Tagged with World War One

Nigel Farage on invading imperial Germany

farage with demon eyesCompare and contrast. One party leader is caught on tape saying he’d like to do away with the NHS and replace it with an American-style health insurance scheme, and has recently said the allies should have invaded imperial Germany, even if it cost an extra 100,000 casualties. Another leader gives a beggar money and looks a bit like an Aardman Animations national treasure. Guess which one the press reserves its opprobrium for?

I just want to say something quick about Nigel Farage’s comments about the First World War. While the headline writers have grabbed on the 100,000 number bandied about, what Farage thinks is ‘the biggest mistake of the 20th century’ is the signing of the armistice that brought WWI to an end. Had the allies pressed on all the way to Berlin, there would have been no doubt that Wilhelmine Germany had been defeated by the force of arms, not the self-serving clique of Reichstag flummeries who plunged a knife into the German army’s back. Farage argues had this been the case, the far right would have been robbed of a potent ideological weapon and its unlikely the Nazis would have assumed power with all that entailed.

Yes, for once Farage has fielded a nuanced argument, albeit a counterfactual. A pity he can’t bring as much erudition to bear on the lying bollocks his gang of Tory refugees peddle. Continue reading →

Why the Great War was not stopped

Crowds celebrate in Trafalgar Square after Britain declares war on GermanyA century on and the establishment are still soft-soaping it. So no Dave, no. Britain didn’t declare war against Germany for the sake of poor little Belgium, the rights of small nations or for the defence of neutrality. Those then groaning under the weight of our empire might have had a thing or two to say about these matters after all. These were the good reasons. The real reasons, which did not make war an inevitability, was acting to prevent French and Belgian channel ports from becoming German naval bases, and putting the Wilhelmine upstart back into its box. Cold, hard interests carried the day in the lead up to the declaration. Humanitarian concern was so much flim-flammery.

The question is why was this senseless and utterly unnecessary slaughter allowed to happen? Recall the extraordinary Basel Congress of the Second International in 1912. Itpassed a manifesto declaring the following: Continue reading →

Labour and the Great War

Labour Party leader and later Nobel Peace Prize winner, Arthur Henderson

Labour Party leader and later Nobel Peace Prize winner, Arthur Henderson

The First World War was an unmitigated catastrophe, leaving over 9 million dead, countless millions more invalided, orphaned, widowed, displaced or impoverished. It destroyed an estimated £208 bn of capital value, and caused economic devastation much greater than that. It plunged much of Europe into political instability, and the lowered threshold to solving issues through violence contributed to the growing experience of political terror from the black and tans in Ireland through to the Nazis and Stalin’s purges.

Few in 1914 predicted the duration or destructive power of the war, though expert students of military science as diverse and Frederick Engels and the chief of the Imperial German armed forces, Helmuth von Moltke had been ominously prescient. The scale of the war was a result of a number of factors. Firstly, military technical developments were in a transitional phase with enormous destructive capacity not yet counterbalanced by advances in communications or transport.

Secondly, the nineteenth century had seen the birth of a new paradigm of industrial society, and concepts of national community that hugely broadened the social base of war. Continue reading →

War – what is it good for?


August is traditionally a time of concentrated conflict and when wars have started. One hundred years ago this week the first world war broke out as a result of a series of dangerous interlocking military alliances, a massive arms race between Britain and Germany, and a competition between European powers for trade and colonial influence all across the globe.

Four years later with 13 million dead and the empires of Russia, Austria, Hungary and the Ottoman in tatters, Britain and France desperately in debt, the real victors of the war were US bank financiers and arms manufacturers. The first world war was also a major contributory factor to the Russian revolution and the birth of the Soviet Union.

What we should also remember is that at the outbreak of war in 1914 the whole population did not go waltzing down the street to the nearest army recruiting office. Many instead took to the streets to protest at the waste, the potential loss of life and to proclaim that workers in Britain and France had no enemies in the working-class movement of Germany and Austria. Unfortunately these voices were a minority, drowned out by the drum of chauvinism. Continue reading →

Busting the myths of the WW1 apologists

tiThis summer will mark the outbreak of the First World War and, although comment has gone quiet since the beginning of this year, the usual apologist discourse for the waging of this war will doubtlessly soon recommence. Such accounts are however part of a revisionist attempt to construct a myth of a ‘just war’ to justify present western military adventures.

From the right we hear that the war was justified to keep save Europe from an expansionist undemocratic Germany. This ignores the fact that we are dealing with a time before the vast majority of European states were nowhere near to being what could be classed as democracies, including both Germany and Britain. Both sides held other nations under colonial oppression so there was no moral superiority of either side. Continue reading →