An assuredly condemned repetition?
We’re on the cusp of an important anniversary and an anniversary, in my opinion, whose lessons are quite intentionally being lost. On the 11th November this year at 11 o’clock in the morning it will be 100 years since the guns of the Great War fell silent.
A war began ostensibly as the knee-jerk reaction of 19th century royal empire building and 19th century thinking plunged those colonial empires into the fires of a conflict the likes of which had never been seen before. Scientific advances had led to weaponry able to kill at unprecedented rates, millions more civilians were displaced as the Allies and the Central Powers held each other in their global four-year attritional stalemate.
Much is rightly written and spoken of in terms of the suffering of the common soldiery on all sides; of cities, districts and areas in various parts of the empires decimated by the loss of their menfolk. People see the same silent black and white clips of troops advancing into exploding ground, of fraught men carrying the wounded back through the trenches and are seldom presented with much further. It’s a time seemingly so far out of time, a black and white world so different from ours today, but is it really? Much is trumpeted of great victories and of previous colonies receiving their baptisms as countries and identities in their own right as they mourned their sons from thousands of miles away; indeed, there had to be something positive, something tangible and worthwhile for such crippling losses to the populations, something more than just one side winning what was essentially an extended royal family squabble which got unexpectedly so devastatingly far out of control.
Much less is presented as to why the Great War started, the secret backroom dealings of the diplomats and the gameboard dealings of the powerful. The Great War was the first to employ mass media propaganda in order to manipulate and control what the general population thought, it was the first war where direct reports from the front got to the general population as they happened and where a governing power could reach all corners of the population in almost real time. As the war exploded and escalated unexpectedly quickly neither side had any real aims, it quickly became more a war of ideas as HG Wells noted, 'We fight', he declared, 'not to destroy a nation, but to kill a nest of ideas....Our business is to kill ideas. The ultimate purpose of this war is propaganda, the destruction of certain beliefs and the creation of others.' One could argue that war has never really ended, just changed addresses and personnel.
There was no apparent existential threat at the time, no real naked desire for thousands to throw themselves into the growing maelstrom; that threat had to be created, and created it was. A small, secret group known as Wellington House produced ‘The War Pictorial’ a publication that reached 500,000 people in 11 languages by 1916, influencing opinion on the war around the world in favour of the Allies. Appeals to nationalism, patriotism and demonisation of the enemy and their actions reached levels never before seen; the public had never experienced this and signed up, trusting and unquestioning of their leaders, in their millions. That this was so successful was not lost on sections of the establishment the world over and others keen enough to see the subterfuge for themselves; not least of which was a non-descript German Army corporal with an axe to grind against the Jews whom he blamed for Germany’s loss and, with willing acolytes, took that propagandising and manipulation to his own terrifying extremes. And as with the manipulation effort thirty years previously, influential people looked on and took note.
From the start of the First World War onward, discussions and agreements in secret between Britain, France, Russia and eventually the United States were taking place. Long-winded talks of handing over chunks of territories to enrich the few took place; satisfying and bolstering failing empires by drawing arbitrary lines on maps with no consideration whatsoever to those who lived there and all whilst thousands of young men were being blown apart on a daily basis. Sipping champagne and smoking the finest cigars in the opulent luxury of embassies and gentlemen’s clubs while the men they sent suffered disease and rotting feet in a life underground waiting to face a storm of lead. These people redesigned the maps of Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East especially to share out and control resources for themselves; the results of which we have been dealing with for a century of persistent meddling, political and business chicanery, the inexorable frustrations, upheavals, displacements and depraved feudal, sectarian or religious violence. The price of greed measured in lives and desperation of largely unseen people.
The parallels nowadays to the events preceding and during the First World War are many and there to see. The territorial empires have given way to mercantile ones and again, as technology reaches a transitional point, old economies give way to new and the old become threatened for their own survival. Increases in nationalism and false patriotism whilst demonisation of the ‘enemy’ is also on the rise. Finger pointing, scapegoating, setting up the us and them. It is profoundly worrying in this age of social media how quickly millions of people can be effectively manipulated by perhaps only hundreds. Millions paid the price, and continue to pay the price in the vast power grab that was the First World War. Are we as ordinary people willing to be led down a similar path again by similar players? It won’t be their fortunate sons on the battlefield, it will be the poor, the luckless, the vulnerable, the ones looking for three squares a day, the ones who are becoming greater in number.
This time of year is a time where we remember the profound effects of those lost and those damaged in our families and communities, where we lament what could have been and what contributions could have been made, where we think of those corners of foreign fields that will be forever England.
But we must also never forget the few that planted them in those corners a century ago and ensure millions more don’t suffer the same fate in future. Vote. Hold our leaders accountable to do the right thing for the people they purportedly represent, not themselves or their paymasters.