As a scarred-but-stalwart believer in the criticality of the liberal arts for the health of a society, I nonetheless find myself questioning whether the post-WWII expansion of higher education—so powerfully positive for the sciences, practical skills, and the economy—wasn’t a disaster for our intellectual culture. Certainly, this vast employment and welfare system created millions of campus jobs for the perennially unsatisfied and practically incapable, but how shall we defend an educational environment that sees its primary mission as protecting young minds from competitive ideas? What should we make of a repressive cult of mediocrity that dismisses Shakespeare in favor of the fashionably aggrieved, then blames Jane Austen for imperialism?
Nowhere is this self-righteous levelling so dangerous as in history faculties. The daily rape of Clio, muse of history, by those who elevate opinions-paraded-as-theory over facts leaves our “educated” middle class unequipped to understand our country or the greater world. History matters. Facts matter. The quest for knowledge, rather than the search for justifications, is essential to our democracy; yet we have largely abandoned it to the tyranny of the cunning footnote.
One of the great lies now presented as unassailable truth is the grim (not Grimm’s) fairy tale that the requirement for Germany to pay reparations in the wake of the First World War created Hitler and Nazi Germany. This hoary nonsense is now accepted as a given, and not only by apologists for genocide.
This matters. Because we continue to hear warnings that, if ultimately forced to make peace, Russia must not face demands for reparations, lest we witness a repeat of Hitler’s rise with a Russian accent.
This counterfactual fearmongering would let Russia off the hook for beginning an utterly unprovoked war, raping, torturing, and slaughtering masses of civilians as an integral part of strategy, destroying hundreds of cities, towns, and villages, wrecking Ukraine’s economy, purposely destroying the essential infrastructure of daily life—and, not least, threatening the use of nuclear weapons. Such a peace would leave the perpetrator untouched, but for a temporary lack of authentic Big Macs.
Reparations payments to the victorious allies, to the extent they were paid, did not draw Hitler from the womb of a virgin Germany. By the time of Hitler’s consolidation of power, the German economy was growing, and domestic consumption was increasingly robust.
The Germans enraptured by Hitler had already conquered hyper-inflation and overcome mass unemployment. Reparations were dead words on wrinkled paper.
What enabled and abetted Hitler’s rise wasn’t war reparations but the prevarications and cowardice of Europe’s leaders. Even allowing for a global financial crisis (that did not much affect Germany), the continent’s key interwar leaders were craven. No potent statesman challenged Hitler. First, his public rhetoric went ignored. Then his Rhineland grab was excused. The Anschluss with Austria was rationalized away, and the seizure of then-Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland forgiven. Today, his laughing ghost hovers over the Caucasus and Trans-Caucasus, over Crimea, over the Donbass…
Hitler gripped power because no one slapped his hand away. Even as German forces converged on Poland’s frontiers, European leaders insisted that peace could still be gotten, if only the right words were spoken by men of good will at the conference table.
So, too, with Putin. As he rose to ever-greater power, employing ever-more-obvious aggression beyond Russia’s borders, his every action was excused, with establishment critics of Putin in the West (a rare breed) placated with a short list of worthless sanctions.
As Russia elevated a new Hitler, the West produced Neville Chamberlains by the dozen.
Now, at last, there is unity in the West. May it hold. Putin has been astonished and stymied. And Russia—the Russia that has colluded with him, that has embraced him, that even now supports his wanton butchery of a neighboring population—is as guilty as its leader.
No matter the make-up of its future government, Russia must pay broken-window-by-broken-window reparations to rebuild what it has gleefully destroyed.
If there are no consequences for current aggressors, there will be no deterrence for future aggressors.
We must not make a whore of history to comfort cowards. Begin with facts.
