THE THIRD WAVE
Even Nazi Germany, so marvelously efficient at wiping out Poles, Russians, Jews and other “non-Aryans,” was anything but efficient in other ways. Raymond Fletcher, a member of the British Parliament who was educated in Germany and has remained a close observer of German social conditions, reminds us of a forgotten reality:
“We think of Nazi Germany as a model of efficiency. In fact, Britain was better organized for war than the Germans. In the Ruhr, the Nazis continued to turn out tanks and armored personnel carriers well after they no longer could find rail transport to take them away. They used their scientists very poorly. Of 16,000 inventions of military significance made during the war, few ever actually got into production because of the prevailing inefficiency. The Nazi intelligence agencies wound up spying on each other, while British intelligence was superb. While the British were organizing everyone to contribute wrought iron fences and saucepans to the war effort, the Germans were still producing luxury goods. While the British drafted women early on, the Germans didn’t. Hitler himself was a paragon of indecision. The Third Reich as an example of military or industrial efficiency is a ludicrous myth.”
It takes more than strong leadership, as we shall see, to make the trains run on time.
The second fatal fallacy in the cry for strong leadership is its unspoken assumption that a style of leadership that worked in the past will work in the present or future. We are continually dredging up images from the past when we think about leadership—Roosevelt, Churchill, de Gaulle. Yet different civilizations require vastly different leadership qualities. And what is strong in one may be inept and disastrously weak in another.
During First Wave, peasant-based civilization, leadership typically derived from birth, not achievement. A monarch needed certain limited practical skills—the ability to lead men hi combat, the shrewdness to play off his barons against one another, the cleverness to consummate an advantageous marriage. Literacy and broad powers of abstract thought were not among the basic requirements. Moreover, the leader was typically free to exercise sweeping personal authority in the most capricious, even whimsical fashion, unchecked by constitution, legislature, or public opinion. If approval was needed, it was only from a small coterie of nobles, lords, and ministers. The leader able to mobilize this support was “strong.”
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