'Self' Blame

One of the most interesting aspects of twentieth century history-making — a genuine cultural phenomenon — is the sheer amount of effort the former belligerents of WWI have put into blaming each other for the conflict.

For decades this was not just empty finger-pointing, but an urgent part of how they collectively attempted to reconstitute the ‘world’ order after 1918.

In some ways one could say that WWI mutated into an almost never-ending, less lethal intellectual conflagration over its origins. In 1929 the German historian Bernhard Schwertfeger explicitly referred to this as the 'World War of Documents'.

By 1991 it was being estimated that the relevant literature ran to 25,000 books and articles, featuring an extremely diverse range of takes on culpability, and this has only expanded further since.

What stands out in this for me is the fact that each ex-participant tried to pin the blame on the others, with the telling exception of the Russians — who largely blamed themselves, or rather their former imperialistic, non-Soviet selves. (There is one key example of German self-flagellation from later in the century to consider as well, from a noted Nazi apostate.)

Anyway, this strikes me as a very solid example of how the Far Left have always found it easier to get worked into a froth about the enemy within than without, with a tendency for rather pointedly arguing amongst themselves that was sent up so well by Monty Python in The Life of Brian.

However, it’s true to say that in the developing world the USA provides international imperialist bugbear services which generally help divert from this innate back-biting tendency, albeit as an outside meddler with explicit connections to more local antagonistic elements.

But in the developed world, it is the domestic imperialist history and its modern adherents that are pretty much always the left-extremists' #1 nemesis, and there is almost no amount of bad behaviour from their nations’ actual external enemies that will distract them from the task of calling it out. (I have noticed on this platform however, that some American tankies also like to project onto us Brits as natural-born Imperialists, par excellence.)

This contrasts markedly with the Far Right, for whom these days their own inner blamelessness (for just about anything) is more axiomatic that ever, and what we might refer to as the Far Centre, for whom it is usually 'the system' that is at fault and in need of a re-jigging in order to deliver more utilitarian results.