Schwertglauben - The German Compound Word for It

reproducible two page advertising supplement
Schwertglauben - The German Compound Word for It
The Germans have a compound word for it.
Zeitgeist, literally, time-spirit, or spirit of times. Weltschmerz, literally, world-pain, or pain of the world. Schadenfreude, literally, misfortune-joy, or joy in someone’s misfortune.
Let’s add another, Schwertglauben,, literally, sword-belief, or belief in the sword, per Wolfram Witte, The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality. The Germans have had a bit too much belief in the sword in their turbulent past, haven’t they? Are they the only ones? Consider a political cartoon of the mid-1960s, showing the signs:
1965- Get out of Vietnam
1975- Get out of the Phillipines
1985- Get out of Hawaii
1995- Get out of California
Schwertglauben can do that to you. It seems so logical, so beyond dispute. It poses as the great inexorable reality, but, as a reality check, it leaves a lot, much too much, to be desired.
The Vietnam War was a classic case of Schwertglauben. All that napalm, plastic shrapnel (not detectable by X-rays), B-52 carpet bombing, twice the bomb tonnage as dropped in WWII, search-and-destroy missions, herbi-cides,”destroy it in order to save it,” etc., somehow could not stop those pajama clad rice farmers from taking over the world, or at least Vietnam.
And still there is much residual Viernam Schwertglauben, even after three decades, a bit too reminiscent of the stab-in-the-back resentments that set the stage for Nazism.
How is Schwertglauben doing today? Wunderbar! It oozes from every pore of, “Stay the course,” and, “Don’t cut and run!” Ever since “Misson accomplished!” it has survived the failure to find WMDs, the failure to connect Saddam and Osama (as likely as Gloria Steinem and Jerry Falwell), and the Project for a New American Century’s plans to invade Iraq needing a “Pearl Harbor incident” to mobilize the public.
It even survived Andy Rooney’s dramatic reading on “60 Minutes” of, by guess who, not to mention the original printing,
“I firmly believed that we should not march into Baghdad. Our stated mission, as codified in UN resolutions, was a simple one- end the aggression, knock Iraq’s forces out of Kuwait, and restore Kuwait’s leaders. To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us, and make a broken tyrant into a latter-day Arab hero. It would have taken us way beyond the imprimatur of international law bestowed by the resolutions of the Security Council, assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinnable urban guerilla war. It could only plunge that part of the world into greater instability and destroy the credibility we were working so hard to reestablish.” George H.W. Bush, A World Transformed, 1998, p464
If Schwertglauben, can survive such blatant clobbering over the head, the following will be much too subtle, but that just goes to show its resilience as a belief system, as a first assumption. “Know your enemy,” goes the old military proverb, but Schwertglauben.is satisfied with anything that can be put on a boot camp poster. Anything is to show “they only understand force” is quite all right, however, as if Schwertglauben understands anything more than that, as if that were not a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fazwa Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why JIHAD Went Global, might not be the final, definitive account of jihad, apparently compiled without electronic sureveillance, but it just might prove the Dick Tuck saying that the best way to apy on a political campaign is to get on the mailing lest. Not only did he read jihadi writings, but he actually interviewed dozens of them. Not that it jibes with Schwertglauben , but it seems al Qaeda was largely discredited in the Muslim world prior to the Iraq invasion. That did for jihad about what the Russian invasion of Afghanistan did.
Chamberlain-style “appeasement” of Islamo-fascists is another recent staple of Schwertglau-ben, however, never mind the WWI reparations demands on Germany that sparked the horrendous inflation and paved the way for Hitler. That should be a lesson in fooling around with someone else’s country, even to Schwertglauben..
Schwertglauben’s close ideological cousins raise the specter of international government and blue-bereted “peacekeepers” putting down insurgency here. If that ever happens, however, there will be the common observation, here and elsewhere, “Taste of your own medicine!”
One definition of military victory is breaking the enemy’s will. Schwertglauben , with its insular, overbearing, pre-conceived notions has no idea if it is breaking the enemy’s will or inflaming it. If that will can only be expressed through tank columns or fleets of ships or planes, it has a fighting chance. If sapper attacks or suicide bombers can express it, Schwertglauben is only an Elmer Fudd chasing the wascally wabbit. Of course it can always complain about no-win wars.
This country was not founded on Schwertglau-ben. See the first few Federalist Papers as to why the Union was formed in the first place. If you have yet to be patriotic enough to read No. 6, let us partially correct that deficiency now:
"The causes of hostility among nations are innumerable. There are some which have a general and almost constant operation upon the collective bodies of society. Of this description are the love of power or the desire of pre-eminence and dominion- the jealousy of power, or the desire of equality and safety. There are others which have a more circumscribed though an equally operative influence within their spheres. Such are the rivalships and competitions between commercial nations. And there are others, not less numerous than either of the former, which take their origins entirely in private passions; in the attachments, enmities, interests, hopes, and fears of leading individuals in the communities of which they are members. Men of this class, whether the favorites of a king or of a people, have in too many instances abused the confidence they possessed; and assuming the pretext of some public motive, have not scrupled to sacrifice the national tranquility to personal advantage or personal gratification.
"The celebrated Pericles, in compliance with the resentments of a prostitute, at the expense of much of the blood and treasure of his countrymen, attacked, vanquished, and destroyed the city of the Samnians. The same man, stimulated by private pique against the Megarensians, another nation of Greece, or to avoid a prosecution with which he was threatened as an accomplice in a supposed theft of the statuary of Phidias, or to get rid of the accusations prepared to be brought against him for dissipating the funds of the state in the purchase of popularity, or trom a combination of all these causes, was the primitive author of that famous and fatal war, distinguished in the Grecian annals by the name of the Peloponnesian war; which, after various vicissitudes, intermis-sions, and renewals, terminated in the ruin of the Athenian Commonwealth."
Thucydides, “The Melian Dialogues,;” the victorious Athenians do what they can; the defeated Melians do what they must, would be
a giddy trip to Schwertglauben today. But we have just seen what happened to the Athenians, at least if Schwertglauben does not get in the way. How far have we fallen? A timeless commen-tary on human nature, Federalist No. 8 shows why we have tolerated so much Schwertglauben :
"... The perpetual menacings of danger oblige the government to be always prepared to repel it; its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense. The continual necessity for their services enhances the importance of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen. The military state becomes elevated over the civil. The inhabitants of territories, often the theatre of war, are unavoidably subjected to frequent infringements on their rights, which serve to weaken their sense of those rights; and by degrees the people are brought to consider the soldiery not only as their protectors but as their superiors. The transition from this disposition to that of considering them masters is neither remote nor difficult; but it is very difficult to prevail upon a people under such impressions to make a bold or effectual resistance to usurpations supported by the military power."
As Douglas MacArthur updated that in 1957:
“Our swollen budgets constantly have been misrepresented to the public. Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor- with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.”
In the interests of ideological balance, liberal tax and spend is a Schwertglauben on taxpayers. Unions have their Schwertglauben toward bosses and scabs, And see Galbraith, The Age of Uncer-tainty, on Hitler being the first Keynesian.
Das Schwert will be an unfortunate necessity for the forseeable future, but let us not make a belief system out of it. Let us take one of its more cogent lessons of recent decades, that ot precision- guided munitions. The closer a warhead lands to the target, the less explosive is needed to destroy it. Precision guidance is exactly what das Schwert needs in the larger context, evenn if it means opposing (!) the President. And not merely abroad, but protection of the innocent at home as well.
What if there was a vocal German movement about 1935 or so, pushing the notion, “Hey, Hitler, this Jew-stuff and war-stuff is blinking, blanking nuts. Cut it out, immediately if not sooner!”
That would have saved a lot of trouble, even if it encouraged Germany’s “enemies,” nicht wahr?
Or do we learn from history that we do not learn from history?
“For it is a truth, which the experience of all ages has attested, that the people are commonly most in danger when the means of injuring their rights are in the hands of those of whom they entertain the least suspicion.” Federalist 25
WHOLE ELEPHANT QUARTERLY
William F. Wendt, Jr. Editor and Publisher $5 per copy 10 for $35 hard currency accepted
wholelephant@yahoo.com
Copyright 2006 by William F. Wendt, Jr. permission granted to reproduce and distribute in whole this two page advertising supplement