Historian Gustav Seibt has written an interesting essay on German intellectuals who supported the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. The origianal essay (in German) is unfortunately behind the firewall at Sueddeutsche Zeitung, but an English translation is avaialable at Sign and Sight. Seibt lists the German intellectual hawks:
Nobody should take pleasure in the fact that authors like Wolf Biermann and György Konrad, essayists like Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht and Karl-Otto Hondrich, "liberal hawks" like Paul Berman and Michael Ignatieff, and even considered observers like Ralph Dahrendorf and Herfried Münkler were wrong on so many counts. In fact, many of those named, and Konrad and Gumbrecht in particular, should be credited for admitting their mistakes.
He goes on to point out the intellectual arrogance that resulted in these thinkers projecting their own fantasies on a Middle East that they understood little or not at all:
First and foremost was an attempt to draw broad historical analogies. The fall of Saddam, a desirable enough goal, was compared directly with the fight against Hitler, the democratisation of Iraq with the democratisation of West Germany and Japan after the Second World War and the chance for democratic change throughout the entire Middle East was compared with the end of the East bloc and the quick establishment of civilian democracies afterwards. But virtually nobody had anything to say about the actual domestic situation in Iraq today.
Then the historian Seibt makes a depressing analogy to the situation in 1914, where nearly every writer and intellectual enthusasically (euphorically) welcomed the war. Have intellectuals learned nothing from history?
The comparison with 1914 is all the more depressing because in 2003, we see again the syndrome of a "Literatentum" – a term coined by Max Weber during the First World War, referring to the phenomena of a body of literature that used critical, aesthetic, definitely non-expert, uninformed superstructures to justify risky decisions in matters of war. A lot was at stake in the First World War as well: culture and civilisation, politics and music, the German spirit and the Western anti-spirit and vice versa – and the "war goals" of an obviously unrealistic, in fact insane blueprint.
Of course, being wrong on the Iraq War turned out to be a good career move for intellectuals and writers in Germany and the United States. Most have lucrative contracts with newspapers and publishing houses. Intellectuals who opposed the war from the beginning and were completely correct in their predictions of disaster are still viewed with suspicion by the established media outlets.
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