Andreas Latzko – “Men in War”

by Moritz Nestor

Antiwar literature from the period following the First World War has now been all but forgotten. After the Great War, and particularly following the publication of Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” in 1928, a significant public debate erupted between pacifists of all stripes and war-glorifying novels, such as Ernst Jünger’s “Storm of Steel”.
    In “The Way Back”, published in 1930–31, Remarque poignantly describes how the survivors of the horrors of war attempt to re-establish themselves in civilian life. In many ways, the novel reminds today’s readers of the personal tragedies of Vietnam War veterans, more of whom died by suicide after the war than were killed in action in Vietnam.
    One is also reminded of the accounts of one’s own fathers from the Second World War and of those veterans of the German Bundeswehr of the war in Afghanistan who returned emotionally broken, whose marriages fall apart as a result of the inevitable consequences that arise when one – not in self-defence, but seduced by the state’s lust for power – is forced to overcome the natural aversion to killing that is deeply rooted in human nature.
    My generation experienced first-hand, through our families and our “difficult” fathers, what it means for the socio-psychological climate of an entire society to be heavily burdened by the behaviour of a generation of men who emerged from war emotionally shattered. The list of psychological symptoms, which today are soberly and coldly labelled “post-traumatic stress disorder,” is well known to us from postwar family relationships: psychosomatic disorders, harshness, rudeness, emotional hyperarousal, lifelong reliving and re-dreaming of war memories (“flashbacks”), emotional numbness, helplessness, and the profound “shaking of one’s understanding of the self and the world.” These veterans of war were in desperate need of psychological support. We were all in desperate need of a reflection on the psychological consequences of war, especially a war of conquest waged in the service of power.
    But the Western victors shifted blame for the war (WW2) onto the German people – after first “throwing a veil over their heads” (Alfred Adler) to deceive them into going to war. They, the Germans, remained silent — as the “perpetrator nation” — about their emotional brokenness, which they themselves did not understand but which was always evident in their everyday behaviour. “That’s just war,” my mother would say helplessly when I complained to her, deeply hurt by my father’s unbridled outbursts of anger. She didn’t know what to do, either — apart from praying, but that didn’t help.
    Instead of identifying the war of aggression — masked as a “humanitarian intervention” (since the 1990ies) yet prohibited under international law — as the political cause of German veterans’ severe mental health issues, and taking political action to address them, a biological approach to psychiatry diverts attention from the accusation that war is the cause by subsuming the consequences of war under the diagnosis of “post-traumatic stress disorder,” PTSD, and managing the suffering through psychiatric means. The number of “cases” of traumatised Bundeswehr soldiers after operations abroad (e.g., Afghanistan, Kosovo) is rising steadily today — by an estimated 100 cases per year. PTSD is “incurable,” explain the psychiatrists treating it; one can learn only to manage it.1
    Back to the First World War: One of the early anti-war texts written in the wake of the mass deaths was “Men in War” by Andreas Latzko (1876–1943). He served in the Austro-Hungarian Army and returned from the war suffering from severe psychological trauma. The novella “Off to War” is included in “Men in War”.2 In it, Latzko describes, against the backdrop of his own personal experiences, the fate of a “war tremor sufferer,” one of hundreds of thousands who escaped the front line and suffered from severe trauma — without physical wounds, but with tics, stuttering, unexplained pain, constant nausea, psychologically induced blindness and deafness, movement disorders and paralysis.
    Some of these sufferers trembled, others screamed, while others had lost their memories or their voices, trembled constantly and uncontrollably, could no longer stand, could no longer eat, and were seized by panic in everyday situations — for instance, diving under the bed in terror when the doctor entered, as if a grenade were about to explode. Even back then, the misery caused by the war was managed by a form of biological psychiatry, about which Sigmund Freud wrote: “Doctors have been assigned a role similar to that of machine guns behind the front line: the role of driving back the fleeing.”3
    In “Off to War”, however, Latzko pierces the fog of war propaganda and transforms a war-weary soldier into a passionate accuser of the true causes of his misery, thereby castigating the public’s enthusiasm for war, which has been manufactured by state propaganda. As punishment for writing the book, Latzko is demoted to the rank of private. “Men in War” is banned in the belligerent states.
    A year after “Men in War” appeared, Alfred Adler, the founder of individual psychology, wrote “The Other Side: A Study in Mass Psychology on the Guilt of the People”, published in German (Vienna 1919):
    

Now they want to lay the blame for this war on this people in the eyes of the world/in the shared world. No! Anyone who has spent time among them will absolve this people of any blame for the war. They were powerless, had no guiding principles and no leaders. They were dragged, shoved and driven to the slaughter. No one told them the truth. Their writers and journalists were under the spell of, or in the pay of, the military. […] If people are to be made to perform slave labour, if they are to go hungry, be forced into labour, pay taxes and suffer punishment, then let us hold to account all those who devised, carried out and deliberately took part in this hellish enterprise.
    

My psychology teacher, Friedrich Liebling, who, like Adler, had to fight in the First World War, said in an interview:

If more money were spent on psychology, in time we would no longer need to spend money on military equipment. We could prevent children and young people from ending up in prisons, clinics and mental hospitals due to delinquency and drug problems. We would not have to send young people to the field of honour, into wars. Every citizen of a nation has the right to know about themselves and their fellow citizens. Only in this way can we achieve mutual understanding and respect, and consequently a just society that can live in peace. But unfortunately, that is not the case today. Generals still dictate people’s lives and destinies.4
    

Understanding oneself and others helps us to develop greater humanity, to love and respect other people for their own sake, and to live out humanitas. In this sense, the insights of depth psychology and the personal human sciences have a profoundly political significance: By fostering greater social empathy and compassion, they help to strengthen people’s inner resilience and make them immune to the irrational imagery of war propaganda.
    Immanuel Kant formulated the fundamental ethical principle that human beings must never be treated merely as a means to an end, but always “as an end in themselves.” Friedrich Liebling writes in his 1964 essay, “Tiefenpsychologische Menschenkenntnis” (Depth Psychological Insight into Human Nature):

But to grasp a person’s true nature is possible only for those who study man for his own sake; indeed, perhaps even a fundamental understanding is inseparable from the desire or inclination to help the other person, to assist them in realising their true nature. An understanding of human nature must not become a parlour game, a superficial pastime in which one points out one’s neighbour’s “flaws” or tears the masks from their faces; nor, even less, must it become a pretext for self-aggrandisement, whereby one believes oneself to be above imperfection simply by recognising the shortcomings of others. It may sound moralistic, but you can only truly understand people to the extent that you love them; and the better you understand them, the more you will love them. The fundamental attitude of a true expert in human nature must be respect for the individuality of others, an attitude free from judgemental and moralistic intentions: nothing is more difficult for a person than such an ability to engage with others without prejudice, and this explains the psychological connection that those who are true experts in human nature are those who have themselves been entangled in great struggles with guilt, temptation or inner distress; the ‘repentant sinners’ – as Alfred Adler emphasises – have played a prominent role in the development of European morality (for better or for worse). If we approach the problem more objectively, it seems clear that once our own hardship has been overcome, it is only then that our eyes are opened to the great struggle that people face in their lives: an insight that makes us more forgiving and compassionate, and brings home to us the inherent value of every human being, regardless of their deficiencies.5•

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2026/no-8-21-april-2026/andreas-latzko-men-in-war

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King Charles must be pinching himself at the moment. After months and months of terrible headlines, he's suddenly surrounded by applause.

Over the past couple of days, in his speeches on his US state visit, he's teased President Trump, stood up to him, charmed him and even though it was hidden in a velvet glove, landed a couple of decent digs.

And many commentators, even critics of the monarchy, seem delighted at the spectacle. It was the underdog winning the cup against all expectations.

Alastair Campbell, a longstanding republican, posted: "Excellent speech by King Charles... Loved the confidence in British and European values."

Sir Anthony Seldon, historian and biographer of prime ministers, praised the subtlety of what the King seemed to have pulled off.

"With a president known for his unpredictability and fresh out of an assassination attempt, the King managed to land subtle blow after blow on a smiling president, upholding Ukraine, Nato, climate change, the Royal Navy, and the limits to presidential authority," said Sir Anthony.

He described it as "a state visit for the ages, the most significant since his grandfather George VI's visit in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War".

Emily Maitlis, interviewer of Prince Andrew in the Newsnight interview, made bigger claims, hailing the speech for cheering up the nation.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqxpr404053o

GUSNOTE: BEING CHIDED BY ROYALS IS GLORY TO DONALD TRUMP.... HE HAS MORE FUNNY STUFF TO DEAL WITH THAN A FEW BAD JOKES AT HIS EXPENSE, FROM A FELLOW WHO IS SHORTER THAN HIM WITH A WIFE NOT AS GOOD LOOKING AS HIS OWN... TRUMP-THE-VILE WOULD REMEMBER THE TAMPON AFFAIR... AND STILL LAUGH ABOUT IT...

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         Gus Leonisky

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Dead empire meets zombie empire: King Charles III’s US visit can’t mask the reek of corruption

The British monarch’s trip showcases an alliance held together by shared complicity and decline

BY Tarik Cyril Amar

King Charles III has gone to Washington, ostensibly to help the transatlantic cousins celebrate getting rid of his predecessor George III 250 years ago. But being a royally gracious loser is, of course, only a pretext.

In reality, as The Economist, the premier British mouthpiece of transatlantic orthodoxy, has deplored, Charles’s mission is to salvage what’s left to be salvaged from the sinking “special relationship” between Washington and London.

That the relationship is in very bad shape is obvious from the compulsive manner in which Britain’s leader Keir Starmer keeps insisting that it still exists, while also emphasizing that he “will remain laser-focused on what is in the British national interest.”

Indeed, the abysmally unpopular Starmer has been subjected to so much typical Trump hazing that, as The Guardian notes, he may be enjoying “a vanishingly rare moment of public approval for his relatively robust response.”

Historically, the “special relationship” has certainly seen better days. It goes back a long way, even if the term itself was coined as late as 1946, when Winston Churchill needed a polite way of suggesting a political friendship with benefits: The British Empire was bankrupt and shrinking, and London was ready to submit to its former colonists in America in return for a new place as their permanent privileged sidekick in the beginning Cold War crusade against the Soviet Union.

Historically, the moderately sized island realm off Europe’s shores had laid the foundations for the continental behemoth across the Atlantic, even if – to be fair to the British – not deliberately but by strategic blunder. The bloody divorce between the rebellious colonists and the obstinate mother country – in many respects really a war between competing oligarchies, including plenty of slave holders and traders – has been imaginatively baked into the bedrock of US self-glorification as a war of independence and revolution.

It is true that, at first, the British were very cross indeed and returned in 1812 to burn the White House. When the Americans went to war with each other in the 1860s, Britain’s upper classes mostly rooted for the South, that is, for the break-up of the US. But even then, London was already cautious enough to maintain official neutrality.

Fast forward half a century and that turned out to have been a very wise decision. When the Germans fought for hegemony in the First World War and knocked out Russia – weakened by revolution – Berlin might well have won or, at least, achieved a stalemate peace against France and Britain, its key antagonists in the West. It was US intervention that, instead, ensured German defeat in 1918.

True, considering the consequences of that defeat and its shortsighted mismanagement by the victors, you don’t have to like the Kaiser’s Germany to wonder if Europe – and the world – would not have been better off if the Americans had stayed out, as eminent historian Dominic Lieven has long pointed out.

In any case, as things happened in the real world, there was a second German (and, this time, also Japanese) try for primacy, much worse than the first. Again, in the Second World War as well, over-extended Britain and the booming US were not only on the same side but formed a particularly close if unequal relationship.

The pattern continued during the subsequent Cold War and beyond, with American and British spies and soldiers often in cahoots to topple sovereign governments and replace them with authoritarian vassal regimes, including Iran in 1953, Chile twenty years later, Iraq in 2003, and Syria only recently, to name only a few cases.

Churchill’s very own American dream, in short, came true: While shedding its empire, a much-diminished Britain – really a middling power with debilitating manufacturing-base weakness – kept punching above its economic and geopolitical weight, due in large measure to having found a new niche as America’s junior accomplice.

There have been partial exceptions and mishaps. Britain, for instance, refused to send troops to help the US in Vietnam. Hardly remembered now, in other ways London did, however, consistently support Washington’s brutal and futile war, if on the sly. The greatest single debacle was, of course, the Suez in 1956, shorthand for a British-French-Israeli imperialist Blitzkrieg on Egypt that went sour when the US – and the Soviet Union – put the Zionist-colonialist marauders in their place. Then as well, a British monarch, Charles’s mother Elisabeth II, ended up making a very delicate trip to Washington.

And Suez brings us to today. Because if that combination of Western-Israeli scheming, crude lying and vicious aggression, a strategic waterway (the Suez Canal), and successful resistance by a country systematically demonized in Western mainstream media (Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt) looks familiar, then it’s because the Trumpist US regime has just produced an inadvertent re-enactment. This time, the heroic and effective resistance comes from Iran, the conniving war of aggression based on lies from Israel and its US auxiliaries, and the strategic waterway is, of course, the Strait of Hormuz.

There are many differences between the Suez in 1956 and the current war on Iran, too. What matters with regard to the American-British special relationship is that this time, it is the US that has gotten badly stuck in a failing war of aggression waged together with Israel. Britain has by no means “refused to take part,” as the New York Times has misinformed its readers. In reality, in letting the US use it as a launching pad for bombing Iran, London is the ever-trusty accomplice again, no better than Germany.

Yet the Starmer regime is trying to have it both ways by engaging in what are really shyster sophistries to mask its deep involvement, while rejecting Washington’s demands for even more collaboration. The upshot is that Starmer has tied himself into a pretzel to please Washington as much as he can without fearing for his own political skin, but that is not enough to satisfy America’s Donald Trump. “When we needed them, they weren’t there,” the president-in-dire-straits has growled.

There are other issues of discontent and sore spots between the “special relationship” partners: London is not amused at all that the Trump administration has cast doubt over its sovereignty over the Malvinas (AKA Falklands), an empire-remnant of some geopolitical significance that is much closer to Argentina (which also lays claim to them) than Britain. London’s plans for the Chagos Islands, home to British and American bases, have run into US opposition.

Britain used to have some special oomph being America’s poodle inside the EU, but Brexit put an end to that. At the same time, Washington does see London as part of Europe whenever Europe fails to satisfy Trump’s every whim, as over his urge for Greenland. In the US, it is precisely with the most MAGA Americans that Britain tends to have the worst image, caricatured as a hotbed of Islamism and anarchy, whereas in reality it’s an increasingly authoritarian hub of Zionist influence.

Opinion polls show that the disenchantment is more widespread: on both sides of the Atlantic, the cousins are growing to like each other less and less. Indeed, the British public has been largely unhappy about the king’s trip.

So, there’s much that is rotten in the “special relationship”between the former global empire and its current successor on its own trajectory of decline and decay. But that is not the only reason why things give off a fetid odor. The worst irony of them all is the fact that the US and Britain still do have important things in common, but they are even worse than what sets them apart. Both Washington and London have cultivated a pathologically close relationship with Israel, supporting the war-addicted apartheid state to the detriment of their own societies, countries, and national interest.

In the same vein, the elites of both London and Washington are, moreover, at the heart of the scandal around the pedophile criminal and conspirator – clearly on behalf of Israel – Jeffrey Epstein. King Charles and President Trump could exchange notes on how to spin the fall-out from the Epstein files, both for the royal family and for the American president himself. Indeed, one of the many recent bust-ups between the British government and Trump has been about Starmer’s criminally negligent – at the very best – appointment of yet another Epstein “customer,” the sinister powerbroker Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US.

Think about it: with all the bad blood between London and Washington, they still converge on complicity with a genocide and the state perpetrating it, and they can commiserate with each other over being stuck up to their necks in the worst, most disgusting, most politically disruptive scandal of the century. The “special relationship” stinks of corruption, whether in agreement or disagreement.

https://www.rt.com/news/639284-king-charles-us-visit/

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