Dynamic of Destruction - Essay Example

Response to Dynamic of Destruction Kramer's Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War, published in 2007, is a tract on how the very nature of war changed drastically at the start of the twentieth century. The author looks at various events from the beginning of the century, starting with the 1914 German raid of Louvain in Belgium, to highlight how war has become an all-encompassing phenomenon in which opposing sides compete to destroy not only each other's armies, but each other's ideologies, civilians, and culture.

However, Dynamic of Destruction is little more than a list of atrocities committed during the first half of the twentieth century – even if the individual events themselves are new to the reader, the manner in which they were performed have been repeated often enough that they seem a natural part of warfare to us. Kramer's thesis is so obvious as to be barely an argument at all. However, the horrors of the Great War were not limited to Germany – other countries, such as Italy and the Balkan nations, also committed shocking acts of brutality on their own as well as other peoples.

The chapter on 'German Singularity?' emphasizes that the “policy of absolute destruction” (114) was not unique to twentieth-century Germany, as many scholars have argued. Italy was one of the nations which perversely thrived under the influence of war. Its “eager … brutality and racism” (116) at the dawn of the century was the nation's attempt to “restore Italy's status as a Great Power” (116) as it invaded modern-day Libya. Even “Italy's bourgeois feminist movement renounced its pacifism” (118).

But Italian intervention in World War I proved unfortunate for the “gentle” troops, who were severely disciplined for their “lack of aggressive spirit” (127) – in Italy, unlike any other country during the war, 250 soldiers were executed as an example to others. One in twelve of the men serving were court-martialled (128). A more racist, though no less mindless, example of violence in the First World War was the situation in the Balkans, which both officially experienced genocide (the Armenian Genocide) and lesser, though still significant, crimes against humanity.

“The killing stopped somewhere short of genocide” (139) but in one case, 1159 of 1200 Bulgarian prisoners captured by Greek soldiers were massacred; in another, eighty-eight Greek villages were burnt to the ground over the course of three months for the cause of Turkish nationalism (145). Every victim was also a perpetrator. The combination of modern war technology and medieval healthcare and morals transformed the Balkans into a filthy orgy of death (136). However, the annihilation of another culture took not only the form of destruction, but also of construction: nationalist policies in the Austro-Hungarian Empire aimed to overrun colonies with German schools and Catholic churches, to reduce the influence of competing religions and languages (135).

This kind of warfare promoted a “cult of violence” (115), in which that which was previously sacred – civilians, for example, as well as cultural and historical artefacts – became legitimate targets of attack. As in the Armenian genocide, when Christians were “Islamicized” (Author, 167) in a conversion which saved their lives at the expense of their culture, countries which committed to war in the twentieth century did indeed commit the country, not just its army. The number of atrocities performed on innocent people and institutions suddenly became so widespread that it is now a part of everyday life – terrorism, the greatest threat to modern America, employs this very method of warfare, focusing on people who should be safe from such dangers.

However, I find Kramer's theory to be somewhat lacking. The book shows that he disagrees with the “special path” (114) of German history, which lead Germany straight from Bismarck to Hitler, but he provides no real alternative to this theory other than racism – furthermore, his argument is that racism was not unique to Germany, even though Nazism was. I disagree with his theory in that it ignores everything that is not directly related to it: it is simply not true that the only cause of war in the twentieth century was personal animosities towards marginalized groups of people.

The economic causes, and the non-violent effects, are important issues, and although it would be fair of Kramer to not focus on these, it is worryingly unacademical that he fails even to acknowledge them. Works Cited Kramer, Alan. Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print. Lastname, Firstname. The book about Armenian genocide. Place: Publisher, Year. Print.