Changing Perspectives on Civilization Gerry OShea
People often
ask how Germany, home of so many great artists and writers, could also have
produced the Nazis with their record of horrendous cruelty and inhumanity. How
could a culture that generated the three B’s, Brahms, Bach and Beethoven also
claim Goebbels, Himmler and Adolf Hitler?
At the
Nuremberg trials, the American prosecutor, Robert Jackson, told the judges that
“the real complaining party at your bar is civilization.” The trial heard that
the Nazi regime had completely discarded widely-accepted standards of decency
and civility.
Joseph
Goebbels, the Third Reich Minister for Propaganda, proclaimed that the Nazis
were defending Europe against the pagan Bolshevik hordes coming from the east.
He also condemned “British Barbarism” for bombing historic German cities and
towns, describing these actions as “English assassination of European culture.”
Hans Frank,
the governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland, declared that his aim was “to
elevate the Polish people to the honor of European civilization.” He is
remembered for looting Polish art collections, banning performances of Chopin
and sending millions of Jews to death camps.
On the
political front, the terrible photographs of emaciated prisoners and the
survivors’ piteous stories from the death camps cried out for revenge. However,
George Marshall, the brilliant American Secretary of State, while approving the
trials of the leading culprits, decided that the mass punitive approach adopted
at the Paris Peace Conference after the Great War was a dismal failure and
should not be repeated. The arguments for punishing the Germans in 1918 may
have been convincing but from a pragmatist’s perspective this strategy led
directly to the growth of extreme nationalism, opening the door to fascism.
Marshall
feared that a humiliated Germany would again re-emerge and assert itself as a
communist power aligned with Russia, or they might listen again to another
deranged voice like Hitler’s. Instead, he successfully initiated a magnanimous
plan, still bearing his name and honored by many historians as the outstanding diplomatic
and humanitarian achievement of the 20th century.
American dollars
flowed into Germany and other European countries to re-build their
infrastructure and jumpstart their economies. All recipient countries had to
accept the principles and practices of a liberal democracy where the rule of
law prevails and the people freely choose their leaders.
The
Americans did not see this as just an economic project. Allen Dulles, head of
the CIA, left no doubt about the idealistic dimension of the Marshall Plan:
“Our task is to save Europe for Western civilization.”
The
re-civilizing of Germany was made somewhat more plausible when it was
established that humane standards were already part of German law, so the
defendants in Nuremberg could not assert ignorance of existing legal strictures
on the central issue of the treatment of prisoners. Affirmation of individual
responsibility was an important civilized legacy of these trials.
The British played
their part in the re-education plans to help to release an appreciation of admirable
culture from the Germanic past. In this program from London, Beethoven and
Goethe were elevated while Bismarck and the Kaiser were demoted.
It is worth
noting and highly ironic that the recent Brexit debate in Britain, promoted
mainly by strong nationalists in the Tory Party, was based on the
conservatives’ dismay at German leadership of the European Union (EU). They have the biggest economy in the EU and,
consequently, the strongest voice at all the meetings in Brussels. This left
the British Tories highly resentful of playing second fiddle to a country they felt
needed to be re-introduced to the benefits of civilization a mere sixty years earlier.
Christianity
in all its forms is a central part of the European heritage. The cathedrals, universities
and monasteries all over Europe are testaments to this vibrant part of the
culture. Catholic-Protestant reconciliation in the 1950’s underpinned the
Christian Democratic idea. De Gasperi, Christian Democrat and Italian prime
minister in nine successive governments after 1945, commented succinctly
“Christianity lies at the origin of this European civilization.”
Spain and Portugal under Franco and Salazar kept the fascist
flag flying as Catholic dictatorships. They sided with the West during the Cold
War, and they finally yielded to the democratic surge after the deaths of the
two Iberian autocrats in the middle of the 1970’s.
The round-up
of Jews and gypsies and their extermination in death camps, horrific acts
unmatched in modern warfare, raised the question about the Christians, who were
almost entirely marked absent during the holocaust. Where were the church voices
crying out against mass murder? Was this the vaunted Christian culture and
European civilization?
Some individual
priests and ministers performed heroic work in resisting the tyranny all around
them. However, Christians were sucked into the maelstrom of anti-Semitism. Even
Pope Pius X11 shirked his duty to call out the horrible immorality engulfing
Europe.
Jews,
gradually recovering from the trauma of the Nazi massacre, began asking
questions about their core belief that they are a chosen people going back to
Abraham. Where was the covenant with the personal God who led them out of the
desert and had promised that he would always act as their guide as long as they
honored his commandments? The enormity of the Shoah eliminated easy answers.
Irish
peasants who watched hundreds of thousands die of starvation in the 1840’s
asked the same question about God. Where was he when hunger stalked the
countryside? One stream of Catholic culture suggested that God had abandoned
them because of their sins.
Central to
the forced European colonization of poor countries in Asia and Africa was a
common story that these advanced western countries came bringing the gift of a
superior civilization. The natives, often referred to as savages, were always
viewed as inferior to their new white bosses.
This civilization
project included missionaries who gave their stamp of approval to the invasions
by the home countries. They preached a new religion about salvation while
dismissing what they called the native superstitions built around local pagan gods.
The United
Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was founded
in 1945 and became increasingly important in trumpeting cultural achievements
outside of Europe. It invented the World Heritage Sites, demanding, for
instance, the preservation of ancient Egyptian monuments and artefacts
threatened by the building of the Aswan Dam in the 1960’s. As these important
sites proliferated around the world, the identification of civilization with
Christianity was greatly diminished.
The Soviet
Union limited good art to expressions of conformity to their narrow understanding
of a socialist state. However, it was George Orwell, a proud socialist from a
different school of thought, whose two most-famous novels, “1984,” and “Animal
Farm,” were, first and foremost, directed against his fellow-leftists who
failed to understand the monstrous Stalinist culture, bereft of all tolerance
of difference.
In a
highly-acclaimed 1969 television series, Civilization, Kenneth Clarke
asked “What is civilization?” He responded to his own question by saying “I
don’t know but I think I will recognize it when I see it.” Positive cultural
emanations in every society are a good start in grappling with questions about
high culture, but Clarke’s point about the difficulty of agreeing a finer
definition than that still remains valid.
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