Читать книгу Blessed Peacemakers - Robin Jarrell - Страница 67

23 March 1858—4 March 1941

The Foolishness of Vengeance

Kaiser Wilhelm II, the vainglorious and mustachioed German emperor who led his nation into the disastrous First World War, loved all things military. Diverting a goodly portion of the national economy to building up his army and navy and surrounding himself with generals and field marshals, he seemed out of touch with the real world in which ordinary people lived. So in 1894, a mild-mannered stutterer named Ludwig Quidde wrote a short pamphlet he hoped might serve as a reality check for the emperor. Titled Caligula: A Study of Imperial Insanity, Quidde’s essay was ostensibly a study of ancient Rome. But anyone with a discerning eye quickly saw that in fact it was an implicit criticism of the Kaiser’s infatuation with the military.

Caligula didn’t land its author in jail, although Quidde was imprisoned on several other occasions for his outspoken pacifism. A member of the German Peace Society, an organization that still exists despite being suppressed under Hitler, Quidde advocated disarmament and international law under three German regimes: the Wilhelmine reign, the Weimar Republic that replaced it, and the Nazi stranglehold that destroyed the Republic. He suffered for his convictions under all three. The Kaiser charged him with lèse-majesté several times and had him thrown into jail. When World War I erupted, Quidde was accused of treason after he traveled to The Hague to dialogue with French and British pacifists. The charge was dropped, but he was hounded by German authorities for the war’s duration. In 1924 the Republic imprisoned him for blowing the whistle on its secret buildup of the German Army. And when the Nazis came to power in 1933, Quidde was forced to flee the country. He settled in Switzerland, where he lived for the remainder of his days.

At the end of World War I, Quidde was one of the most vocal opponents of the harsh reparations levied against Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. Many of the treaty’s critics disliked it because they believed it besmirched the honor and autonomy of the German state. Quidde’s opposition was based on something else entirely: he feared that the economic penury into which the reparations would throw Germany would create a climate of anger that would inevitably spawn another war. “A humiliated and torn German nation condemned to economic misery,” he warned, “would be a constant danger to world peace, just as a protected German nation whose inalienable rights and subsistence are safeguarded would be a strong pillar of such world peace.” War is a bad enough destroyer of peace. But post-war acts of vengeance by the victors upon the losers only perpetuate the cycle of violence.

Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1927, Quidde argued in his acceptance speech that world peace could only be based on the security provided by international law and order, not by military might. His hope was that new technology would make the killing power of weapons so terrible that nations would recoil in horror from their use. That hope has yet to be realized.