Day of Empire
Page 31
Grove was just one of a sea of immigrant venture-capital success stories that flooded America with wealth and catapulted the country to undisputed global economic and technological preeminence in the last decades of the twentieth century. Of the thousands of engineering and technology companies started in Silicon Valley between 1995 and 2005, an amazing 52.4 percent had at least one key founder who was an immigrant. Sun Microsystems cofounder Vinod Khosla and Hotmail cofounder Sabeer Bhatia emigrated from India. Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, came to America from Britain. In 1998, a young Russian student named Sergey Brin took a leave of absence from Stanford's computer science Ph.D. program to found a small Internet search company with his fellow graduate student Larry Page. Today that company—Google—employs more than ten thousand people and has a market capitalization of more than $136 billion.
Of course, the thousands of nerds, geeks, and visionaries that created Silicon Valley included plenty of third-, fifth-, and seventh-generation Americans. Fred Terman, Stanford University's influential engineering dean in the 1950s, was not an immigrant; neither was Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs. Nor were the gigantic fortunes made in the 1980s and 1990s limited to immigrants. On the contrary, the unprecedented explosion in wealth displayed once again the unique ability of the American economy to reward enterprise and talent from any background, whether homegrown or imported. Of the four hundred richest Americans in 2000, an extraordinary two-thirds had built their fortunes from nothing.31
America's technological and economic dominance has translated directly into military supremacy. Today, the United States has ten Nimitz-chss, nuclear-powered supercarriers, each one capable of carrying more than seventy fighter jets. No other country has a single aircraft carrier remotely comparable to these behemoths. The United States has a fleet of stealth aircraft, undetectable by radar, armed with one-ton radar-guided bombs. No other country has any. The United States also has by far the world's largest, most advanced arsenal of “smart” bombs, cruise missiles, unmanned high-altitude “drones,” satellite surveillance systems, armored tanks equipped with night vision and laser range-finders, and nuclear-powered attack submarines—none of which would have been possible without the new microprocessor technology.32
In short, the United States’ rise to world dominance depended heavily on its winning the high-tech race. Then, on September 11, 2001, technology was turned on the United States.
TEN
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan
We have now canvassed all of history's hyperpowers, observing that every one of them owed its rise to world dominance in critical part to tolerance. What we have not examined are the forces of /m tolerance. This chapter does so, examining both the deadly power of mobilized intolerance and its inherent limits.
No society based on racial purity, ethnic cleansing, or religious zealotry has ever become world dominant. In the middle of the twentieth century, however, two brutally intolerant regimes—Nazi Germany and imperial Japan—achieved enormous power and, together, threatened to take over the world. The meteoric rise and stunning defeat of the Axis Powers illustrate both the frightening potency of extreme intolerance and the ultimate inability of societies based on such intolerance to attain world dominance.
NAZI GERMANY: THE DREAM OF
ARYAN WORLD DOMINANCE
At 3:15 p.m. on June 21, 1940, Adolf Hitler and his top commanders descended on the forest of Compiègne, fifty miles north of Paris, to preside over the surrender of the French. Hitler had personally chosen this hallowed forest—hunting grounds for the French monarchy for a millennium and the site of Joan of Arc's capture—for its more recent historical pedigree. It was here in November 1918 that Germany surrendered to France, ending World War I. As a pleasant June sun beat down, Hitler emerged from his Mercedes. His face, according to one eyewitness's account, was “grave, solemn, yet brimming with revenge. There was also in it, as in his springy step, a note of the triumphant conqueror, the de-fier of the world.” The fiihrer insisted on dictating the terms of the armistice in the same railway car where Germany had surrendered twenty-two years earlier. After a day of fruitless attempts to soften the treaty's harsh terms, Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, the French hero of the battle of Verdun, succumbed categorically to the Nazi demands.1
The reversal of fortune at Compiègne marked the zenith for Hitler and Nazi Germany. Rising from the rubble and disgrace of World War I, Germany had not only miraculously rearmed and reindustrialized in less than a decade but had gone on to conquer most of continental Europe in only nine months. By the time France capitulated, the Nazis already controlled Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands and were poised to invade Britain. A year earlier, the seemingly invincible Wehrmacht had unleashed on Poland its blitzkrieg, “a monstrous mechanized juggernaut such as the earth had never seen.” Just seven years after Hitler's rise to power in 1933, the Nazi promise of a “Thousand-Year Reich” no longer seemed so implausible.
Five years later, it was all over. Hitler was dead, and Germany lay in ruins. In its climb to power, Hitler's regime brought state-sponsored intolerance to a new level, instituting “a reign of terror over the conquered peoples which, in its calculated butchery of human life and the human spirit, outdid all the savage oppressions of the previous ages.”2 More than just a by-product of Nazi domination, brutal intolerance had been critical to the Nazis’ ability to amass power in the aftermath of World War I. Nazi ideology— with its potent mixture of militant nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, and religious hatred—was fantastically successful in generating loyalty and sacrifice from Germany's humiliated population. But Hitler and his party's unflagging devotion to bloody race purification ultimately proved a grotesque cancer within the regime and helped seal its eventual obliteration.
THE POWER OF HATE
World War I left Germany a bloodied and beaten nation. Nearly two million of its young men perished in the war, and almost as many were crippled for life. Among the general population, millions of working- and middle-class Germans suddenly found themselves unemployed and destitute. Adding to the trauma of defeat was the Treaty of Versailles. Imposed in 1919, the treaty forced Germany to admit that it was solely responsible for having caused the war. As punishment, Germany was saddled with staggering war reparations, stripped of its colonial holdings, and forced to forfeit cherished national territory to France and to the hated Poles. Germany's proud and once formidable armed forces were to be reduced to a volunteer force of 100,000 men, among other stinging restrictions. Not everyone thought that the treaty's crushing terms were wise. John Maynard Keynes, advisor to the British delegation, ominously predicted that the peace contained the seeds of the next war.3
It was from this crucible of ignominy, suffering, and suppressed rage that Adolf Hitler and the Nazis emerged. Spewing a combination of Aryan supremacy, conspiracy theories about Jewish-Communist plots, and calls for extermination of racial inferiors, Hitler promised a return to the primordial German past and with it the rise of an all-powerful expansionist German state under his leadership. Hitler and his supporters lashed out at Jews, Communists, Slavs, homosexuals, and anyone else not sufficiently “German,” blaming them for the country's runaway inflation, massive unemployment, and diminished international standing. Hitler's bombastic rhetoric of racial supremacy proved to be a popular draw at Nazi speeches. One repeated charge was that minorities had “stabbed Germany in the back,” a claim the Nazis used to explain how Germany could have lost the Great War despite never having fallen victim to a ground invasion.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, few German politicians thought the Nazis posed any serious threat of taking power. But by building a coalition that encompassed big business, the military, and above all the middle class, the Nazis grew from a group of back-alley brawlers to a broad-based movement that succeeded in winning 43 percent of the German vote in 1932, paving the way for Hitler to become Germany's next chan
cellor in 1933.4
It is almost trivializing to call the Nazi regime “intolerant.” Racial hatred pervaded every aspect of Nazi policy, from health to agriculture to defense. Precisely because its principal commitment was to German nationalism, the Nazi Party had little need for an economic policy. (Once heard at a Nazi gathering: “We don't want higher bread prices! We don't want lower bread prices! We don't want unchanged bread prices! We want National Socialist bread prices!”) The historians Roderick Stackelberg and Sally Winkle have summarized the singular focus of Nazi policy: “Hitler had no vision of domestic social reform other than the elimination of Jews and all forms of diversity and dissent from German society, the creation of an authoritarian system based on race, and the preparation of the populace for war.”
While Jews were the primary targets of Nazi fanaticism, they were hardly alone. Gypsies, Poles, gays, the disabled, the sick, and various other groups were also singled out for removal to concentration camps, forced labor, and arbitrary execution. At Nazism's core was a belief in the unquestionable supremacy of Aryans—the “master race”—and their proper role as rulers of the earth.5
THE COSTS OF INTOLERANCE
The Nazis’ persecution of Jews and other groups enriched the party and financed the German war machine—but only for a fleeting historical moment. First, Jewish banks and businesses were expropriated by the state. Then, as Jews were rounded up and sent to ghettos or concentration camps, their valuables—pocket watches, gold necklaces, earrings, brooches, bracelets, and diamond rings—were confiscated. Jewish homes, cars, art collections, and “great wads of banknotes” were seized. Finally, special SS squads were charged with pulling gold fillings from the mouths of Jews sent to the gas chambers—sometimes even before the victims were killed. These fillings were melted down and, along with the rest of the bounty, deposited in a secret Reichsbank account under the cover name “Max Heiliger.”6
Quickly, however, the Nazis’ commitment to the extinction of “inferior” peoples came to cost the regime in crucial ways. To begin with, untold resources, time, and even talent were required to implement the deaths of those who could not be tolerated in the “New Order.” A vast bureaucracy had to be organized to locate, count, and classify Jews according to minutely defined blood-percentage categories. Indeed, with increasing frequency, the requirements of Nazi ethnic cleansing conflicted with urgent war needs.
For example, entire SS units were dedicated to guarding prisoners at Nazi concentration camps. Precious materials like marble, sandstone, and polished nickel were ghoulishly lavished on the construction of crematoria and gas chambers. Trains were devoted to shuttling Jews to their deaths even as the Germans were scrambling to move troops. In the winter of 1942, with German soldiers surrounded at the pivotal battle of Stalingrad, Heinrich Himmler, commander of the SS, personally intervened to divert desperately needed trains in order to kill more Jews. Himmler pleaded to the head of railroads: “I know very well how taxing the situation is for the railroads and what demands are constantly made of you. Just the same, I must make this request of you: Help me get more trains.” Even in their darkest hour, the Nazis chose racial hatred over military success.7
Moreover, by murdering millions of conquered subjects and hundreds of thousands of German citizens, the Nazis deprived themselves of incalculable manpower and human capital. As already mentioned, Germany lost an array of brilliant scientists, including Albert Einstein, Theodore von Karman, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, and Lise Meitner, many of whom went on to play an integral role in the construction of the world's first atomic bomb, which the United States used to win the war. Who knows how many other great minds were lost?
Everything in Nazi Germany was filtered through the lens of German racial superiority. Almost comically, the Nazi scientist Bruno Thuring attacked Albert Einstein's theory of relativity for its contradiction of the “Nordic's instinctual understanding of the meaning of energy.” Nazi rejection of “Jewish” science also led Germany to fall behind in the development of radar, a technology that proved pivotal to the Allies’ success in the Battle of Britain. Meanwhile, the Nazis’ confidence in their own scientific supremacy blinded them to the possibility that the Allies might have cracked their codes—another decisive mistake.8
“EXPELLED OR EXTERMINATED, NOT ASSIMILATED”
When German troops first entered the western frontiers of the Soviet Union, they were often hailed as liberators, especially by Ukrainians and the Baltic peoples, who had long been terrorized by Soviet domination. Even in Russia, some high-ranking German officials felt that “if Hitler played his cards shrewdly, treating the population with consideration and promising relief from Bolshevik practices…the Russian people could be won over.”
Nowhere was this truer than in Ukraine, where Nazi ideology was popular and many longed for independence from the Soviet Union. But instead of enlisting Ukrainian brigades to fight against the Soviets, the German army was followed directly by SS death squads charged with subjugating, enslaving, and killing the local population. In addition to almost wiping out Ukraine's Jewish population, the Nazis slaughtered an estimated five million non-Jewish Ukrainians.9
Unlike Genghis Khan, Hitler was not interested in enlisting the superior talents of conquered nations. Unlike the Romans, Hitler was not interested in incorporating their populations. Instead, he was interested in incorporating their land. For Hitler, international relations was “fundamentally a struggle for space” in which “the stronger won, took the space, proliferated on that space, and then fought for additional space.” This struggle for German “living space,” or Lebensraum, became the core of Nazi foreign policy. In Mein Kampf and numerous speeches, Hitler broadcast his intention to achieve Lebensraum through “conquest of additional land areas whose native population would be expelled or exterminated, not assimilated.” According to Hitler, world peace would come about only “when one power, the racially best one, has attained complete and uncontested supremacy.”
It did not take long for Hitler to demonstrate that Lebensraum was not just rhetoric. For the Nazis, the “living space” Germany needed was located primarily in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia. Hitler saw the Slavs as a race “incapable of organizing a state or developing a culture.” Accordingly, Nazi policy called for the German army to eliminate or enslave the Bolshevik “subhumans.” The “great cities of the East, Moscow, Leningrad and Warsaw,” were to be “permanently erased,” and the “culture of the Russians and Poles and other Slavs” was to be “stamped out.”10
These policies did not curry much favor among the populations the Nazis conquered, to put it mildly. Indeed, some high-ranking German officials acknowledged that the Nazis’ hard-line anti-Slavism represented a strategic miscalculation of enormous proportions. For example, the reich minister for the east, Alfred Rosenberg—even though he was a notorious Aryan nationalist— wrote in 1942 that “[a] better gift could not come to Germany” in the war than the support of the disaffected populations of the Soviet Union. Rosenberg and others argued, almost certainly correctly, that many Soviet subjects would willingly fight “on the German side for the prize of national autonomy and independence from the Soviet Union.” The Poles in particular, with their pervasive anti-Semitism, were natural German allies. But Hitler remained committed to “extermination, not assimilation,” viewing the Poles as “an Eastern European species of cockroach” who “had no right to live,” except perhaps as slaves for their German masters.”
The genocidal brutality of the Nazi occupiers, coupled with their publicly declared goal of obtaining more “living space” for Germany, only succeeded in mobilizing the Soviet populations against the Nazis with a determination that Stalinist leaders could never have managed on their own. Even as the Soviet Union suffered more than twenty million wartime deaths, the Red Army fought on. Had Hitler pursued a shrewder strategy of tolerance and assimilation in the east, it is frightful to imagine the success the Nazi empire might have had.
Hitler was no Cyrus the Great. He could never have prostrated himself before the conquered Babylonians in order to win their loyalty. Nazi ideology viewed conquered peoples as Untermenschen—subhumans—to be swept away to make room for their racial masters. The historian Klaus Fischer captured the essence of the Nazi dilemma, writing, “No matter how much skill and competence was brought” to Hitler's task of “the ruthless subjugation of conquered people, and the physical extermination of racially inferior breeds,” the “bestial mission was bound to arouse the world into determined opposition.”12
IMPERIAL JAPAN: CONQUEST BY THE
MOST “VIRTUOUS” OF PEOPLES
Germany was not the only Axis power with visions of global domination. On August 1, 1940, Foreign Minister Matsuoka Yosuke publicly unveiled Japan's scheme for territorial expansion. The so-called Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—to be conquered by the Imperial Army and united under the benevolent rule of the Japanese emperor—was to grow in four stages.
The core of the sphere was to include Korea, Manchuria, the south of China, and Taiwan—all of which would be under Japanese control within two years. Second, Japan would take over the rest of China, as well as former European colonies such as the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), French Indochina (including modern Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos), Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, and New Zealand. Third, Japan would extend its reach into eastern Soviet territory, the Philippines, and India. Finally, central Asia and parts of the Middle East, including Iran, Iraq, and Turkey, would all be brought under Japanese control.