NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 22, 27 January 1943, Page 4

NOTES ON THE WAR NEWS

CONQUEST A

SCIENCE

While the news today, at \ the time of writing, records no decisive event in the war, the Red Army moving steadily towards its various objectives in Russia, the Allies massing in North Africa for a,renewed offensive against the Axis in Tunisia, and battering the Japanese from the air in the .Southwest Pacific, it is worth while to turn again to geopolitics or the . "science," in the German interpretation of the word, of wor|d ; conquest. First there is interesting comment on Saturday's article in a letter from R. S. Parker, whoJs one of the few who have read Sir Halford Mackinder's book. Mr. Parker writes: In your "Notes oii the War News" of Saturday you republish an American reviewer s highly romanticised account of H., J. Mackinder's interesting little book, Democratic Ideals and Reality." For the reviewer to say that the work _ was not read by the citizens of Britain, Australia, etc," was a slight exaggeration, since it was; one of the minof prescribed text-books for a generation of economics students in at least one Australian university. ...Yet few of them, I think, would have called it an epochmaking book, since most of. its. generalisations about land and sea-power are commonplaces of historical .geography dressed ■in picturesque journalese. The American [writer really maligns the book, however, when he states that the German "geopolihcians "based their plans for world conquest and domination upon it," for the work itself pays tribute to the advanced state of the study and teaching of political geography in Germany before World War I. (1914). The following quotation is from my copy of the original (1919) edition: "Maps are thej essential apparatus of Kultur, and every educated German is a geo-j grapher in a sense that is true of very \ few Englishmen or • Americans; . His Real-Folitik lives in his mind upon a mental map. The serious teaching of geography 'in'- German high schools and. universities dates. from. the very beginning of Kultur. . Your Prussian, and his father, and his grandfather have debated such concepts (as Berlin-Bagdad, etc.), all their lives, pencil in hand." • ■ Incidentally, adds Mr. Parker, I see no mention in your column of the obvious implications of the book's argument, should a powerful union .of Socialist States extend its dominion from the Asiatic "heartland" into the European "peninsula." Such a "worldisland" might lack neither technology, organisation, nor "free loyalties. ... . Apart from this, perhaps the most interesting point in Mackinder's book is the author's claim—in a footnote—to have invented the term "man-power. Haushofer to Hitler. Not having read Mackinder's book the writer of these notes must leave things as they stand. There is, however, a further commentary by John Chamberlain in the "New York Times" on another just published work on geopolitics, "Generals and Geographers: The Twilight of Geopolitics" by Hans W. Weigert. . Quoting some famous dicta by generals and others, including Napoleon's reference to Egypt as key to the East, and Bismarck's "The master of Bohemia is the master of Europe," Mr. Chamberlain says: All of these boys, however, were 'rank amateurs wnen compared to the modern German school of geopoliticians, headed by General Karl Haushofer. In a passage that has been vastly overrated,: the English geographer, Sir Halford Mackinder, once said: "Who rules East Europe commands the heartland; who rules ; the heartland commands the world-island; who rules the world-island commands the world." This is palpable nonsense on .the .face of it, for Mdngols, Turks, and Slavs'have ruled the "heartland within historical memory, and none of these peoples have been able to command the world. What Mackinder really meant was that population pressure from Asia had had its terrific impact on Europe prior to the discovery of America in 1492, and would, presumably, have a similar impact again once the.coloniarreaches of the world had filled up. But General Haushofer, with Teutonic yearning for a huge, cloudy generality, seized upon Mackinder's geographical poetry and built a so-called "science" of conquest upon it. The story of how this pseudoscience grew to malignant proportions is told in Hans W. Weigert's book, a| story of the degradation of political geography in the hands of the Germans. All nations tend at times to rationalise their desires and accomplishments in terms of "destiny.' Thus "manifest destiny" was invoked to give blessing to our own seizure or Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California from, the Mexicans. The British have talked of the "white man's burden. But such undoubtedly geopolitical thinking has always rested on a^basic concept of limitation: The Anglo-Saxon peoples have believed in limited risk and the balance of power, but not in a monopoly of all power. With Haushofer and Hitler, geopolitics has been used as both a spur to and a justifica- , tion for global conquest. As Weigert puts it, Haushofer makes more sense than Hitler; the general had more education than the self-taught dictator. Haushofer's father knew Ratzel, an earlier pioneer of geopolitics, who was a warm-hearted man as well as a geographer with a Darwinian sense of the rise and decline of peoples. Haushofer himself spent a couple of years in Japan as -a young man. During the first World War he fought on the Russian front, and his memory of the ruin he saw all about him in Eastern Europe as he brought his division home in 1918 has had a marked effect on his thinking. The lack of natural boundaries in Eastern Europe has caused Haushofer to overstress the necessity of a geographically protected "living space." Hitler's Mistake. But when Haushofer read Mackinder he did not jump immediately to the. conclusion that Germany must attack Russia. He had campaigned on the steppes, and he knew their oppressive spaciousness. He had also read the letters, the diaries, and the books written by the Napoleonic soldiers who lost themselves 4n fear during the march back from Moscow in 1812. Haushofer believed the "heartland of Eurasia could be controlled by Germany through alliance with Russia and through subsequent economic penetration. The triumph of Haushoferism occurred in August, 1939, when Stalin and Hitler made their pact Unfortunately for geopolitics, Hitler was a super-Haushofer. He, too, had his eye on "heartland." But he wanted to take it by force of arms. Back m 1931 Ewald Banse, a Professor of Military Science at Brunswick High School, had warned that the Russian army "can never be finally pinned down and beaten in its own country." Banse s thinking was that of the German generals, and Haushofer was a general as well as a geopolitician. But Hitler, the romantic, the child who has been fed on the German equivalents of the American comic strip character Superman, thought he knew better than the generals. The result will soon: be history. I will sum up that history in my own anti-Mackinder, anti-Haus-hofer generalisation: "He who rules heartland commands heartland." Why is "geopolitics," as contrasted with political geography, the bunk? The reasons are as varied as the peoples of the world. In the first place, if Germany were ever to capture "heartland" and then go on to control the world, the basic origin of such power would reside in the brains of German chemists, in the industry of the Ruhr, and in the superior fighting qualities of the population of Central Europe. (Do I hear someone murmur, "He who owns the Ruhr owns the world"?) But central control of five continents, seven seas, arid twenty cultures is impossible, for reasons that should be obvious to any reader of Justice Brandeis. Bigness doesn't pay. The simple fact that a Britisher could make a better aeroplane in the Spitfire than a German could make in the Messerschmitt -was the (first geopolitical fact to shoot Haushofer full of holes. Mechanical ability, human recalcitrance, the development of jradid tube plane-spotting; devices, the King Jame» Bible •» r«flect«4 ia the