<p>There can be no denying that Germany must bear full responsibility for the Great&nbsp;War. But precisely what was the root cause of this terrible tragedy that befell&nbsp;mankind a century ago? The leading statesmen and scholars of the period enlighten&nbsp;us on the origin and nature of this devastating conflict.<br /><br />War begins in the minds of men and it was the perversion of the German mind and&nbsp;will that made the Great War inevitable. And the individual responsible for this grotesque&nbsp;perversion was the German philosopher Friedrich Hegel. (In a paraphrase of Heinrich Heine&nbsp;(1797-1856) Isaiah Berlin admonished: &ldquo;Philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a&nbsp;professor&rsquo;s study could destroy a civilization.&rdquo;) Hegel believed history is the onward march of&nbsp;God of the Absolute of the World Spirit. The World Spirit acts in the realm of history through&nbsp;nations and through human personalities who are its chosen instruments. When Hegel saw&nbsp;Napoleon riding through the streets of Jena he declared he met the World Spirit on horseback.<br /><br />In any one specific historical period one people and one alone are the unconscious&nbsp;instrument of the World Spirit. Hegel identified the German nation as the dominant people&nbsp;for this epoch and the new agent of human progress. Revered as the philosopher of the Prussian&nbsp;State generations of scholars lecturers educators teachers statesmen administrators and&nbsp;military historians took their political philosophy as well as their outlook on the State and&nbsp;society from him. &ldquo;The State is the materialization of the Divine idea the moral spirit as&nbsp;the manifest self-evident will which conceives and knows and to the extent that it knows&nbsp;executes.&rdquo; &ldquo;Everything that man is he owes to the State; only in it can he find his essence. All&nbsp;value that a man has all spiritual reality he has only through the State.&rdquo; &ldquo;War has the higher&nbsp;significance in that through it nations maintain their moral soundness.&rdquo; &ldquo;So mighty a form as&nbsp;the World Historical Figure must trample down many an innocent flower and crush to pieces&nbsp;many an object in its path.&rdquo;<br /><br />It is the atheistic and sterile philosophy of Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) wherein one finds&nbsp;an explanation of unbridled German militarism and glorification of war and conquest and the&nbsp;German &ldquo;cult of valour.&rdquo; In Hegel lies the Prussian obsession with military invincibility succinctly&nbsp;expressed in those awesome epithets; &ldquo;Blood and Iron&rdquo; &ldquo;Might is Right.&rdquo; In Hegel one understands&nbsp;the yearning for a war in defence of the Fatherland. It is atheistic philosophers like Hegel who have&nbsp;armed demagogues with ideas to wage war on the human race. And the Great War was a war of&nbsp;ideas; hence its duration and ferocity. (See Friedrich Engels&rsquo; remarkable prophecy p 933)&nbsp;</p>
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