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An 11/11 Masterpiece Cries Out for Peace
As the numerologists note our arrival at 11/11/11, our attention is better focused on this day as the anniversary of the end of the useless, worthless, horrifying war that turned so much of 20th Century into a twisted, violent mess. And on how we must prevent the same from happening to our shiny new millennium.
A superb route to that understanding comes through a modern masterpiece, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, by Adam Hochschild.
A seasoned author and social critic who helped found Mother Jones Magazine, Hochschild's page-turning account of the "Great War" in Great Britain is both a joy to read and a tragedy to digest.
Its glory lies in Adam's ability to penetrate the human core of the arrogance, foolishness and utter senselessness of a conflict that for no real reason killed at least ten million people outright and tens of millions more (including 500,000 in the US) by disease, most notably the influenza, which struck just prior to humankind's ability to mass-produce penicillin.
The author (by way of disclosure, a friend of mine for decades) is an extraordinary writer of history. His prose is fluid and clear, unpretentious and at all times accessible. He manages to balance devastating accounts of lethal folly with the human dimension behind even the cruelest military martinet.
Adam's story is of a nation---and a continent---that embarked on a war it thought would be a cake walk. Europe had been at peace since Bismarck's Prussians left Paris in 1871. For more than four decades, an unimpeded industrial revolution took the US and western Europe---as well as Japan---to levels of imperial wealth undreamed of before. The Great Powers had achieved by 1914 a level of technological affluence that might have been described as science fiction a century prior.
But the literature of the time was polluted by an astonishing ennui, a bizarre discontent with the ease of middle and upper-class life that is staggering to comprehend. The prose of the rich is filled with the "need" for war to "stir the blood" and "further the race." Theodore Roosevelt, Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill and their ilk glorified mass gore as if were some kind of vital tonic for the deadening sink hole of peace and prosperity.
That war finally came for no real reason thus comes as no surprise. As Hochschild deftly shows, much of the upper crust of England welcomed it as a cross between a fox hunt and a garden party, and sent its sons off to die miserable deaths in mud and blood almost too ghastly to describe.
But there were those who knew better, and these are Hochschild's true heroes. The war aroused great pacifist activists like Bertrand Russell, and created others from the horrors of the struggle itself. Male and female, rich and poor, Adam introduces us to a panoply of truly great human souls whose desperate warnings about the insanity of armed struggle resonate ever more powerfully through history.
On the other side, one can hear in the pro-war ramblings of so many insulated English aristocrats the prelude to this century's excursions into Iraq, Afghanistan et. Al. Dick Cheney predicting an Iraq throwing flowers at our troops' feet merely rephrased the ravings of the Empire's minions heralding the "grand adventure" in France, where the Bosch would "be sent running in days."
Run they did, of course, but after years, not days, transforming themselves into Nazis who would deliver even greater horrors to us all.
Hoschild's genius in To End All Wars is to seamlessly weave the lives of the working class and the rich, the militarist and the pacifist into the single human fabric, and then to show how it was tragically ripped apart and burnt to cinder.
As a global organism we are, each of us, deeply harmed by all mass slaughter, whether our actual bodies are on the killing field or not. No carnage was as devastating in terms of where it led than the imperial madness of World War I.
Now, with a new millennium upon us, we are again tested by America's imperial attacks in the oil fields and wherever else an insatiable war machine---the SAME war machine---can sell its message of fear and violence.
Reading Adam Hochschild'e elegant, compelling narrative of how "civilized" England turned into a barbarous killing machine, we come away knowing that the function of such great writing is to teach us above all not to repeat this kind of history.
Given our imperial presence around the globe, and reading here of the shining lights of those who opposed that absurd carnage, our path of action should be clear. To End All Wars is a compelling, inescapable elegy that leaves us no room for excuses.
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Show AllI just read the opening chapter of " Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest" by Wade Davis.
In a few short pages it manages to capture the utter bloody stupidity, moronic nature, venality, mendaciousness and inane cluelessness of the British high command.
Lions led by donkeys indeed.
Check out the article on the BBC website about Thankful Villages
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15671943
pax, salaam, shalom
The US should have never entered that stupid bloody war, as one of our best opponents of that insane time argued into the gathering void, Randolph Bourne. His phrase, "War is the health of the state," has summarized what war has been about for the past century, and it's as current now as it was in 1914. But the brilliant Woodrow Wilson was too dense to understand what a blood-drenched fiasco he was entering, and the pattern with American presidents has been unchanged since. Obama is the latest incarnation of American idiocy prancing around in the disguise of pragmatism and visionary wisdom. If he invades Iran, on any pretext, at the bidding of that Israeli asshole Netanyahu, he should be publicly executed.
The US had to enter the war because international bankers had bet on the Allied Powers and it appeared that the Germans were going to spank them. And I'd like to read this book, but the review is a bit mistaken. The "Bosch" weren't sent running in any way, shape or form. On the armistice 93 years ago today, the germans were on French soil. You can't even really call that a stalemate. How this translated into the utter humiliation and betrayal of the German people is a story that has STILL not adequately been told. Although many of us have completely plausible suspicions.
State those suspicions.
really, let's hear them.
It's also worth remembering that Wilson's late-blooming enthusiasm to involve Amerika in the Great War also gratified his personal megalomaniacal ambition.
Though mediated in humanistic, altruistic rhetoric, Wilson's determination to participate in "the war to end all wars", and thereby endow the nascent Amerikan Imperium with a seat at the proposed League of Nations, was a strategy designed and intended to gratify Wilson's messianic conviction that he was destined to be the Savior of the Civilized World.
Joining the European Allied cause gave Wilson standing to take charge of post-war international diplomacy.
The Germans called for an end of the war in 1916. They suggested there would be no territorial concessions and it be declared a draw with all armies returning to the starting points.
Britain and France were assured that if they refused, the USA would enter the war on their side. The rest is history.
It unlikely there would have been a war thirty years later or an Adolf hitler had peace been accepted when it was offered
I recommend Robert Graves' "Goodbye to All That," and of course Owens'
Dulce et Decorum est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime. --
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, --
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Another great story of that era is Follette's "Fall of Giants". The human side mixed with the clueless governments' inability to stop their stupidity before so many, so incredibly many died. What will be the death toll ...really...of our current wars? Possibly the entire planet will die from the DU, oil burned climate controllers, and diseases left to fester and slaughter for lack of money in health and food.
I don't know if this world as we know it has the ability to withstand the tragedy perpetrated on it by the privileged ignorant few.
Thank you Harvey for making me think some more.
I object to his inclusion of Kipling among his "warmongers." Kipling was a much more complex character as his poem "Recessional" indicates:
Far-called our navies melt away --
On dune and headland sinks the fire --
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget -- lest we forget!
Kipling also lost his son in the war and spent the rest of his life wandering around the battlegrounds of Europe and the Mid-East trying--and failing--to find his grave.
And, much as our first Iraq war was ginned up by lies about Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait, WWI was declared to the same tune of the "Belgian atrocities" allegedly committed by the invading Germans. The truth was that the people who wanted the war were the arms merchants whose business and family connections with each other continued throughout the war. I doubt anyone reads Upton Sinclair any more but his novel Word's End lays it all out quite clearly. (It seems I'm not getting HTML to work here today.)
I agree with Harvey Wasserman's assessment of this book as Adam Hochschild compellingly tells the reader of how idiotic wars can be and in particular The Great War. In chapter 22 ["The Devil's Own Hand"], for instance, Hochschild bring out the fact that:
"Even by the most conservative of the official tabulations ... more than 8.5 million soldiers were killed on all fronts. Many other counts are higher, usually by about a million." [p.347]
"More than 21 million men were wounded; some carried pieces of shrapnel in their bodies, or were missing arms, legs, or genitals. So many veterans had mangled faces that those in France formed a national Union of Disfigured Men; in Britain, 41,000 men had one or more limbs amputated, another 10,000 were blinded, and 65,000 veterans were still receiving treatment for shell shock ten years after the war." [pgs. 347, 348]
"The toll was particularly appalling among the young. Of every 20 British men between 18 and 32 when the war broke out, three were dead and six wounded when it ended. One of the highest death rates was among those who, like the 18-year-old John Kipling [Rudyard's son], were born in the year of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. If the British dead alone were to rise up and march 24 hours a day past a given spot, four abreast, it would take them more than two and a half days. Although this book has concentrated on Britain, which lost more than 722,000 men killed [not to speak of more than 200,000 soldiers dead from the rest of the empire], the combat death toll was more than half again higher in Austria-Hungary, nearly double in France [which had a smaller population than Britain], more than double in Russia, and nearly triple in Germany. Of the many million pairs of grieving parents, we will never know how many felt that their sons had died for something noble, and how many felt what one British couple expressed in the epitaph they placed on their son's tombstone at Gallipoli: 'What harm did he do Thee, O Lord?' " [p.348]
"Periodically some event would expose the continent's vast reservoir of grief. When Britain's Unknown Warrior was buried in Westminster Abbey on the second anniversary of the Armistice, across the country, at 11 A.M., crowds stopped in the street, and cars, buses, trains, assembly lines, and even mining machinery underground came to a halt for two minutes of silence. Heard, everywhere, however, was the sound of women sobbing." [p. 348]
"Higher than the military toll were the civilian war deaths, estimated at 12 to 13 million. Some of these lives were lost to shelling and air raids, a much greater number to massacres for which the war was an excuse, like the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, and even more than to the near-famine conditions that spread through the Central Powers and the lands they had occupied. [Such deaths continued for many months after the war ended, for the Allies maintained the Royal Navy blockade to pressure Germany into signing the Versailles treaty]. And should we not add to the total the toll from other conflicts triggered by the war, like the Russian civil war, whose civilian and military deaths have been estimated at 7 to 10 million?" [pgs. 348, 349]
What was perhaps particularly telling was reading of the soldiers marching practically shoulder to shoulder as they charged toward the enemy out of their trenches toward no man's land as they were mowed down by the tens of thousands by enemy machine gun fire. Hochschild writes about the Battle of the Somme that "Of the 120,000 British troops who went into battle on July 1, 1916, more than 57,000 were dead or wounded before the day was over-nearly two casualties for every yard of the front." [Ch. 14 "God, God, Where's the Rest of the Boys?" p.206] Probably the man most responsible for the carnage that cost the lives of so many of Britain's soldiers was Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig [who should have been tried as a war criminal], as he kept throwing more British troops needlessly into the abattoir.
This is an essential book for those who wish to know what war is like and in particular The Great War. I would also add another book about this unnecessary war and that would be Minds at War: Poetry and Experience of the First World War which recounts the poetry of the Trench Poets as well as the positions and prose writings of various influential people during that time period about The Great War such as Bertrand Russell, Thomas Hardy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw, Vera Brittain, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, and Erich Maria Remarque.
"Either man is obsolete or war is"-Richard Buckminister Fuller [1895-1983], American author and inventor
Remember the Gastapo and how they treated the Jews, so now we have some FBI members treating the Muslims the same, and keeping the hate going strong against Arab countries, mostly to please the Jews. It was not the Muslims/Arabs who treated the Jews badly in 1930 to 1945, but the Jews are now part of the hate.
Also see Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain.
"That war finally came for no real reason thus comes as no surprise." War for no reason? Hmm! Robert Newman's "History of Oil" offers a much more plausible reason for WWI than we were given in our mainstream history lessons, delivered with delightful humor. Enjoy!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5267640865741878159
"I have seen war
I have seen war on land and sea
I have seen blood running from the wounded
I have sen the dead in the mud
I have seen cities destroyed
I have seen seen children starving
I have seen the agony of mothers and wives
I HATE WAR." FDR
So far, we ain't doin' too well in the 21st century!
Another excellent book that I read as a teen (It probably kept my fascination with war from turning into a short military career and stimulated my interest in psychology) was From the Jaws of Victory, a history of military incompetence by Charles Fair. Good chapter on The Great War. Probably not in print now but worth finding.