"You mean the Roman style persecution started all over again. Is this what you're getting at?" Indira asked.

      "Not exactly," I replied. "The Venetian Empire found itself totally impotent to respond. They couldn't respond in the old Roman way. They didn't have the smarts to do this. There was not a single leader that the Venetians could assassinate. There wasn't even a mass movement identifiable that they could persecute and slaughter, or tear to shreds in the old Roman style. The Renaissance was a dawning idea that had permeated society as a whole. The Venetians had no choice therefore, but to fight the new idea itself, and that is what they did. They waged a religious war against the truth, against the divinity of man, and they won. They fractionalized society and set the factions against each other. They created the Reformation and at the same time also the Counterreformation. In the process they took the new Christian ideal of universal love and waged war against it. They did it in part also with countermanding non-religious philosophies that declared that love has no place in business and in the affairs of state. They promoted a lot of that. In this fashion the ground was prepared for a near global war. And that's what happened. Out of this background of a fast collapsing civilization a whole string of wars became unleashed. The succession of those wars appeared unstoppable. They went on for eighty years until half the population of Europe had been slaughtered. The madness ended only when a new awakening began back to the same old idea of truth, of the divinity of mankind. This second awakening, in turn, gave rise to a second renaissance following the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the Westphalian Renaissance, which eventually set the stage for the founding of the greatest republic that has ever been created on the face of the earth, which became the USA."

      "I take it that this second renaissance was seen as another death threat for the empire. That would have been the British Empire that had 'invaded' India at this time," Indira interrupted. "The British must have seen themselves loosing all of their colonies. With America claiming independence, would India be next. They probably were scared as we can't imagine of loosing their vast holdings here in India to a similar independence drive."

      "Well, they had to face the fact that they couldn't defeat America anymore," I replied. "They tried twice and lost twice on the battle field. But they managed to leash out hard against the intellectual forces in Europe that had created the second renaissance, which had set the stage for the founding of the USA. That's what they hit with all they got. In order to accomplish the defeat of the second renaissance at the center of Europe where it had sprung up, the British imperials staged the French Revolution. In the background of the revolution the Jacobin terror rampage was unleashed that effectively eradicated the intellectual elite of France. That Joacobin terror was later spread through all of Europe by Napoleon, who became the first modern fascist. Miraculously, Europe recovered from that, and with the recovery a new cultural optimism erupted. The new optimism was once again based on the power of ideas. That's the natural result of human ingenuity. The economic integration of all of Eurasia had been put on the agenda at the time on the basis of that recognition. Plans had been laid down for vast rail-link land-bridge to be constructed that would reach deep into Russia, and from there all the way to China."

      "This sounds to me like a new death threat to the sea-power based British Empire," said Indira and began to laugh. "Does this train of tragedy ever end? I can see the same thing happening in our country," she said, "but only on the minutest scale compared to that."

      "Actually, it didn't end," I replied. "The British Empire responded promptly with setting the stage for World War I. It took them 50 years to get World War I started. Mary and her discovery stood in their way, but Mary died and the train to hell was restarted. The rulers of the empire evidently knew that their empire could no longer be secured with a lesser response to a globally expanding renaissance idea than unleashing global war. And that's what they did. Whenever cultural optimism unfolds on the vast global scale so that it threatens to unlock the profound potential of humanity for an economic development spanning such a vast area as the whole of the Eurasian continent, the imperials knew that they could not defeat this aspiring idea of a people's self-development, as any pervasive idea. They were empty, afraid, bankrupt. They were too small to fight Russia, and China had slipped out of their fingers. They evidently knew that nothing short of the physical destruction of the key regions could in any way prevent the realization of this unfolding humanist development that threatened the Empire's very existence. They had concocted communism, but the Russians hadn't swallowed the bait at their 1905 revolution. The Empire was so 'bankrupt' that it no options left but to unleash global war. The destruction that they unleashed was accordingly on an unimaginable scale. The destruction became so horrid, so dehumanizing, that a brand new ideology emerged from it that drove the debasement of the image of humanity to still lower levels. They promoted a combination of the beastmen ideology of Maistre and that of the sewer of the Spanish Inquisition in an attempt to crush the Westphalia Renaissance once and for all, which had been carried forward in America. Out of that radically debased background emerged the fascist beastmen ideology of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Mired in this sewer, we find the roots of the ideology that Hitler implemented with the initial backing of the leading elements of the private the British Empire."

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Stories about War from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche