Homework and Warfare

Today was a nice, quiet, cloudy day with two flashes of lightning, three rounds of thunder (one of them very impressive, the first proper "thunderclap" I've heard, loud and long-rumbling). I like thunderstorms very much, except for the fact that the lightning can be deadly. Anyway, I cooked rhubarb compote, read a delightful end-of-nineteenth-century girly online novel which any masculine reader would most likely find harmless but disgustingly saccharine, and played the piano. Pudel came for a visit, and we conversed and ate cookies as well as orange-liqueur-filled chocolate sticks.

Lately I've felt perfectly natural and happy, and not in a frivolous or overdone way either. The day after tomorrow I will most likely peregrinate to Dahlem and get the Freie Uni Studienhandbuch at Schleicher's. The day before yesterday I began to plan an essay on Machiavelli's ideas and Oliver Cromwell; I had intended to do it for my first-term History 120 essay at the university, but I ended up never doing it (hence my low mark in History). An impediment to this latest plan for self-improvement is that The Prince has gone missing; I will probably be reduced to perusing its Project-Gutenbergian counterpart.

But today I am helping Gi. and Ge. with their school history presentation about the historical relations between Austria and Germany. We are focusing on World War I and the Anschluss. The beginning of WWI is perhaps one of the absurdest chain of events I've ever heard of. Austria-Hungary's archduke, not even emperor, is killed by a vigilante in Serbia. The German Emperor declares his support for Austria-Hungary with reckless prodigality. Perhaps emboldened by this support, Austria-Hungary presents Serbia with a rigorous 48-hour ultimatum consisting of ten demands. Serbia is willing to accede to nine of them fully, and the tenth (Demand #6) partially. It's not enough. Serbia mobilizes; Austria-Hungary declares war. Russia is Serbia's ally, so Russia mobilizes. Germany declares war on Russia, in order to support Austria-Hungary; a day or so later it extends the declaration to France, because that country is in turn an ally of Russia. And, in order to get at France, Germany invades Belgium, which in turn provokes the British to join the war. It's a highly unreasonable chain effect. The obvious, sensible course of action would have been to have an independent investigation of the assassination, and to leave it at that.

Of course I know that the causes of World War I were much more involved, and that the European nations were, so to speak, "spoiling for a fight." I do hope we won't be so stupid again, but I guess we are. I think that the reaction to September 11th was the wrong one, too; it should have been responded to by (true) improvements in border control and policing, rather than by invading two countries and making a terrible counterproductive hash of it, where many times more people were killed than there were in the trigger event. Though the proportion is not as crazy as the proportion of millions of dead soldiers and civilians to one dead member of a royal family. I'm not a pacifist, but I do believe in keeping warfare small and precise where it is or seems inevitable, and I certainly don't believe in dead civilians. Which reminds me that (according to Wikipedia) about 4,200,000 civilians were killed during World War I in the Ottoman Empire. I wonder why I hadn't heard of this before. That death toll was about a hundred times as large as that of Germany, or of Austria-Hungary.

People may say that counting and comparing the number of corpses is not the way to do things, but it seems to me that even numbers with many zeroes fail to attract much attention after a few years have gone by. One of the things that I found shocking when I read the Gulag Archipelago two or three years ago is how the terrible experiences and deaths of millions of people can (apparently) be so entirely forgotten, even within living memory. It was hard for me to understand how anyone could go on after that.

Anyway, I may not be helping with the homework kicking and screaming, but certainly I am doing it murmuring and reluctantly. Much as I like correcting mistakes of spelling and grammar, and giving advice (regarding phrasing, etc.) that is followed, I can quickly tire of it in a school context, especially in the context of a project about a very broad subject. At least T. is still awake in these wee hours, too, listening to a Mozart symphony that manages not to clash with Gi.'s equally cheerful though less intellectually involved Japanese pop/rock. Everyone else is, to my knowledge, sleeping soundly.