We’re about to commemorate the 100th anniversary of World War I. As usual, we are about to be inundated with a lot of misunderstandings and misdirection as to what it was about.
It was not about stopping a warlike despot. It was about preferring some despots over others. For mercenary reasons. And less.
It was about markets––who had access to them, who controlled them. Who could buy and sell where and who couldn’t get into that game.
The players were empires and would-be empires. Arrangements so old-fashioned it’s embarrassing that we took part in it at all, within the lifetimes of people we know.
The political globe in 1914 was half pink, a subset of British red. British control was astonishing, literally worldwide, including the subjugation of the 2nd most-populous nation on Earth and portions of the most populous one. Additional markets were unofficially pink, such as Poland, Argentina and many Middle East oilfields, virtual serfs of the City of London.
A good portion of the remainder of the world was colored green, representing the extensive French empire. Belgium owned the resource-rich Congo (the most brutal of all the colonial operations); the Netherlands had Indonesia and Caribbean holdings. The United States had extended well into the Pacific, owning the Philippines outright, and controlling commerce to its Latin south. Czarist Russia controlled its neighborhood; Austria-Hungary ordered its southeastern flank. Other Europeans owned other Third Worlders. Still. Even in the “post-Enlightenment” 20th Century.
While there were extensive investments by wealthy classes across lines of empires, all markets were substantially consigned – locked up. National monopolies.
Relative to their productive capacities, Italy, and particularly Germany, newly-created entities, controlled few colonies–few places to market their goods, few places to mine raw resources. You couldn’t sell a Mercedes or Fiat in Egypt or Australia without paying a prohibitive British “tariff”. The highly productive German economy was strangling on its own inventory and externally imposed limitations. It had quaint markets to its impoverished southeast and in its toehold in Nowhere, Africa. Those extensions were hardly in position to pay for sophisticated German technologies.
"... Germany has begun her colonial enterprise very late, and was, therefore, at the disadvantage of finding all the desirable places already occupied." –German Kaiser Wilhelm II, 1899.
Given the parochial mindsets of the time and the compulsions of capitalist development, it was only logical for Germany to force its way out, into the Lowlands and France and to challenge British control everywhere. That’s what started WWI.
However, always seeking the personal drama angle, our media will reiterate the trivial assassination of one Ferdinand of the already-dying Austria-Hungary. Our educational institutions will as well, so to distract from the destructive impulses of unfettered capitalist competition, the actual cause. Brian Williams and Co. will reflex about “heroes”.
Without shame, Winston Churchill admitted that is was not about any sovereignty, but to defend The Empire. Vanity, first among the various monarchs, then sold to their subjects as nationalism, was also a factor, but not as much as the economic impulses.
French and British capitalists refused to open their fiefs, even to “free trade” competition in northern Europe as had been proposed by Germany.
And so it came to blows, the most aggrieved, Germany, striking the first meaningful blow.
“It is doubtful that any period in world history offers so prolonged, useless, pointless, and terrible an example of waste as Europe from 1914-1918. World War I wins almost every conceivable award for idiocy that one can imagine. The causes...are still obscure.” –historian Stephen Weir, 2008.
––Right at first, mindless in conclusion.
World War I is still often portrayed as a war of ideals, a struggle between aggressive militarism and more or less liberal democracy. BS. No liberal democracy was permitted in most of the colonies retained by the victors. While the majors on the Allied side generally allowed more representation by its citizens than the Axis countries, there were exceptions to that, such as Russia and Japan; citizens within the Axis home countries enjoyed the respect and freedoms common for the time in the West (the Armenian issue considered a colonial problem); and aggressive militarism by the victors declined only where calmer circumstances allowed it (i.e., suppressing mere anti-colonial uprisings required less aggressive militarism than needed against Germany). There was no conviction by any of the victors to be less assertive in principle after 1919.
Britain and France, seeking to expand their capitalisms, actually saw opportunity in the combat: control over the dying Ottoman Empire, gateway to Oil. They blatantly called the Ottoman lands “The Great Loot”. They divvied up the Middle East as early as 1915. So defensively, the Turks looked to those presently fighting against Britain and France, thus completing the “Central Powers” with Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria.
Czarist Russia, despite its designs toward Mediterranean access, was caught up by what our founding fathers called “entangling alliances” – principally with Serbia, under threat from Austria-Hungary.
Italy and Japan just wanted to get into the game – with whomever they thought might win, to ingratiate themselves commercially and maybe to get some more turf. Italy actually changed sides, demonstrating the absence of any principle in play above narrow self-interest.
Remaining independent portions of the Third World took no preference between the belligerents. They saw no advantage between being controlled by London or Berlin.
Such was the view in the U.S. until 3 years into the war, when President Wilson was pressured by his moneyed masters into considering the balance of U.S. investments: U.S. investors had more contracts and commercial understandings with British firms than with German ones. So, after the usual predictable provocations, suddenly followed a huge propaganda campaign to fight for our capitalists against their capitalists, couched as “The Kaiser is the Devil”, “The Barbarian Hun”.
Socialists and Jehovah’s Witnesses on both sides of the Atlantic knew they had no dog in the fight, socialists saying they had no capital to fight for, that they didn’t care about the nationality of their boss. Both paid dearly for their “lack of patriotism”.
Everyday people, especially in France, Italy, Russia and Germany, eventually revolted against the pointless carnage. Russians and Germans overthrew their governments in disgust, the latter finally ending the war.
That’s it. Everything else is incidental, secondary, patriotic myth, blather and horror porn. Followed by actual extensions of the pink and green empires, fractious Middle East borders, redrawn European borders and new nations (mostly well-intentioned), one socialist revolution and the dissolution of 6 other monarchies, and the setup for the upcoming worst war in human history. The world got new methods of brutal systematic murder along with the theoretical outlawing of one of those, and the disposal of trench warfare. The U.S. got closer ties with the City of London for its 117,000 dead and countless ruined limbs and lungs. It got temporary peace in the Atlantic trade but that was from lack of war – what would have happened if the stupid war hadn’t happened, if imperialism had been rejected in Thoreau‘s time.
"In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism or religion or both to deceive and overawe the People." –Eugene V. Debs, Presidential candidate, Canton, OH, anti-war speech June 16, 1918. He would be federally imprisoned for saying such.
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Kirk Peffers, former labor union president, anti-war activist and writer for 46 years with particular focus on imperialism.