The Worth of War (3 page)

Though initially successful, after several decades this imperial policy of conquest and annexation undermined the Inca state. By the end of the fifteenth century, the empire had come to occupy most of the arable land in the region, including the Central Andean coast and highlands. Further expansion meant penetrating the Amazonian rain forests east of the Andes Mountains. These forests were inhabited by fierce, primitive tribes who, along with the tropical heat and diseases, took an enormous toll on Incan armies sent to secure the region. Such land as could be occupied, moreover, proved difficult to cultivate and impossible to administer from the Inca capital of Cuzco. The cost of subduing and garrisoning these lands was far greater than the revenue they produced for the royal treasury, leading to a fiscal crisis for the crown. The military demands of garrisoning the new territories, moreover, depleted Incan strength in other portions of the realm, opening the way for many revolts among subject peoples. In these ways, the program of military expansion, launched because of a peculiar religious belief, proved ruinous.

In the early sixteenth century, the newly installed emperor Huáscar attempted to solve the problem of the royal mummies once and for all by stripping deceased rulers of their property rights. Huáscar declared that the mummies should be buried and their lands taken over by the state. This decree was, of course, deeply resented by the panaqa, which had much to lose from the elimination of the property rights of the
dead rulers. Accusing Huáscar of blasphemy and heresy, some members of the panaqa launched a revolt and sought to replace the emperor with his half-brother, Atahuallpa, who controlled the Incan army in Ecuador. The resulting civil war lasted three years and was won by Atahuallpa, but, before he could be crowned, Francisco Pizarro and his band of 168 adventurers arrived. Pizarro was able to exploit the continuing political and ethnic divisions in the already-shattered empire to bring it under Spanish control. Over the next decade, the Spaniards hunted and destroyed the royal mummies, which they saw as symbols of Incan resistance to Spanish rule.

Thus, decades of warfare prompted by a species of magical thinking undermined the empire of the Incas and left it vulnerable to conquest by a handful of conquistadors. The empire's endless wars may have made sense on the basis of purely internal political and religious considerations, but it was objectively foolish.

During roughly the same period of time, the Aztec empire located far to the north of the Inca domain was also engaged in endless warfare prompted by magical thinking. In the fifteenth century, the Aztecs expanded from the island of Tenochtitlan in Lake Texcoco to the control of a large empire centered in what is now the southern portion of Mexico. Like that of the Incas, Aztec imperial expansion was driven by magical thinking. The Aztecs believed that they were the chosen people of the sun, and that it was their duty to keep the sun alive by providing him with human blood—in particular, the blood of captured warriors, “the precious liquid,” that would strengthen the sun and save the universe from destruction.
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The source of this liquid, needed by the priests in large quantities, was the sacrifice of living victims, generally prisoners captured in war. Since major ceremonies required the sacrifice of thousands, even tens of thousands of persons, Aztec armies were compelled to engage in constant warfare and expansion of the borders of the empire to capture the requisite numbers of enemy warriors.

As in the case of the Incas, these beliefs had a certain internal political validity, legitimating the power and unity of the state and its noble and priestly classes while enhancing the loyalty of the common
people. The higher classes also shared in the booty brought back, along with captives, by victorious Aztec armies. The blood of the captives fed the sun while their possessions fed the empire's economy. By the sixteenth century, though, the empire's expansion had slowed as it reached its geographical and logistical limits. Military campaigns fought at the empire's far southern and northern borders were enormously expensive and produced few captives and little booty. Conquests in these distant regions, moreover, were too far from the imperial capital to be sustained administratively or logistically.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Emperor Moctezuma II called a halt to futile efforts to expand the empire's borders and directed his armies, instead, to attack and seize sacrificial captives from the several large, quasi-independent kingdoms within the borders of the empire that had resisted incorporation into the Aztec realm. These enclaves included the mountainous region of Guerrero, the populous Mixtex states of Totopec, and several others. These kingdoms mounted the same sort of fierce resistance to the Aztecs that had blocked their incorporation in the first place and gave the empire little booty and few sacrificial captives for its efforts. Several Aztec armies were routed while seeking to conquer the strongly defended enclaves. These signs of Aztec military weakness, in turn, encouraged revolts among tributary states within the empire that had good reason to hate the Aztecs. When Cortés arrived in 1519 with his conquistadors, more tributary states revolted and several joined the Spaniards, providing Cortés with tens of thousands of fighters to help his band of Spaniards overthrow the huge Aztec empire.

As in the case of the Incas, decades of warfare inspired by magical thinking left the Aztecs vulnerable to conquest by a small group of European adventurers. The Incas fought to acquire more land to feed their royal mummies while the Aztecs fought to seize captives whose blood would strengthen the sun. In each case, these beliefs served internal political purposes. However, by leading to endless warfare, overexpansion, and the enmity of all their neighbors, magical thinking failed the audit of war. The available data moreover seems to suggest
that the sun has survived despite no longer being nourished by the blood of sacrificed captives.

WAR AND SECULAR MAGIC: THE CASE OF NAZI GERMANY

A more contemporary state whose military defeat can be traced to its leaders' magical thinking is Nazi Germany. Germany's leaders led the nation into war in 1939 for a mix of reasons, including both Nazi ideology and the more traditional motives of
Realpolitik
that drove Germany into the First World War. In 1939, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that war would lead to the eventual destruction of the German state. Quite the contrary. Germany possessed a superb army, easily overran Western Europe and, in 1941, seemed poised to destroy the Soviet Union, which would have meant German domination of the European continent. That Germany did not win the war is due in no small measure to its leaders' insistence on engaging in magical, in this case
ideological
thinking, that could not survive the audit of war.

Wilhelmine Germany had been among Europe's great powers, and it required the combined military might of Great Britain, France, Russia, and the United States to defeat Germany in the First World War. Germany, too, had been a center of literature and high culture, science, and even administrative capability. In almost every respect, Wilhelmine Germany had been among the most advanced states on earth. The collapse of the German economy and the German state between the wars, however, undermined traditional elites and created an opportunity for groups from what normally would have been dismissed as Germany's lunatic fringe—the German equivalent of America's various paramilitary groups—to come to power. The Nazi party, led by Adolph Hitler, was one of several right-wing paramilitary movements that attempted to appeal to unemployed, working, and lower-middle class Germans through propaganda, political organization, and violent confrontation during the last days of the Weimar Republic.
The centerpiece of Nazi ideology was a system of nonsensical racial classifications that placed Germans and other members of the so-called “Aryan race” at the top and others below them in descending order of racial quality. The Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe, including Poles, Russians, and Ukrainians, were near the bottom and labeled
Untermenschen
(subhumans). Jews, of course fell at the very bottom of the Nazi racial hierarchy. The Slavs were to serve as a source of slave labor and the Jews, as Nazi ideology evolved, were to be exterminated.

Racist appeals, along with violence, helped the Nazis to seize power in the 1930s.
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Racism and anti-Semitism were simple themes that offered ready solutions and scapegoats for Germany's complex problems. The ferocity of Nazi violence, moreover, had a certain allure for desperate and angry workers.
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Once Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933, racism, in particular anti-Semitism, played a major role in the Nazi party's ability to consolidate its control of the German state. For this purpose, codification of the Nazis' racial ideology proved important The 1935 Nuremberg Laws established strict racial categories. Anyone with at least three Jewish grandparents was defined as a Jew. Later, those defined as Jews were excluded from the civil service, stripped of most of their property, expelled from schools, and subjected to numerous other disabilities. An individual with two Jewish grandparents was defined as a
Mischling
(person of mixed blood) of the first degree while an individual with one Jewish grandparent was defined as a Mischling of the second degree. Depending upon their precise classification, Mischlinge were subject to various indignities, but not treated as badly as Jews.

This system of racial classifications and the subjection of the Jews to various forms of discrimination helped tie major institutions of Germany's government and society to the new regime. The classification, exclusion, transportation, and, eventually, murder of Jews required the help of a host of government bureaucracies, as well as accountants, lawyers, judges, engineers, and so forth. As they took part, agencies and their employees were gradually drawn into the orbit of, and subordinated to, the Nazi regime that defined their new missions and priorities and
rewarded and punished conduct.
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In a similar way, racial laws linked various institutions of German society to the regime. Churches were a source of birth records and so became involved in the system of racial classifications. Non-Jewish banks and businesses profited from the confiscation of Jewish properties. Those who took the positions from which Jews were expelled in the universities, professions, and civil service had reason to become supporters of the regime, and so forth.

Racial codes also became instruments through which the Nazis subdued the social stratum from which their chief political foes were drawn, namely, Germany's urban bourgeoisie. After World War I and the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy, the urban bourgeoisie became Germany's new ruling stratum. Along with gentile members of their social class, Jews came to occupy positions of leadership in the liberal Weimar Republic. Before World War I, Jews constituted barely 1 percent of the German populace. But, in a pattern not so different from that of the contemporary United States, Jews were well integrated into the urban bourgeoisie and played important roles in the financial, cultural, and political institutions controlled by the bourgeoisie—banks, universities, the media, and so forth, while having little or no presence in other sectors of German society. The Weimar Republic's various foes sought to discredit the government by pointing to the prominence of Jews among the regime's supporters. Rightists declared that the regime was dominated by Jews and their puppets working against the true interests of the German people and derisively called Weimar a
Judenrepublik
.

The Nazi accession to power had represented a defeat not only for the Jews but for the liberal bourgeoisie more generally. The entire social stratum with which Jews were allied and through whom Jews had risen to positions of prominence had been overthrown. Once they had taken control of the government, the Nazis proceeded to use this stratum's association with Jews to cow the liberal bourgeoisie into utter submission. In particular, the Nazi system of racial laws and classifications made hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish members of the German bourgeoisie directly vulnerable to the Nazi regime's system
of sanctions. Germans and Jews had intermarried for generations. An enormous number of middle- and upper-middle-class Germans had sufficient Jewish ancestry to be disqualified from desirable positions in the government and private sector or to be considered Mischlinge and therefore subject to a number of disabilities.
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The eagerness of such Germans to upgrade their status led to the creation of a new occupation, that of
Sippenforscher
, or genealogical researcher specializing in helping individuals prove their Aryan descent. Fortunate Mischlinge might be able to secure reclassifications, or “liberations,” enhancing their career opportunities while diminishing the possibility that the government would one day decide to consider them Jews. Moreover, Millions of middle-class Germans with no discernible Jewish ancestry had past or present social, business, professional, or romantic relationships with Jews that could bring them to the attention of the authorities. Such individuals lived in fear that they might be denounced to the Gestapo by their enemies, hostile neighbors, or business rivals for such associations. In this way, a formerly powerful social stratum was unnerved and subdued as its Jewish allies were extruded from German society.

In sum, for the Nazis a bizarre system of racial classifications, no less a form of magical thinking than the beliefs of the Incas and Aztecs, became a powerful instrument of governance. It helped Hitler and his followers extend their control over the state and the society and undermine the influence of their most formidable political rivals. Despite its lunacy, Nazi racism possessed a form of internal political validity. Nazi ideology, however, soon failed the external audit of war as decisively as had the magical beliefs of the Incas and Aztecs four centuries earlier.

In 1939, of course, Germany embarked upon a military campaign to conquer Europe. Initially, German armies were spectacularly successful. In a few short months, the Wehrmacht defeated and occupied Poland, France, Belgium, Norway, and Denmark and drove the British from the European mainland. In 1941, Germany launched a massive attack upon the Soviet Union. In the first months of fighting, German advances were spectacular and German forces occupied much of European
Russia. In 1942, however, Soviet resistance stiffened. By 1943, Soviet armies, equipped with new weaponry as well as American lend–lease supplies, turned the tide of battle. The Germans began a long retreat ending in Germany's surrender in 1945.