Modern militarism, especially Prussian militarism, is a scientific and philosophic system of objectivization, of compulsory escape from morbid subjectivity and suicidal mania. I repeat “modern militarism”; for the fighting spirit of savages and barbarians, or even the fighting spirit of medieval knights and mercenaries is, psychologically and morally, very different from the scientifically coordinated military system of the modern absolutist State. Savages and barbarians fight from aboriginal savagery, or driven by want or hunger; but, in the world war, disciples of Rousseau and Kant, Goethe and Herder, of Byron and de Musset stood in the trenches. And when, in the spirit of Hegel, Werner Sombart praises German militarism and boasts of the Fausts and Zarathustras in the trenches, he fails to understand how severely he is, in reality, condemning German and European civilization. The fighting of these modern, civilized men is a violent effort to get away from the perplexities that arise in the ego of the superman; and, for this reason, the intelligentsia were no whit behind the peasants and workmen in fighting spirit, but rather outdid them. This phenomenon struck me first when I saw the Serbian intelligentsia in the Balkan wars. In modern war, adversaries do not face each other eye to eye, hand to hand. They destroy each other from a distance, abstractly, invisibly, killing through and by ideas—German idealism translated into the tongue of Krupp. Even defensive war, which alone is morally admissible, thus becomes repugnant; and this is why Democracy has so hard a task in training democratic soldiers, in building up a democratic army composed of soldiers consciously on the defensive, not seeking to conquer and to subjugate by main force, yet brave and ready to sacrifice their own lives. Militarism and modern war are of a piece with Rousseau’s “State of Nature,” with Comte’s lapse from Positivism into Fetishism, and with the Romanticist yearning for an unreasoning, animal, vegetative life. Neither the great theorist of modern Democracy nor the founder of Positivism nor the Romanticists saw that the “State of Nature,” Fetishism and animality signify barbaric blood-lust and a war of all against all. The natural man knows naught of suicide from modern weariness of life, exhaustion and neurasthenia. If he ever kills himself it is in rage at some affront or at the failure of some vigorous effort, whereas the modern man suffers from morbid suicidal mania, from lack of energy, fatigue or dread born of mental and moral isolation, of barren megalomania, and supermanishness. Militarism is an attempt of the superman to escape from diseases
