Are wars inevitable?

Right now, could you or I change history for the better by bumping off, say, Vladimir Putin or Ali Khamenei? Or would these despots, once dispatched, simply be replaced by other troublemakers eager to exploit human anger and discontent?

Do so-called “great leaders” — like Caesar, say, or Cromwell, Napoleon, Lenin, or Hitler — determine history (in which case assassins might well be justified in whacking them, assuming assassins possessed the wisdom to foresee the future)? Or — as Professor Sidney Hook suggested more than 70 years ago and Emerson more than 150 years ago — do great leaders merely ride events, like the ant on the elephant’s back?

Through a rearview mirror, human history often seems preordained. But Margaret MacMillan, the distinguished World War I historian, has argued the opposite. In two recent works about World War I (The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 and Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World), she has enumerated several pre-1914 conflicts (the Balkan crises of 1874, 1885, and 1913, for example) that could have exploded into full-blown wars but fizzled, either through farsighted crisis diplomacy, or distraction by another crisis somewhere else, or lethargy, or fear, or sheer dumb luck.

James Stewart in reverse

When she spoke at a Library Company function in Philadelphia last week, MacMillan took her thesis a step further. During the question period, she suggested that, had the Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s chauffeur not taken a wrong turn into a Sarajevo side street in June 1914, thus placing the archduke in the crosshairs of an assassin who had been vacillating up to that moment, World War I might not have occurred at all, and 17 million lives might have been spared. For that matter, she added, had Hitler been killed or seriously wounded during the Great War, World War II and the Holocaust might not have happened either, with a consequent sparing of perhaps 50 million lives.

At first glance, MacMillan seems to be proposing the obverse of the beloved 1946 Hollywood film, It’s a Wonderful Life. In that Frank Capra fantasy, a suicidal small-town banker played by James Stewart gets the opportunity to see what a miserable place his hometown would be if he’d never been born. In MacMillan’s version, presumably, Hitler would see what a happy place the world would have been without him.

But MacMillan’s real point, I think, is that we should ask better and subtler questions about who and what determines history. The ingredients for disaster are always present, she reminds us. But it takes a rare combination of events, luck, and a uniquely diabolic alchemist to brew those elements into a full-fledged catastrophe. The world’s great tragedies may seem inevitable in retrospect, but they might very easily never have happened at all, just as you and I might easily have never existed either.

Hitler’s grandmother

Hitler is a prime case in point. In 1836, an unmarried 42-year-old Austrian domestic servant named Maria Schicklgruber was impregnated by a man whose identity has never been determined, possibly her employer (possibly even Jewish, according to some theories). The illegitimate son born of that liaison was Hitler’s father. And in November 1939, just after he launched World War II, Hitler escaped assassination at a Munich beer hall when a time bomb exploded just 13 minutes after he departed, destroying the podium where he had spoken and killing several people. Hitler survived only because his flight back to Berlin had been grounded due to fog, so he had to leave early to catch a train. Hitler, in other words, was the product of several accidents, any of which might have erased him from history.

But you and I can play this game as well. In June of 1877, a 25-year-old woman named Lottie Rottenberg died of typhus in the Hungarian village of Luko. Three months later her grieving husband married Lottie’s younger sister Sallie. Over the next 16 years, that union produced seven children, of whom the last was my grandfather. Had Lottie not died, or had Sally decided that six kids were enough, I wouldn’t be here.

So, can assassins change history? A recent academic study of assassination attempts on national leaders from 1875 to 2004 concluded that they can, but usually only when the political system is an autocracy. In democracies, by contrast, the study concluded that the sudden death of one leader rarely changes a nation’s direction. (Click here.)

Tom Lehrer’s lullaby

The authors of that study don’t delve into an explanation, beyond observing that democracies “appear robust.” That robustness, I would argue, stems from our subconscious perception that each of us exerts an awesome influence on the future in ways none of us can conceive — not only in the lives we create, but also in the lives we touch every day.

In 1945, two of the most militaristic societies in world history, Germany and Japan, were suddenly transformed into two of the most pacifist societies in world history. That happened because America and its allies extended a hand of support to their defeated rivals instead of imposing vindictive punishments (and also, to be sure, because Germans and Japanese experienced the horror of war on the own turf for the first time). In 1991, the Soviet empire voluntarily ceased to exist without the firing of a single shot, thanks to the courage of articulate dissidents like Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Lech Walesa, Adam Michnik, and Václav Havel (and also, to be sure, because the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev concluded that the Soviet system wasn’t worth shedding blood to preserve).

These modern nonviolent miracles might have led to war, just as the vindictive aftermath of World War I precipitated World War II. As Tom Lehrer put it in the ‘60s:

Once all the Germans were warlike and mean,
But that couldn’t happen again.
We taught them a lesson in 1918
And they’ve hardly bothered us since then.

(To hear Lehrer’s “MLF Lullaby,” click here.)

Lehrer was terrified by the notion of giving nuclear access to Germany, but the Germans have turned out to be more pacifist than we are. Nothing is preordained. Each of us is more powerful than we think. Our leaders are less powerful than they (and we) think. Democracies by their nature are stronger than autocracies.

It’s something to think about next time you feel the urge to poison Vladimir Putin’s tea.

For a response by Tom Purdom, click here.