Recently, the internet was lit ablaze by Tucker Carlson interviewing popular historian Daryl Cooper. Revealing that religion is not on the decline, like angry Catholics from the medieval times all of Twitter was out to burn Cooper at the stake for his views on World War II. There have been numerous explanations, takes, and debates after the fact about whether what Cooper said was historically accurate. I will not endeavour to bore you with yet another piece on the historical facts. Rather, the discourse was accompanied by a remarkable amount of stupidity that shows just how embedded collectivist thinking is within casual political society. It needs to be called out for the illogical and bamboozling claptrap that it is.
When it comes to war, collectivism runs amok. One day, you are engaging in peaceful transoceanic commerce with an individual of a different nationality and a different culture until, suddenly, you are convinced they deserve to be bombed along with everyone else who shares the same home. As an example, you can see this tweet from a former staffer for a member of parliament in my country, the United Kingdom:
None of that immense suffering would’ve happened if Germany hadn’t collectively decided to go on a genocidal rampage across Europe.
— Ben Harris (@btharris93) September 4, 2024
This insane logic is sadly commonplace among the political mainstream and indirectly infects policy outside of wartime. Even at their electoral peak, the Nazi Party only ever garnered 37.3% of the vote, years before the initiation of World War II. No reasonable person is going to argue that suddenly 70-80% of the German population staunchly did an about turn and became undying, proudly Seig Heiling National Socialists. But, for the sake of generosity, let’s assume they did. The next step, that they suddenly deserve capital punishment for supporting the actions of others is still nutty. Rishi Sunak, former prime minister of the United Kingdom, accepted, without a single scent of hesitation, unfathomable volumes of money printing from the Bank of England to fund COVID lockdown boondoggles which caused terrible amounts of misery for millions of people in my country. Are all Conservative voters directly responsible for the woe of these people and should they receive an appropriate punishment? I can practically feel the balking at the very sliver of such a contemptuous idea; yet, this instantly shows the incoherency of such thinking.
Proponents of this collectivism usually fallback on the argument that wartime is a different environment. Our principles are cast aside for absolute victory because if we don’t take part in total war then the other side will storm through us, rendering our principles meaningless. Principles do not win wars, dear boy! This is usually a very disingenuous justification, since war hawks use it when criticized regarding the massacre in Dresden or the mountains of civilians killed during carpet bombing, and even the unbelievable atrocity against the Japanese in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. If the logic is that civilians are worth killing in the millions to land the final blow to the enemy war machine, how far does this go? Are proponents willing to follow the logic through and say that even more civilians should have been killed if, by their own thinking, they are all responsible for actions of their dicators? They are all evil right? A rather squeamish reaction beckons when that question is alluded to. This theory of culpability is filled with holes and should not be taken seriously.
Uncritical analysis has seeped into mainstream political discourse during peacetime and this has, undeniably, caused ever increasing conflict. Politics is essentially camps of people attempting to use the coercive and often harmful levers of the state to enforce their views on their opponents. It necessitates a small group of political elites vying for the votes of a larger group of people. Political actors shove people into groups based off characteristics like race, gender, and age and assume that most of those people think a certain way and try to appeal to them by saying they will implement certain policies. That leaves millions of people left with a government they did not consent to in any shape or form, implementing policies that they would never choose in their own private lives; if you don’t comply to something you didn’t consent to, you are punished by laws passed by those non-consensual deviants. Do we need to call Holmes in on this one? Conflict is inevitable because, as it turns out, people do not like having views they don’t agree with forced on them. Repeat this process a few times and, slowly, millions of people become completely disillusioned with the political system, exemplified by the trend of ever fewer people turning up to vote.
Collectivist logic is perverse; it forces people into groups based off immutable characteristics and then assumes they all act and think the same. Not even the same person acts or thinks the same over a single day. At best, this collectivist logic enforces policies over vast swathes of people despite them not consenting and at worst, leads to their execution without a trial. If the best-case scenario has very real harmful effects, then it should, at the very least, be discussed in more detail and debated before it is actioned. Take away the power of the state to intervene almost everywhere and the ill effects that I have outlined dissipate as individuals can make their own decisions about their lives. Unfortunately, the collectivist boobytrap surrounding World War II leaves the debate in the political arena about particularly egregious events like Dresden. There needs to be a more than skin-deep analysis about why killing civilians in events like that is necessarily awful, including the ramifications this way of thinking has on your own population. People will be shocked when it harms their own tribe.
