WHEN SHALL WE HAVE THE BIG BANG?

COMMENTARY ARCHIVES, 9 Jan 2009

Vithal Rajan

The cosmologist’s concept of the Big Bang is old hat for Hindus, who have believed for millennia that is how the Universe is born, and will perish, a concept beyond all limits of human morality, for as the Rig Veda says, ‘It was born before the Gods themselves, who knows why, or whence It came?’

As a Hindu, I am quite comfortable with all this; my only anxiety is not to have the Big Bang happen while I am around. From my home in Hyderabad, India, I have helped launch a ‘Joint Signature Campaign by Citizens of India and Pakistan Against Terrorism, War Posturing and To Promote Cooperation and Peace,’ from 9th January 2009 to 8th February 2009, seeking Signatures from People, and Endorsements from Organisations of both countries, to be submitted to the Prime Minister of India and the President of Pakistan. (Posted on this week’s TMS under Militarism)

The technocratic hawks of both poor countries have added the burden of nuclear weapons to their already fearsome arsenals. When the Kargil ‘half-war’ occurred to see off the last millennium, we woke to a new millennium goal of seeing our armies stare at each other ‘eye-ball to eyeball,’ as nationalistic media chortled.

Dean Acheson used this compelling metaphor when describing the Cuban Missile Crisis of over 40 years ago, and added with relish: ‘They blinked!’ I am sure Indian hawks, civil and military, are waiting for the Pakistani military to do the same, knowing that if a war will ruin India’s development plans for the next twenty years, it will also destroy the Pakistanis.

John Foster Dulles, who with his brother who ran the CIA fervently believed in the Red Menace, made brinkmanship into a geo-political fine art of ‘playing chicken.’ Détente was impossible in his time, till the name of Dulles meant only an airport.

The BJP know at least this part of history all too well, and feel safe in whipping up more hysteria about Islamic Jihad. Electronic media, which depends on sensationalism to bring in the bucks, speaks everyday about whether ‘war is an option.’

Indian sabre-rattling is carried out safely from behind the coat-tails of Big Brother America. President Bush has signaled American determination to maintain a military colossus, and exercise American right as self-willed policemen to make pre-emptive strikes anywhere, and to unleash a re-armaments race in which America would remain winner from the start. 

President-elect Obama, by surrounding himself with military top brass, has also signaled that during his leadership the world should not anticipate any lessening of gratuitous aggression. So, what America’s 9/11 and India’s 26/11 have done is to take us to a new time, dangerously unknown to statesman or general.

To understand where we might end up, or how we might end up now, just when we thought the Cold War was over, with all its frightful fantasies of thinking the unthinkable, we may as well turn back to other dangerous times when no one knew what was going to happen, when in the midst of civilised life, humanity was in mega death.

Historical analogies are fallacious, everyone knows that, and yet even great historians like A.J.P. Taylor have hoped that someone might sometime want to draw a ‘contemporary moral’ from the study of the Great War of 1914-18.

The dawn of the last century was more peaceful than this one; the Great Powers had not fought each other for several decades; the Emperors of Britain, Germany and Russia were all first cousins; their statesmen and generals, their men of power, despite their nationalistic pugnacity, had not seen a shot fired in anger. They did send out armies, but like today, only against people who could not hit back.

If we bomb from the air today, they bombarded from dreadnoughts anchored safely out at sea. Their armies were armed to the teeth, and yet they took part in regular, even greater arms races. Lord Fisher built the British dreadnoughts; Admiral Tirpitz built the German navy in the British image.

A healthy defence industry, then as now, was considered integral to economies that believed in uninterrupted economic progress. Many fortunes were made, thank you very much, and if national belligerency flagged at any point, there were incidents ready to inflame it, like the ‘Agadir’ one, and budgets to be hiked in ‘guns over butter’ debates, a phrase that owes its currency to those times.

Few in any European country knew very much about the peoples in other country; much less did they care about their politics. And yet media, which needed to make money, and opinion leaders, who needed to be with the powerful, made much of national sentiment, and almost convinced people for brief periods that they did hold strong nationalist opinions beyond their daily struggle to exist. All this is familiar.

However, the great and the small felt, despite all warlike gestures, their world could not end, and that great military strength itself was the most effective deterrence to actual war. Deterrence would work with the automatic efficiency of Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ in economics. People a hundred years ago believed in the immutable laws of nature.

Even revolutionaries those days believed in the ‘laws’ of history. Despite the new uncertainties that have been introduced into this clockwork world by Einstein, and Heisenberg, and chaos theory, and despite a hundred years of bloodshed that have killed a hundred million people, we today continue to think that nothing terrible could happen to us, and wish like Falstaff that ‘ it were bed-time and all well.’

1914 seemed no different from any other year, no more dangerous than the years gone by, just as 2009 looks quite ordinary today. What threw a match into what looked like a well-ordered power-keg was the act of terrorism of an alienated Serbian student, Princip, who had Pan Slavic dreams, who believed, if you will, in an umma of Slavs.

No Slav leader seems to have cared for such an ideal, except to make convenient use of such slogans when making demagogic speeches. Then as now, every country had its department of dirty tricks; and Serbia had one picturesquely called The Black Hand, though we know now it had nothing to do with the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination.

This incidental act of terror, which sprang out of a culture of deprivation, bloodshed, and humiliation, was seen by all the European powerful people as a Serbian, even perhaps as a Slavic, affront to the civilised comity of nations. It was right and proper that the Austro-Hungarian Empire should seek satisfaction for the death of their crown prince; but… what was that to be?

Bringing the culprits to trial was a trivial matter, an inadequate response to the gravity of the moment. Having imagined exhausted Serbia to be an unprincipled demonic force, a failed political entity if you will, it was the ambition, the duty, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to break it to pieces; and yet at the same time the Empire had to repeat in front of everyone that it had no territorial ambitions. And if it had, the Russians would not have liked it. So what was to be done? Something forceful, but which would not bring about the disaster of war.

The chancelleries of Europe at that time were full of peaceful warriors, men who chaffed under the shadow of great predecessors, who were themselves thought to be weak by their deputies, and who in late life wanted to prove themselves. A profile of angularities not known among national leaders today.

Berchtold of Austria, living under the shadow of the Austrian defeat at Sadowa, may have wanted to prove at least to the Germans that here was an Austrian who could stand up, at least to humbled Serbia. Pašic´, the Serbian leader, changed his mind about agreeing to Austrian demands, in case his rivals at home rightly thought him to be weak.

Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister, knew how Kutusov had used Russian depth and winter in the Napoleonic campaign and felt he could safely indulge in brinkmanship without paying the price. He cajoled the Czar to order mobilisation of the army as a safe diplomatic manoeuvre.  Bethmann, the German Chancellor, certainly felt small in Bismarck’s shoes. He would show ‘who ruled in Berlin.’ He egged on Berchtold, who advised the Austrian Emperor to stand firm against Serbia.

All this is understandable. The younger Bush has wanted to show that he is at least as strong as his father who bombed Iraq during the first Gulf War, and so he launched the second one. Clinton bombed a pharma factory in Sudan when he heard that his ratings were slipping. And now it is up to Obama to show Americans that though he is half-black he can be as strong as any other killer president.

While political posturing was going on prior to the outbreak of the Great War of Europe, the military had handed over their minds to the ‘laws of war’ they thought were immutable. Their great forces were there to deter, or to win. Every action of any possible enemy would trigger a counter from them in a timetable as rigid as the one nuclear deterrence has produced today.

If Russia mobilised, the Germans had to attack France as decreed by the Schlieffen plan. When the Kaiser thought he had produced a plan to save peace, the Wehrmacht had to inform him it was all too late to stop the 11,000 trains already carrying troops into Belgium. The red button of 1914 had already been pressed all unknown to Germany’s Most High War Lord. And so they went to war, bellicose statesmen bursting into real tears like the little boys they were.

Libraries are filled with learned analyses of the causes of the Great War. Clear-cut causes beloved of academics are just not to be found. Many historian have worried over what really caused the Great War; and at different times they find different causes; for some, it is the statesmen and their brinkmanship; for others, the military chiefs of staff are to blame, and their sticking to the Schlieffen Plan or some other military nonsense; again German industrialisation could ‘inevitably’ have brought on war; or was it bellicose nationalist sentiment? And most times, most people just did not care….

Certainly, the usual suspects have been declared innocent. Kaiser ‘Bill’ tried his best to maintain peace; the Czar wanted nothing more than the Peace offered later by Lenin. Lloyd George is supposed to have said they just ‘muddled into war.’ Our statesmen are no wiser than they were, and we all might once again just muddle into war.

While analysts cannot find the culprits, some can certainly trace what was lacking for building secure peace. Democratic discussions never took place prior to declarations of war, even within cabinets, let alone consulting the people at large. Bellicosity was the simple solution to domestic problems. There was excessive reliance on the mechanisms of deterrence, and simple pride in building big armies.

Even experienced politicians and crowned heads believed in the technical skill of their military chiefs to conduct scientific warfare, and when posed with an ‘or else’ bowed to the inevitability of fighting a war to avoid defeat. Nothing much has changed today, except it takes much less time to fire nuclear-armed missiles than it took for the British Grand Fleet to steam out of Scapa Flow in 1914.

The India Pakistan standoff is far more threatening than the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia. World leaders deplore the tension, and may even issue travel advisories to their citizens just to make a point, but no one really imagines this will lead to world conflagration, any more than they did in the summer of 1914.

Everyone is agreed that the Indian government is right in demanding an end to cross-border infiltration, to terrorism and barbaric attacks, like the one that took place around Mumbai’s ‘iconic Taj Mahal hotel,’ but Obama and many other statesmen do think the Pakistanis are within their rights to ask for a settlement of the ‘unfinished business’ of Kashmir.

In India, leaders perceive each other as weak and vacillating. They see themselves as trying to live up to the images of the founders of independent India. They also certainly realize that the Pakistani President Ali Zardari is trying hard to control his own militants in Pakistan, but, like the Serbians of the past, has problems of poverty, ethnicity, and recent bloody history to deal with.

The head of the Serbian secret service was also the head of the Black Hand gang, and this did not ease the problems for politicians then, nor is it easy for Zardari to deal with the ISI, the Pakistani secret service today. The triumphal, righteous mood in Delhi is very much what it was in Vienna then, but as always there are other Great Powers who do not want the balance of power to be upset.

The trick is to squeeze diplomatic advantage without paying the price of war; now as then. They failed then; we may fail now. Millions died in the Great War that no one wanted. Millions could die in our sub-continent.

The people of the world cannot leave it to wiser heads, for, simply put, there are none. In the guns over butter debate, we must start with home issues of food and job security, health cover and a liberal education, and democratic governance. Let us say no to war.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 9 Jan 2009.

Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: WHEN SHALL WE HAVE THE BIG BANG?, is included. Thank you.

If you enjoyed this article, please donate to TMS to join the growing list of TMS Supporters.

Share this article: email mastodon facebook 🔗 copy link

This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.

Comments are closed.