Dominic
Alexander 11 November 2014. Posted in News
Dominic
Alexander debunks ten myths being used by politicians and historians to rebrand
World War I in the centenary of its outbreak.
1-The war was
fought in defence of democracy
This is
contradicted by the basic facts. Germany had universal manhood suffrage while
in Britain, including Ireland, some 40% of men still did not qualify for the
vote. In Germany also, there were attempts to justify the war on the grounds
that it was being fought to defend civilised values against a repressive,
militaristic state, in the form of Russian autocracy.
2-Britain
went to war due to a treaty obligation to defend the neutrality of Belgium
There was no
clear and accepted obligation on Britain to do this, and, in fact, before the
Belgian issue appeared, the war party in the cabinet was already pushing for
British intervention on the entirely different ground that there were naval
obligations to France. These obligations had been developed in secret
arrangements between the military of both countries, and were never subject to
any kind of democratic accountability. The Germans even offered guarantees over
Belgian integrity, which the British government refused to consider at all.
3-German
aggression was the driving force for war
However
aggressive the German leadership may have been in 1914, the British
establishment was at least as determined to take the opportunity to go to war
with its imperial rival. At one point the Foreign Office even seized on
imaginary German incursions into France to justify a British declaration of war
on Germany. The declaration letter had to be retrieved from the German
ambassador and rewritten when it was discovered that the stories were false.
The enthusiasm of the British ruling class for war undermines any justification
for it based on German aggression.
4-Germany had
started a naval arms race with Britain
Imperialist
competition between the two states over markets and resources preceded the arms
race in the fifteen years before the war. Britain’s naval power was the vital
element in its ability to restrict German access to markets and resources
across the world. Unless Britain was willing to allow Germany to expand
economically, the logic of capitalist competition meant that Germany was bound
to challenge British naval supremacy. The latent violence of the leading
imperial nation is always the context for aggressive challenges to the status
quo on the part of rising powers.
5-German
imperialism was uniquely vicious and had to be challenged
The atrocities
committed against the Herrero people in Namibia were indeed terrible crimes,
but were hardly unique compared to the horrors committed by all those involved
in the rubber industry in the Belgian Congo, to take but one example. Also,
European opinion had only a few years before 1914 been horrified by the
brutality of another colonial power when it was engaged in ruthlessly expanding
its dominance over independent states in Africa. This was Britain in its wars
of aggression against the Boer states in South Africa, during which
concentration camps were first used in order to control a civilian population.
6-Public
opinion was united in favour of the war, as shown by images of cheering crowds
in 1914
It is now
usually admitted that the degree of enthusiasm for the war was strictly
limited, and the evidence is that the crowds who gathered at the outbreak of
war were by no means united in martial enthusiasm. In fact sizeable and
widespread anti-war demonstrations occurred in both Britain and Germany. Had
the leaderships of Labour and Socialist parties across Europe not caved into
demands to support their national ruling classes in going to war, it is quite
possible that the conflict could have been stopped in its tracks.
7-The morale
of British troops fighting on the Western Front remained intact to the end of
the war
While Britain
may not have suffered quite the same scale of mutinies as in the German and
French armies, at times there were whole stretches of the front where troops
became so unreliable that generals did not dare order them into combat. The
evidence for widespread cynicism about war strategies, contempt for the
military leadership, and grave doubts about the purpose of the war, cannot be
wished away by the revisionists. In so far as soldiers carried on willingly
fighting the war, the explanation needs to be sought in the habituation to
obedience, as well as the threat of court-martial executions. There is no need
to invoke either fervid nationalism or any kind of deep psychological
blood-lust as explanations.
8-The
military leadership, notably General Haig, was not a bunch of incompetent
‘donkeys’
Attempts to
rehabilitate the likes of General Haig founder on some of the basic facts about
the tactics he relentlessly employed. Repeated infantry attacks on opposing
trenches consistently failed to gain any clear advantage, while causing
colossal casualties. On the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1st July
1916, 57,000 troops out of 120,000 were killed or wounded. Despite continuing
carnage on an incredible scale, Haig carried on ordering further attacks. When
any hope of a breakthrough against the German lines was clearly lost, the
purpose of the battle was shifted to attrition pure and simple. The plan now
was to kill more German troops than the British lost. Since there was no way of
reliably measuring the casualties on the other side, Haig relied on estimating
it through the losses of his own side. On this basis he began to be angered
when the army suffered too few losses, as when he complained that one division
in September had lost under a thousand men. There can be no defence for this
kind of disregard of human life.
9-The end of
the war saw the triumph of liberal capitalism, against collapsing autocratic
Empires
In fact all
states involved in the war were deeply destabilised. Even the United States,
whose involvement was the most limited, experienced the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919,
with unprecedented labour revolts, such as the Seattle general strike,
alongside savage repression of socialists and black Americans. Britain saw the
beginning of the Irish war of independence, and increasing unrest in India,
which marks, in effect, the point at which the Empire began to unravel.
Domestically, there was also a wave of radical working-class unrest,
particularly in the ‘Red Clydeside’, which culminated in troops being sent into
Glasgow to impose martial law.
10-Despite
the slaughter and destruction, the war was worthwhile
The war
opened up a period of endemic economic dislocation, and outright crisis. In
Britain there was a decade of industrial decline and high unemployment even
before the Great Depression. In effect, it was only the Second World War which
brought the major capitalist powers out of the slump. The First World War saw
the point at which capitalism became addicted to war and to a permanent arms
economy. The war demonstrated the capacity of capitalism to create
industrialised waste, carnage and destruction on a colossal scale. The
remembrance of the war is appropriately a time for mourning the horror, the
loss and the waste of it all, but it should also provoke a determination to
resist our rulers’ insistence on promoting war to further their interests. War
can achieve nothing other than to create the conditions for further wars.
Popular
opinion has, ever since its ending, remembered the First World War as a time of
horrendous and futile misery and slaughter, as epitomising political and
military leaders’ incompetence and callous disregard for human life. That
popular judgement, which has helped turn common opinion against war in general,
was correct, and we must not let the war mongers dismiss this instance of the
wisdom of ordinary people.
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