NO BACH, NO GOETHE, NO MERCY:

China's course parallels old Germany's (James P. Pinkerton, March 15, 2005, Newsday)

The country had been battered and conquered for centuries, until it finally pulled itself together, politically, militarily and economically. Flexing its newly developed muscles, the rising empire threatened its neighbors, motivating a counter-alliance.

If that sounds like China today, it also sounds like Germany yesterday. The parallels are instructive - and depressing.

Starting in the 16th century, Germany was devastated by chronic conflict. Finally strongly unified after 1871, the nation compensated for past humiliations, and then overcompensated. The Germans said they merely wanted to find "a place in the sun," but under Kaiser Wilhelm II, German power grew rapidly and was handled recklessly. As a result, other European powers lined up against the Second Reich, and war was inevitable. It became actual in 1914.

Yet, even though Germany was defeated and the kaiser deposed at the end of World War I, the arc of its power was so great that its expansionism continued, under a completely political system, until it was checked for good in World War II.

Now it seems that China is retracing at least some of Germany's fateful steps: first its decline, then its rise.

There are obviously many more important differences--China's demographic crises, continued economic backwardness, its lack of a unifying theology, etc.--but the most important one is that America and England only reluctantly fought the Germans, whose culture they respected (too much). After touring a liberated concentration camp, Ike famously snarled at a couple of G.I.s: "Still having trouble hating them." Internal Army surveys had shown that even most of the armed forces--nevermind the general American population--didn't think we should even be fighting in Europe. In fact, in his new book, Demiocracy and Pop;ulism, John Lukacs argues that it is fortunate that Marxist Revolution failed in Germany and only succeeded in a backwater like Russia, else we in the West might have taken it seriously as a potential governing philosophy.

But where Germany was insulated by all of these cultural factors, China has no such buffers. It is more like an Imperial Japan, which Americans quite enjoyed incinerating. This is not to say that a president, especially not this president, would necessarily resort to nuclear weapons, but it does mean that he'd have plenty of leeway with the public if he decided to.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 15, 2005 12:38 PM