed the 20th century as an era of "peace and prosperity." By 1919, this optimism lay in ruins, replaced by Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918), which framed civilizations as organic entities destined to decay.
2. Loss of Leaders and Warriors: The Aristocracy’s Bloodletting
Claim: The decimation of Europe’s aristocratic and martial elite created a leadership vacuum filled by mercantile pragmatists, accelerating cultural amnesia.
Clarification:
The "Lost Generation" was not merely a demographic loss but a severing of lineage. Hereditary nobles, trained in governance and steeped in cultural traditions, were replaced by bureaucrats and financiers prioritizing efficiency over legacy.
In-Depth Analysis:
Case Study: British Peerage:
Statistics: Over 20% of British aristocrats aged 18–35 died in the war. Families like the Cecils (masters of Hatfield House) lost multiple heirs, eroding their political influence.
Cultural Impact: The decline of the "gentleman-officer" ideal, exemplified by Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry, left a void filled by figures like Winston Churchill—a self-made statesman lacking ancestral gravitas.
Economic Shifts:
Rise of the Merchant Class: Post-war reconstruction prioritized industrialists (e.g., Alfred Mond, founder of ICI) over landowners. The 1922 Rothermere Press editorial declared, “The age of the aristocrat is dead; long live the engineer.”
Philosophical Underpinnings:
Nietzsche’s Übermensch in Crisis: The aristocracy’s fall mirrored Nietzsche’s warning that without transcendent leaders, society would succumb to mediocrity. Max Weber’s Politics as a Vocation (1919) lamented the rise of “specialists without spirit.”
3. Moral Collapse: The Hypocrisy of Civilizational Superiority
Claim: WWI exposed the moral bankruptcy of Western claims to enlightenment, as colonial greed and industrial slaughter rendered notions of “civilized” warfare obsolete.
Clarification:
The war’s justification—defending democracy—clashed with its imperialist roots (e.g., the Sykes-Picot Agreement) and atrocities like the Armenian Genocide, which Allied powers tacitly ignored.
In-Depth Analysis:
Colonial Complicity:
Resource Exploitation: African and Asian colonies were coerced into supplying troops and materiel. Over 1 million Indians fought for Britain, yet the 1919 Amritsar Massacre revealed the brutality underpinning imperial “duty.”
Racial Hierarchies: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of White Folk (1920) condemned the war as a “white man’s quarrel,” highlighting the hypocrisy of fighting for freedom while enforcing colonialism.
Ethical Philosophy Post-WWI:
Existential Nihilism: Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre later argued that WWI annihilated moral absolutes, leaving individuals adrift in a meaningless universe.
Pacifist Movements: Bertrand Russell’s imprisonment for anti-war activism underscored the clash between state morality and individual conscience.
Contradictions in Memory:
Monuments vs. Reality: The Cenotaph in London (1920) honored the dead but obscured the war’s futility. Veterans like Erich Maria Remarque mocked such symbolism, writing, “No one talks of the war, but no one forgets it.”
4. Clinical Depression Beyond the 1920s: The Illusion of Recovery
Claim: The Roaring Twenties masked a deeper societal malaise, culminating in the Great Depression—a somatic manifestation of unresolved trauma.
Clarification:
The 1920s’ hedonism was not genuine recovery but a collective dissociative episode, akin to a trauma survivor oscillating between numbness and hyperactivity.
In-Depth Analysis:
Economic Precursors:
War Debts and Hyperinflation: Germany’s 1923 hyperinflation (prices doubling every 3.7 days) eroded trust in institutions. The 1924 Dawes Plan deferred reckoning, creating a false stability.
Stock Market Speculation: The 1929 crash mirrored the psychological concept of “manic defense”—a flight into risk-taking to avoid despair.
Cultural Escapism:
Jazz Age Decadence: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) portrayed the era’s “vast carelessness,” where parties masked spiritual emptiness.
Cinematic Fantasy: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) allegorized societal fragmentation, with elites and workers inhabiting disjointed worlds.
Psychological Parallels:
Freud’s Repression Theory: The 1920s’ exuberance mirrored repressed trauma resurfacing as economic collapse—a societal “return of the repressed.”
5. Enabling Atrocities and WWII: The Legacy of Unaddressed Trauma
Claim: Moral exhaustion from WWI left Western civilizations ill-equipped to confront totalitarianism, enabling Stalin, Hitler, and Mao.
Clarification:
The interwar period saw democracies paralyzed by guilt (e.g., British appeasement) and economic myopia, while authoritarianism offered false certitudes.
In-Depth Analysis:
Case Study: The Treaty of Versailles:
Humiliation as Fuel: John Maynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) warned that punitive reparations would breed vengeance. Hitler’s rise exploited this, framing WWII as a redress of WWI’s “stab in the back.”
Colonial Blind Spots: While condemning Nazi expansion, Britain and France suppressed independence movements in India and Algeria, undermining moral authority.
Ideological Vacuum:
Communism’s Appeal: The Bolsheviks framed WWI as capitalist folly, attracting disillusioned Western intellectuals like George Orwell, who later critiqued Stalinism in Animal Farm.
Fascist Aesthetics: Mussolini and Hitler revived militaristic pageantry, offering a simulacrum of lost aristocratic order.
Philosophical Reflections:
Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism: Arendt traced totalitarianism to the collapse of Enlightenment frameworks post-WWI, where “rootlessness” made masses susceptible to ideological extremes.
6. Failure to Confront the Past: The Cult of Forgetting
Claim: Commemoration without introspection has allowed WWI’s wounds to fester, perpetuating cycles of violence.
Clarification:
Rituals like Armistice Day focus on sacrifice, not culpability, fostering a victimhood narrative that absolves civilizations of accountability.
In-Depth Analysis:
Memory Politics:
British Cenotaph vs. German Volkstrauertag: While Britain glorified the dead, Germany’s post-war memorials (e.g., Tannenberg Memorial) mythologized defeat, feeding revanchist myths.
Educational Omissions: A 2018 UK study found that only 34% of GCSE history syllabi cover WWI’s colonial dimensions, perpetuating Eurocentric narratives.
Intergenerational Trauma:
Veteran Silence: Many soldiers, like J.R.R. Tolkien, refused to discuss the war, passing unresolved trauma to descendants. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings allegorized this through Mordor’s lingering shadow.
Therapeutic Frameworks:
Identity Redevelopment: Steenkamp, M. M., et al. (2020). "Identity-Based Interventions for PTSD: A Scoping Review." Clinical Psychology Review, 81, 101915. Reviews interventions targeting identity disruption in PTSD, including mindfulness, narrative, and community-based approaches.
Role of Identity Destruction in PTSD: Larsen, S. E., & Berenbaum, H. (2017). "Identity Dissociation, Trauma, and the Development of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder." Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 9(1), 75–82. Examines how addressing identity fragmentation (e.g., through cognitive restructuring) reduces PTSD symptoms.
7. Survival Through Truth and Values: A Path to Sanity
Claim: Reconnecting with democratic and humanistic values—through education, art, and institutional reform—offers a antidote to civilizational decline.
Clarification:
“Core values” must transcend vague notions of “freedom” to include accountability, reparative justice, and intercultural dialogue.
In-Depth Analysis:
Concrete Proposals:
Curriculum Reform: Integrate colonial and working-class perspectives into WWI education, as done in Germany’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past).
Art as Catharsis: Projects like Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red (2014 UK poppy installation) could evolve to include colonial soldiers’ stories.
Institutional Accountability:
Reparations: France and Belgium’s ongoing extraction of Congolese resources echo WWI’s extractive economies. A modern Marshall Plan for former colonies could address historical debts.
Philosophical Foundations:
Jürgen Habermas’s Communicative Rationality: Rebuilding societal coherence requires inclusive dialogue, where diverse voices co-create a shared moral framework.
Articulated Line of Reasoning
WWI was not merely a war but a metaphysical rupture—a point where Western and English Civilizations stared into the abyss of their own making. The industrialized slaughter, the loss of a generation’s nobility, and the moral hypocrisy exposed by murderous corporate and banking exploitation collectively induced a psychosis. Societies, like traumatized individuals, oscillated between denial (the 1920s) and self-destruction (WWII). The unaddressed guilt of Versailles, the rise of totalitarianism, and the persistent glorification of empire are symptoms of this untreated malaise.
Today’s crises—populism, societal collapse, technological alienation—are modern phantoms of WWI’s unresolved trauma. Survival demands not nostalgia for a mythical past, but a rigorous archaeology of memory: excavating the war’s buried truths, from the trenches of Flanders to the rubber plantations of the Congo. Only by integrating these shadows can these civilizations reclaim the moral and psychological coherence required to navigate an uncertain future.
It is essential we reflect on the cultural, intellectual, and ethical foundations that once propelled our civilization—rooted in ideals of individual sovereignty, private property, and the sharing of power—to recognize how far we have strayed from those principles in an age marked by endless conflict, moral rot, and the erosion of our sanity and shared purpose.
To honor the legacy of the English-Speaking Peoples and our Civilization and separately the European Civilization, we must confront those among us who keep us insane in order to foster and perpetuate, through lies and deceit, the genocidal cycles of violence and exploitation made possible by the power sharing structures have for more than a century now normalized wage, tax and debt slavery, division, dehumanization, war and state sanctioned genocide.
We must wake up and remember who we are!
We must wake up and remember who the enemy is!
For they are among us seeking with all that they are to genocide us!
Partial Bibliography
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books, 1992.
Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of White Folk. Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Schocken Books, 1951.
Shephard, Ben. A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century. Harvard University Press, 2000.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings. Allen & Unwin, 1954.
Right now, you and LTC Murray are definitely the ones to pay attention to and I definitely am.
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