Page 240 - Islam Denounces Terrorism

238 Islam Denounces Terrorism

We have seen too how these views were not limited to military
figures, and that Max Weber for example was deeply concerned
with the international struggle for survival. Again Kurt Riezler,
the personal assistant and confidant of the German chancellor
Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, wrote in 1914:

Eternal and absolute enmity is fundamentally inherent in rela-
tions between peoples; and the hostility which we observe
everywhere… is not the result of a perversion of human nature
but is the essence of the world and the source of life itself. 28

Friedrich von Bernhardi, a World War I general, made a similar
connection between war and the laws of war in nature. "War" declared
Bernhardi "is a biological necessity"; it "is as necessary as the struggle
of the elements of nature"; it "gives a biologically just decision, since its
decisions rest on the very nature of things." 29