2014: A Century Since 1914

Saturday, 11 January 2014

2014: A Century Since 1914

This year will mark the centenary of the beginning of the First World War. Already in the UK they are planning events for August and the propaganda machine has begun its work. The Tory Education Minister, an idiot called Michael Gove, described the war as "a just war for freedom" and he even criticized Black Adder for painting an unpatriotic view of the war.

What a load of rubbish. I am going to get in early and state my view: The First World War was a war perpetrated by the ruling classes for their own interests, imperial territory and power. It was not about freedom. England was not the good guy and Germany the bad guy. It is an absolute tragedy that so many were slaughtered, including so many Australians, for a war that did not have a just cause.

I really hope propaganda does not defeat the real history of this war as various ceremonies are undertaken around the world. So far I have not heard anything idiotic from an Australian politician but it is probably just a matter of time.

In response to Gove's remarks in the UK, Seumas Milne made a number of excellent comments in the Guardian (9/1/14) which I applaud:

"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 most men and all women in Britain were still 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".

What a terrible and depraved war. Completely senseless. And how much were the seeds of later atrocities - nazism and communism - sown in the First World War.

I am with Black Adder 100%.