What Do Vikings, Communists, and Klingons Have in Common?

Chapter 5.5: Nazis and Mongols and Spartans, OH MY!

Why this book | Title Page | Table of Contents
Preface | Introduction
PART 1
Chapter 1 (1.1) (1.2) | Chapter 2 (2.1) (2.2) (2.3) | Chapter 3 (3.1) (3.2) (3.3) (3.4) (3.5) (3.6)
PART 2
Chapter 4 (4.1) (4.2) (4.3) (4.4) (4.5) | Chapter 5 (5.1) (5.2) (5.3) (5.4) (5.5) | Chapter 6
PART 3
Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14
PART 4
Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 |
PART 5
Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Conclusion
Appendix | Works Cited

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5.5
Metrics of calumny

• Military conquest and imperialism

• Valorization of martial greatness

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Metrics of calumny, cont’d

Military conquest and imperialism

Another example of the casuistry associated with the Marxist continuum goes something like this:

• The Nazis and fascists were bent on military conquest

• Fascism and Nazism are right-wing (Marxist intellectuals told us so—it must be true.)
  
  ∴ Inclination towards military conquest is a right-wing phenomenon

Even a surface knowledge of history (or basic logic) should give the lie to this assertion, and it almost seems silly to have to take it on. However, in the interests of thoroughness…

For most of the last half-century, modern liberals have generally been more likely to oppose, rather than to support, armed conflict.¹ Historical memory being short, it seems as though it has ever been thus. And yet their ideological and political progenitors (twentieth-century Progressives, e.g.) were rabidly militaristic. 

And on the opposite side of that same coin…

For most of the last half-century, conservatives have been more likely to support than to oppose military action. And yet there was a time when their ideological forebears were isolationist and anti-war. (And in very recent years, many conservatives have stared moving back in a more isolationist and even anti-war direction.)

Many ideologies, parties, and forms of government are capable of being more or less truculent at any one time. The world has known monarchs who sought conquest and monarchs who just wanted to be left alone. There have been communist counties that turned their attentions inward and communist countries that cast an envious gaze towards their neighbors. Even modern representative democracies, while putatively less likely to start wars of pure conquest, engage in a fair amount of military conflict.

As discussed in chapter 1, the USSR was truculent and imperialist. On a scale that measures degree of military belligerence, we would have to place them on the same end as the Nazis, the Vikings, and the tzars they replaced.

As a primary unit of measure, this is useless—it tells us nothing definitive about any ideology, party, or nation…

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