First world war: an imperial bloodbath that's a
warning, not a noble cause
The Guardian's Seumas Milne published the column below a few weeks ago. It's excellent, interesting and well worth reading - I only just came across it.
Tory claims that 1914 was a fight
for freedom are absurd – but then history wars are about the future as much as
the past as the present
- The Guardian, Wednesday 8 January 2014 16.01 EST
They were never going to be able to
contain themselves. For all the promises of a dignified commemoration, the Tory
right's standard bearers held back for less than 48 hours into the new year
before launching a full-throated defence of the "war to end all
wars". The killing fields of Gallipoli and the Somme had been drenched in
blood for a "noble cause", declared Michael Gove. The
slaughter unleashed in 1914 had been a "just war" for freedom.
Hostility to the war, the education
secretary complained, had been fostered by leftwingers and comedians who
denigrated patriotism and painted the conflict as a "misbegotten
shambles". Gove was backed by the prime minister, as talk of international
reconciliation was left to junior ministerial ranks.
Boris Johnson went further. The war was the fault of German expansionism and
aggression, London's mayor pronounced, and called for Labour's shadow education
secretary Tristram Hunt to be sacked forthwith if he doubted it. The
Conservative grandees were backed up by a retinue of more-or-less loyal
historians. Max Hastings reckoned it had been fought in defence of "international law"
and small nations, while Antony Beevor took aim at
"anti-militarists".
This is all preposterous nonsense.
Unlike the second world war, the bloodbath of 1914-18 was not a just war. It
was a savage industrial slaughter perpetrated by a gang of predatory imperial
powers, locked in a deadly struggle to capture and carve up territories,
markets and resources.
Germany was the rising industrial
power and colonial Johnny-come-lately of the time, seeking its place in the sun
from the British and French empires. The war erupted directly from the fight
for imperial dominance in the Balkans, as Austria-Hungary and Russia scrapped
for the pickings from the crumbling Ottoman empire. All the ruling elites of
Europe, tied together in a deathly quadrille of unstable alliances, shared the
blame for the murderous barbarism they oversaw. The idea that Britain and its
allies were defending liberal democracy, let alone international law or the
rights of small nations, is simply absurd.
It's not just that 40% of men and
all women in Britain were denied the vote in 1914 – unlike Germany, which already had full male suffrage – or
that the British empire was allied with the brutal autocracy of tsarist Russia.
Every single one of the main warring
states was involved in the violent suppression of the rights of nations
throughout the racist tyrannies that were their colonial empires. In the
decades before 1914, about 30 million people died from famine as colonial officials
enforced the export of food in British-ruled
India, slaughtered resisters in their
tens of thousands and set up concentration camps in South Africa.
Britain was supposed to have gone to
war to defend the neutrality of "plucky little Belgium" – which had
itself presided over the death of 10 million Congolese from forced labour and mass murder in the previous couple
of decades. German colonialists had carried out systematic genocide in what is
now Namibia in the same period.
As to international law, Britain's
disdain for it was demonstrated when Germany had asked by what right it claimed territory in Africa a
few years before. London refused to reply. The
answer was obvious: brute force. This was the "liberal" global order
for which, in the words of the war poet Wilfred Owen, the ruling classes
"slew half the seed of Europe, one by one".
In reality, it wasn't just the seed
of Europe they sacrificed, but hundreds of thousands of troops from their
colonies as well. And in case there were any doubt that all the main combatants
were in the land-grabbing expansion game, Britain and France then divvied up
the defeated German and Ottoman empires between them, from Palestine to
Cameroon, without a thought for small nations' rights, laying the ground for
future disasters in the process.
Gove and his fellow war apologists
worry that satirical shows such as Blackadder have sapped patriotism by
portraying the war as "a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an
out-of-touch elite". The incompetence and cynicism of generals and
politicians certainly had horrific results. But it was the nature of the war
itself that was most depraved.
Fortunately, the revisionists lost
the argument among the public long ago – just as Gove has largely lost his
battle to impose a tub-thumping imperial agenda on the school history
curriculum. They will keep trying though, because history wars are about the
future as much as the past – and so long as imperial conflict is discredited,
future foreign military interventions and occupations will
be difficult to sell.
For the rest of us, this year's
anniversary should be a reminder that empire in all its forms, militarism and
national chauvinism lead to bloodshed and disaster. It also contains a warning
about the threat from the rise and fall of great powers. China is no imperial
Germany, but the US – allied with Japan – is a declining global power in a region in which it is tightening its
military grip. It's not 1914, but the dangers are
clear.
