Timothy Mason's Social Imperialism

[The_Golden_Turd]

He was a English Marxist Historian.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_imperialism

One of the more notable uses of the social imperialism concept was by the British Marxist historian Timothy Mason who argued that World War II was caused by social imperialism. In Mason’s opinion, German foreign policy was driven by domestic political considerations, and the launch of World War II in 1939 was best understood as a “barbaric variant of social imperialism”.[10] Mason argued that “Nazi Germany was always bent at some time upon a major war of expansion”.[11] However, Mason states that the timing of a such a war was determined by domestic political pressures, especially as relating to a failing economy.[12] According to Mason, by 1939, the “overheating” of the German economy caused by rearmament, the failure of various rearmament plans caused by the shortages of skilled workers, industrial unrest caused by the breakdown of German social policies, and a sharp drop in living standards for the German working class forced Hitler into going to war at a time and place not of his choosing.[13] Mason contended that, when faced with the deep socio-economic crisis, the Nazi leadership had decided to embark upon a ruthless “smash and grab” foreign policy of seizing territory in Eastern Europe which could be pitilessly plundered to support living standards in Germany.[14] Mason described German foreign policy as driven by an opportunistic “next victim” syndrome after the Anschluss, in which the “promiscuity of aggressive intentions” was nurtured by every successful foreign policy move.[15] In Mason’s opinion, the decision to sign the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and to attack Poland, and with it risking a war with Britain and France, was an abandonment by Hitler of his foreign-policy programme, outlined in Mein Kampf and Zweites Buch, and was forced on him by the need to seize and plunder territory abroad in order to prevent the collapse of the German economy.[13] Mason’s theory of World War II as an act of social imperialism and as a sudden “flight into war” into 1939 was to involve him in the 1980s in a debate with the British historian Richard Overy.

1. What does he mean by overheating of the economy?

2. What is the Next Victim Syndrome, as far as who it pertains to? Did Hitler have it, or his generals, or the population? It doesn’t seem like all three could hold it functionally the same in their minds at the same time, they all might feel euphoria and opportunity, but it’s very likely based on varying cognitive functions. Alexander couldn’t continue his lLiberation of India because his men clearly were no longer on board… at what point do you say it’s a group behavior of all, and when it starts diverging and conflicting?

Don’t get me wrong, I can put slot of historic campaigns from history into his definition, but it wouldn’t mean much to me as a historian, trying to explain cognitive functions of why it succeeded or failed in each case. Feudalism is particularly nuanced, your bound to have it go sideways in countless directions as far as motivations and alliegiances go. It runs into conflict with Natural Allies and Natural Enemies, balance of power, and internal stability. It doesn’t always promote synoecism, can ruin it in fact.

The battles between the various leagues in ancient Greece we’re always in fear of this kind of expansion… Third Sacred War and the eventual collapse of Greece to Macedonia is evidence of it:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Sacred_War

I’m interested as it seems a Will To Power kind of argument, and the Greeks were done into it, as well as the Nietzscheans during WW2. The Soviet Union and US rapidly expanded militarily, but it was through alliances and proxy wars, China became a faction… but didn’t lead to a collapse like with the Nazis.

I’m guessing Nietzsche failed to detect a blindside in the feedback mechanisms here, but not certain what it is… his Nazis’ emulators ironically took up the Greek ideal too well, and got the shit kicked out of them, completely subjugated, as the Greeks before them had been.

[The_Golden_Turd]

I found this tangentially related, but interested, longest quote of a text I’ve ever seen Wikipedia allow:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Ulrich_Wehler

Wehler, Hans-Ulrich “Unburdening the German Past?” pages 214-223 from Reworking the Past edited by Peter Baldwin, Beacon Press: Boston, 1990 pages 218-220.

In another essay during the Historikerstreit, Wehler wrote of Nolte and Hillgruber that:

"Hitler supposedly believed in the reality of this danger [of Communism threatening Germany]. Moreover, his dread of being overwhelmed by the “Asiatic” Bolsheviks was allegedly the prime motivating force behind his policies and personality. Nolte restated his axiom—one which perhaps reflects the naiveté of an historian who has devoted his life’s work to the power of ideologies—in a blunter, more pointed form than ever before in the fall of 1987: “To view Hitler as a German politician rather the anti-Lenin”, he reproved hundreds of knowledgeable historians, “strikes me as a proof of a regrettable myopia and narrowness”. Starting from his premise, and falling under the sway of the very fears and phobias he himself has played up, Nolte once again defiantly insisted: "If Hitler was a person fundamentally driven by fears-by among others a fear of the “rat cage”-and if this renders “his motivations more understandable”, then the war against the Soviet Union was not only “the greatest war ever of destruction and enslavement”, but also "in spite of this, objectively speaking [!], a preemptive war.

While Nolte may like to describe his motive as the purely scientific interest of (as he likes to put it) a solitary thinker in search of a supposedly more complex, more accurate understanding of the years between 1917 and 1945, a number of political implications are clearly present. The basic tendency of Nolte’s reinterpretation is to unburden German history by relativizing the Holocaust. Nolte claims the Nazi mass murder was modeled on and instigated by the excesses of the Russian Revolution, the Stalinist regime and the Gulag; that it countered this “Asiatic” danger by imitating and surpassing it. This new localization of “absolute evil” in Nolte’s political theology leads away from Hitler, National Socialism and German history. It shifts the real origins of fascist barbarism onto the Marxist postulate-and the Bolshevik practice-of extermination. Once again the classic mechanism of locating the source of evil outside one’s own history is at work. The German war of destruction certainly remains inhuman. But because its roots supposedly lie in the Marxist theory and Bolshevik class warfare, the German perpetrator is now seen to be reacting in defensive, understandable panic to the “original” inhumanity of the East. From there, it is only one more step to the astounding conclusion that Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the war of conquest and extermination that followed were “objectively speaking”-one can hardly believe one’s eyes-"a preemptive war…

An even closer connection between academic and political interests is apparent in Andreas Hillgruber’s Zweierlei Untergang, where the plight of the German Army on the Eastern Front and the civilian population of eastern Germany is treated without any countervailing consideration for the fate of the Jewish and Slavic “subhumans”, the members of the German opposition, and incarcerated groups, or indeed for the Europeans subject to German occupation, and the German people themselves, all caught up in a senselessly prolonged “total war”. Such a position unavoidably carries immensely oppressive political implications. His laments over the destruction of the “European center”, Germany’s intermediary position between East and West, and her loss of great power status is shot through with countless political value judgments. His guiding position (later admitted openly), according to which the loss of the eastern provinces and the expulsion of the German population westward represented “probably the most burdensome consequence of the war”, is in itself a matter for political discussion.

Such political implications can only lead us down the wrong path-not to mention a scientific dead-end. In all likelihood it was Hillgruber’s aversion to methodological and theoretical reflection that was largely responsible for this wrong turn. Be that as it may, the political effect of Zweierlei Untergang has been downright fatal. It has led to the return of an unreflecting nationalism, in which sympathetic identification with the German Army on the Eastern Front and with the German civilian population has become dogma. Such a worldview has led an otherwise extremely knowledgeable historian to extrude and exclude the victims of National Socialism from his narrative, an omission that would once have been unimaginable but that we now see in black and white. The consequences of a naive attempt to identify with the subjects of historical writing could hardly be demonstrated more drastically"

I haven’t really read any of those guys, but will note adopting tactics from another country isn’t evidence your feared them, but rather pragmatism on the part of a general staff to stay modern and eclectic.

You have a tactical synthesis… every piece of the chess board has a abstract capacity to follow rules on what they can do and not do successfully in attacking the other. You can’t win a game of chess without calling out “check” first, in order to do that you have to understand how the pieces can play together.

Obviously both sides feared one another, but you can emulate one another as well, which both sides did. Both sides had ambitions on the other as well… rest assured, WW2 did happen, and for reasons. I’m not certain what the necessity of historians bickering against one another matters here, they both seem to of missed the point… Hitler was a twisted evil asshole, so was Stalin, both Gulags and Basis Concentration Camps borrowed from the Boer War, and political exile used since antiquity. It seems a shit headed argument either way, trying to make Hitler and Stalin less human, two dimensional? Why can’t they be as human as we are in noticing their states were very similar, and could benefit from adopting similar methods? Hitler is still fully to be blamed for bring Hitler. So is Stalin. Both mimed the other, and the philosophical tyranny their public’s expected of them. Both were inept regiems for not trying to see past their era… both operated under similar conditions, similar concepts, similar symbols. Stalin got lucky and survived. Very lucky. Both we’re original copies of the other, and both left a bad taste in one another’s mouth… hard to see your own reflection in the eyes of the enemy.