The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,151

construction, we might say today—and “detraction will not suffer it.” Detraction there soon was. Perhaps the best antiwar film of all time is the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933). Groucho plays Rufus T. Firefly, the newly appointed leader of Freedonia, and is asked to make peace with the ambassador of neighboring Sylvania:I’d be unworthy of the high trust that’s been placed in me if I didn’t do everything within my power to keep our beloved Freedonia at peace with the world. I’d be only too happy to meet Ambassador Trentino and offer him on behalf of my country the right hand of good fellowship. And I feel sure he will accept this gesture in the spirit in which it is offered.

But suppose he doesn’t. A fine thing that’ll be. I hold out my hand and he refuses to accept it. That’ll add a lot to my prestige, won’t it? Me, the head of a country, snubbed by a foreign ambassador. Who does he think he is that he can come here and make a sap out of me in front of all my people? Think of it. I hold out my hand. And that hyena refuses to accept it. Why, the cheap, four-flushing swine! He’ll never get away with it, I tell you! [The ambassador enters.] So, you refuse to shake hands with me, eh? [He slaps the ambassador.]

Ambassador: Mrs. Teasdale, this is the last straw! There’s no turning back now! This means war!

Whereupon an outlandish production number breaks out in which the Marx Brothers play xylophone on the pickelhauben of the assembled soldiers and then dodge bullets and bombs while their uniforms keep changing, from Civil War soldier to Boy Scout to British palace guard to frontiersman with coonskin cap. War has been likened to dueling, and recall that dueling was eventually laughed into extinction. War was now undergoing a similar deflation, perhaps fulfilling Oscar Wilde’s prophecy that “as long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.”

The butt of the joke was different in the other classic war satire of the era, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). It was no longer the hotheaded leaders of generic Ruritanian countries that were the target, since by now virtually everyone was allergic to a military culture of honor. Instead the buffoons were thinly disguised contemporary dictators who anachronistically embraced that ideal. In one memorable scene, the Hitler and Mussolini characters confer in a barbershop and each tries to dominate the other by raising his chair until both are bumping their heads against the ceiling.

By the 1930s, according to Mueller, Europe’s war aversion was prevalent even among the German populace and its military leadership.134 Though resentment of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles was high, few were willing to start a war of conquest to rectify them. Mueller ran through the set of German leaders who had any chance of becoming chancellor and argued that no one but Hitler showed any desire to subjugate Europe. Even a coup by the German military, according to the historian Henry Turner, would not have led to World War II.135 Hitler exploited the world’s war-weariness, repeatedly professing his love of peace and knowing that no one was willing to stop him while he was still stoppable. Mueller reviews biographies of Hitler to defend the idea, also held by many historians, that one man was mostly responsible for the world’s greatest cataclysm:After seizing control of the country in 1933, [Hitler] moved quickly and decisively to persuade, browbeat, dominate, outmaneuver, downgrade, and in many instances, murder opponents or would-be opponents. He possessed enormous energy and stamina, exceptional persuasive powers, an excellent memory, strong powers of concentration, an overwhelming craving for power, a fanatical belief in his mission, a monumental self-confidence, a unique daring, a spectacular facility for lying, a mesmerizing oratory style, and an ability to be utterly ruthless to anyone who got in his way or attempted to divert him from his intended course of action....

Hitler needed the chaos and discontent to work with—although he created much of it, too. And surely he needed assistance—colleagues who were worshipfully subservient; a superb army that could be manipulated and whipped into action; a population capable of being mesmerized and led to slaughter; foreign opponents who were confused, disorganized, gullible, myopic, and faint-hearted; neighbors who would rather be prey than fight—although he created much of this as well. Hitler took the