Jean Jaurès, antiwar leader

Jean Jaurès (1859-1914) was a major leader of the French Socialist Party. He died as a martyr to the pre-First World War position of the Second International against imperialist war. The social-democratic parties knew that war was building. They took what could rightly be called a revolutionary pacifist approach to preventing it. They solemnly pledged to oppose any war launched by the capitalist class of their own country. Which, of course, in their political understanding meant the rulers of the time in Germany, France, Britain and Russia.

Jean Jaurès (1859-1914)

A warmongering French nationalist thug named Raoul Villain murdered him on July 14, 1914, just days before the decadent rulers of Europe plunged themselves in a massive and completely unnecessary war that turned out to be the most destructive in history. Until the next world war. At the end of the slaughter, four long-standing imperial dynasties had fallen: The German Hohenzollerns of "Kaiser Bill"; the Habsburgs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then destroyed forever; and the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, also destroyed forever.

Sam Ball describes Jaurès' anti war position (France remembers murdered socialist hero Jean Jaurès France 24 07/31/2014):

In 1902, Jaurès became one of the founding members and leader of the French Socialist Party, later the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) – the forerunner to today’s Socialist Party of current President François Hollande. He also founded the socialist paper L'Humanité, still going today, whose editors he was having dinner with at the time of his murder. ...

But he is perhaps best remembered, by socialists and non-socialists alike, for his anti-militarism and attempts to avert the outbreak of the First World War.

“Never, for forty years, has Europe been in a more threatening and more tragic situation," he warned in the spring of 1914.

Jaurès spent much of the final years of his life travelling across Europe, attempting to organise general strikes among the workers of the continent’s great powers in order to force their governments to back down from the brink of war.

Despite Jaurès' antiwar radicalism, George Mosse once described him as "a very moderate Socialist hero." (Confronting History: A Memoir; 2000; p. 160)

Henry Ehrmann wrote of the effect of Jaurès' assassination (Jean Jaurès-Last of the Great Tribunes Social Research 16-3 1949)

Jaurès was shot by a nationalist fanatic on the eve of the first world war. In the midst of the clamor of general mobilization a grieved hush fell over all of France. Those who spoke at Jaurès' open grave expressed feeling-s akin to Nehru's brokenvoiced, "The light has gone out of our lives," after the Mahatma's assassination. A British newspaper referred to the event as an international catastrophe; Anatole France and Romain Rolland were confident that after the war Jaurèsian thought would be a source of inspiration throughout Europe and that Jaurès would be recognized as the most representative figure of his age and his country. Official immortalization followed in 1924 with the transfer of Jaurès' ashes to the Pantheon, the Jacobin temple to la patrie.

Jaurès' inclusion in the French Pantheon did not impress a young corporal who served in in the German Army during the World War. He subsequently alluded to it (apparently, he didn't specify Jaurès) in the first volume of Mein Kampf, "der Vorderaufstieg in das Pantheon der Geschichte ist nicht für Schleicher da, sondern für Helden!" In the James Murphy translation, "the steps that lead to the portals of the Pantheon of History ... are not meant for place-hunters but for men of noble character." It's a problem of English translations of Mein Kampf that the translator is tempted to make it accessible by softening the gutter rightwing tone of the original. I would translate that, "entry into the Pantheon of History is not for skulkers but for heroes!"

Despite the revolutionary implications of Jaurès' antiwar position, in which he called for “insurrection rather than war" (See below), he was actually the advocate of a more moderate version of socialism than that of the French Marxism of the 1870s.

It would be easy to conflate the antiwar factions in the Second International parties with the more revolutionary faction and the prowar faction with that of the reformist "revisionists." But that would be an oversimplification of the reality. Eduard Bernstein, the godfather of Revisionism in German Social Democracy, became part of the antiwar faction during the First World War, alongside big names of the revolutionary faction like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, while Bernstein's great opposite number in the Marxism-Revisionism debate, Karl Kautsky, wound up in the prowar faction.

Margaret MacMillan cites Jaurès as someone who was aware of the potentially dangers of what a heading in this Brookings article calls "the complacencies of peace, The Rhyme of History: Lessons of the Great War 12/14/2013:

In short, we have grown accustomed to peace as the normal state of affairs. We expect that the international community will deal with conflicts when they arise, and that they will be short-lived and easily containable. But this is not necessarily true. The Socialist leader Jean Jaurès, a man of great wisdom who tried unsuccessfully to staunch the rise of militarism in France in the early years of the 20th century, understood this very well. “Europe has been afflicted by so many crises for so many years,” he said on the eve of World War I, and “it has been put dangerously to the test so many times without war breaking out, that it has almost ceased to believe in the threat and is watching the further development of the interminable Balkan conflict with decreased attention and reduced disquiet.” [my emphasis]

In his signed article on Jaurès in Britannica Online, Claude Harmel writes:

He fought the supremacy of the German Social Democratic Party in the Second International and, in order to deprive it of its revolutionary reputation, confronted it at the Congress of Stuttgart in 1907 with his formula “insurrection rather than war.” This statement, though, did not completely summarize the whole of his political thought; he strove for the adoption of a system that would ensure “peace through arbitration” and recommended a prudent policy of “limitation of conflicts.” He therefore opposed colonial expansion, such as the French invasion of Morocco, because it provided a source of international conflicts.

Hostile to the Franco-Russian alliance and suspicious of the Franco-British alliance because it seemed to be directed solely against Germany, Jaurès became the champion of Franco-German rapprochement; as Germany was France’s traditional enemy, his position earned him the hatred of French nationalists. His passion for reconciliation ultimately led to his tragic death. Up to the last moment, however, he was actively exhorting the European governments to avert a world war and to settle peacefully the conflict that followed the archduke Ferdinand’s assassination at Sarajevo in June 1914. On the very day of his own assassination, Jaurès was considering an appeal to President Woodrow Wilson of the United States for help in solving this crisis. [internal links omitted]

Of course, there is no small amount of tragedy in Jaurès' opposition to war. He believed that with effective democracy, the power of democratic public opinion would be an effective check on war. As sound as that belief was and is, things were not that simple. John Kenneth Galbraith, certainly no warmonger, wrote in The Culture of Contentment (1992):

Almost any military venture receives strong popular approval in the short run; the citizenry rallies to the flag and to the forces engaged in combat. The strategy and technology of the new war evoke admiration and applause. This reaction is related not to economics or politics but more deeply to anthropology. As in ancient times, when the drums sound in the distant forest, there is an assured tribal response. It is the rallying beat of the drums, not the virtue of the cause, that is the vital mobilizing force.

And once the war gets rolling, it becomes very hard for either side to back off without a clear-cut victory.

The socialists of Jaurès' day also had historical reasons for pessimism over the passion of ordinary people for peace above national glory. Galbraith wrote in an earlier work, The Age on Uncertainty (1977):

In 1870, [Prussian Chancellor Otto von] Bismarck, who had once made overtures to [Karl] Marx to put his pen at the service of his fatherland, went to war with Napoleon III. In a prelude to the vastly greater drama of August 1914, the proletarians of the two countries showed themselves far from being denationalized; instead they rallied to the defense, as they saw it, of their respective homelands. Then, as later, nothing was so easy as to persuade the people of one country, workers included, of the wicked and aggressive intentions of those of another. The First International, already split by disputes, was outlawed by Bismarck and soon by the Third Republic. Its headquarters was moved to Philadelphia, not a place of seething class consciousness; there, a few years later, it expired. In 1889, as a union of workingclass political parties and trade unions, it rose again - the Second International. This Marx did not live to see.
[my emphasis]

The book was a companion volume to a TV documentary series of the same year. The related episode is The Age of Uncertainty Episode 3 Karl Marx The Massive Dissent:

Still, the insight that Jean Jaurès and other peace advocates of his time shared is still relevant: the fact that the Other Side has nefarious goals doesn't mean that Our Side's goals are any more noble or worthy. Especially when it comes to policies that lead to the mass killing in war.

Galbraith also notes in the 1977 quote, continuing immediately after the above:

But if the war was the nail in the coffin of the First International, it also gave Marx a moment of hope. For where revolution is concerned, war in modern times has worked with double effect. It has been extremely efficient for mobilizing the proletarians of the world into opposing armies, defeating the dream of the internationally unified working class for which Marx (and those to follow) hoped. But it has been equally efficient for discrediting, at least temporarily, the ruling classes that conducted it - a tendency by no means confined to the countries suffering defeat. [my emphasis]

Christmas Truce of 1914

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Christmas Truce of 1914, my second favorite Christmas story.

This song written and sung by John McCutcheon, Christmas in the Trenches, commemorates the event:

Consortium News presents two articles on the Christmas Truce and what it may tell us about war and peace today: Gary Kohls, The Christmas Truce’s Moment of Hope 12/24/2014; and, Greg Maybury, Anything Learned from ‘Christmas Truce’? 12/23/2014.

Kohls writes of the First World War and the Christmas Truce:

The chest-pounding of the deluded, arrogant, out-of-touch leadership on all sides resulted in a war fever that had unstoppable momentum. Their indoctrinated testosterone-laden rookie soldiers soon found themselves, as always, to be the elite's dutiful trigger-pullers as the slaughter on the Western Front commenced. Some nine million combatants died and many of those who survived bodily were rendered insane, criminally psychopathic or otherwise psychologically and/or spiritually disabled for the rest of their lives.

No one, including the glory- and power-seeking militarists at the top, had foreseen the coming holocaust or the intolerable stalemates from this new kind of warfare which relied on shovels, machine guns, artillery and poison gas. Heroic cavalry charges with swords drawn were suddenly obsolete. Everyone, especially the out-of-touch generals and the clergymen who were supposed to be in charge of the nation’s souls, had been blinded by the propaganda lie that war was something other than satanic.

As tantalizing as is the story of the Christmas Truce, it is also a reminder of what could have happened if there had been less obedience to authority and more organized opposition to senseless war in the families, schools and churches.

100th anniversary of Franz Ferdinand's assassination

Austria Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated on June 28, 1914, along with his wife Sophie, by the young Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914)

This put in motion a chain of events that led to the First World War.

The PBS Newshour features 8 things you didn’t know about Franz Ferdinand by Talia Mendich 06/27/2014.

They also feature Michael Mosettig's ‘The shots heard round the world’ 100 years ago 06/27/2014 which reminds us what would happen in the process of what has gone down in history as the July Crisis:

... within a month, across Europe, the armies of the empires of Austria-Hungary, Russia, Germany, France, and Britain were at war. The Ottoman Empire would join the side of the Central Powers soon after. Only the British and French empires survived, though greatly weakened. Global power would pass to the United States, which refused to wield it for another two decades, until another war enveloped the world. Sarajevo would be battered in yet another Balkan war in the 1990s that saw the dismemberment of the post-World War I Yugoslav federation. A bridge where the assassin was standing, now renamed Latin Bridge, was known during the Yugoslav years as Princip Bridge.

No everyone looks on Franz Ferdinand's death as a regrettable thing, apparently: Carol Williams, Bosnian Serbs erect statue to nationalist who ignited World War I Los Angeles Times 06/27/2014.

Adelheid Wölfl looks at how the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, has become the subject of varying interpretations in Der Attentäter, der zum Promi wurde Der Standard 28.06.2014

I've posted this 1977 documentary by John Kenneth Galbraith before, The Age of Uncertainty Episode 5 Lenin and The Great Ungluing:

The Lenin in the title refers of course to the Bolshevik Revolution, one of the major outcomes of the First World War. One not contemplated by the leaders who initiated the war. From the companion volume of the same title and year:

People of the World War II generation, my generation, will always think of their conflict as the great modern watershed of change. Hitler was defeated, fascism destroyed. For the great colonial empires just discussed, it was either the end or the beginning of the end. The nuclear age arrived. ...

We should be allowed our vanity, our personal rendezvous with history. But we should know that, in social terms, a far more decisive change came with World War I. It was then that political and social systems, centuries in the building, came apart - sometimes in a matter of weeks. And others were permanently transformed. It was in World War I that the age-old certainties were lost. Until then aristocrats and capitalists felt secure in their position, and even socialists felt certain in their faith. It was never to be so again. The Age of Uncertainty began. World War II continued, enlarged and affirmed this change. In social terms World War II was the last battle of World War I. [my emphasis]

Here is a 2004 German documentary on the First World War, Der Untergang des alten Europa - 1. Weltkrieg, which includes the transition to what would become known as the Weimar Republic in Germany and to democracy in Austria:

Tags: first world war, franz ferdinand, world war i

First World War propaganda and the stab-in-the-back legend (1 of 2)

In this post, I'm looking at the argument Klaus-Jürgen Bremm makes in Propaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg (2013) essentially defending the infamous stab-in-the-back myth that says Germany's glorious generals won the war on the battlefield only to have it undermined by the unworthy civilians and democrats and traitors back home in the wimpy civilian world. (See Part 1 here.)

Rightwing propaganda representation of the "stab-in-the-back"

Bremm describes the theory this way:

In der langen Geschichte der Schlachten und Feldzüge war es ein nahezu beispielloser Vorgang. Eine Nation, die für ihre militärischen Qualitäten bis dahin weltweit respektiert oder gefürchtet war und deren Armeen sich im Oktober 1918 noch an allen Fronten tief im Feindesland behauptet hatten, warf im November 1918 unvermittelt und entnervt die Waffen fort. Die erst drei Tage alte Republik ließ ihre unglückseligen Vertreter hastig karthagische Waffenstillstandsbedingungen unterzeichnen, die den fluchtartigen Rückzug der scheinbar noch unbesiegten Divisionen des Heeres hinter den Rhein diktierten.

Trotz der allgemeinen Erleichterung über das so unvermittelt eingetretene Ende des deutschen Widerstandes rieben sich die alliierten Führer verwundert die Augen. ...

Plötzlich waren die Enttäuschung und vor allem die Scham über die vorzeitige Kapitulation grenzenlos. Dazu traf die Besiegten der internationale Spott: „Bevor sie am eigenen Leib das Leiden und die Zerstörungen des Krieges erdulden mussten, hätten sich die Deutschen vorteilhaft aus der blutigen Affäre gezogen, in die doch sie allein die Welt gestoßen hatten", höhnte der französische Schriftsteller Henry Lichtenberger und der britische Journalist George Young bemerkte einigermaßen verständnislos: Es wäre besser für die Deutschen gewesen, wenn sie mehr Mut bewiesen und weniger schnell aufgegeben hatten.

[In the long history of battles and military campaigns, it was a nearly unprecedented instance. A nation that until then was respected or feared worldwide for its military qualities and which in October 1918 had still maintained its armies deep in enemy territory, in November 1918 directly and unnerved threw their weapons away. The only three days old Republic had its unlucky representatives hastily sign a Carthaginian ceasefire that dictated the hasty withdrawal of the apparently still undefeated divisions of the army behind the Rhine.

Despite the general relief over such an immediately arriving end of the the German resistance, the Allied leaders rubbed their eyes in wonder. ...

Suddenly the disappointment and above all the shame over the premature capitulation were boundless. International mockery about that was directed at the defeated {Germans}: "Before they had to tolerate the sorrows and destructions of the war in their own body, the German advantageously pulled them out of the bloody affairs, into which they alone had thrust the world." {my translation from the German}, taunted the French writer Henry Lichtenberger. And the British journalist George Young remarked fairly unsympathetically: It would have been better for the Germans if they had shown more guts and not given up so quickly.] [my emphasis]

This is a ridiculous conclusion, at least formulated in the way Bremm does.

As Lothar Machtan, biographer of the Kaiser's last Chancellor Max von Baden, puts it in "Autobiografie als geschichtspolitische Waffe" Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 4/2013, by October 1918 Imperial Germany had become "ein politisches System und einen Herrscherstand retten ... die nur durch eine veritable Neuerfindung hätten überleben können" ("a political system and a governing elite ... that could have survived only through a veritable reinvention [of itself']").

"Your Homeland Fatherland is in Danger": German first World War recruiting poster

The Kaiser and his generals had failed across the board. They launched a war of aggression under the false pretense of a defensive war. They denied concealed the consistently expansionist goals to which they held until military failure eventually forced them to recognize their impossibility of achievement, as Fritz Fischer famously documented in detail in Griff nach der Weltmacht (1961).

Gerd Krumeich in his article on the Dolchstoßlegende in the Enzyklopädie Erster Weltkrieg (Gerhard Hirschfeld et al, Hrsg; 2009) notes:

[Gen. Wilhelm] Groener, [Gen. Hermann von] Kuhl und sogar [Gen. Paul von] Hindenburg hatten betont, daß das deutsche Heer im Spätherbst 1918 keineswegs mehr an »allen Fronten siegte« und daß es sich seit den militärischen Katastrophen des Juli/Aug. 1918 nur noch darum habe handeln konnen, einen »anständigen Frieden« zu erreichen - was indessen durch die revolutionäre Entwicklung unmoglich geworden sei.

[{Gen. Wilhelm} Groener, {Gen. Hermann von} Kuhl and even {Gen. Paul von} Hindenburg had emphasized that the German army in late autumn 1918 had certainly not "won on all fronts" and that since the military catastrophe of July/August 1918 the only option was to work to achieve an "respectable peace" - which, however the revolutionary development made impossible.]

In other words, well over a year before the end of the war the Kaiser's glorious generals were whining that the civilians on the home front had failed to be worthy of their glorious generalship, the generalship that had grossly overestimate their own capabilities and failed repeatedly to deliver the results they promised to the nation. The leadership that had expected what became the nearly 4 1/2 year carnage of the First World War to be a short war of a few weeks ending in German victory with vastly expanded territory and even more vastly expanded effective control over neighboring nations and new colonies.

An in October 1918, they knew they were beaten. And Gen. Erich Ludendorff, who had functioned in effect as a military dictator since mid-1917, was happy to turn over his disastrous loss to the Social Democrats to let them take the heat for the defeat and what turned out to be a humiliating peace. They didn't even try to "reinvent" the Imperial Government. It was finished.

There is a lot to criticize about the politics of the Social Democratic Party and its leaders Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann during their first few months in office.

But their initial agreement to a ceasefire that represented a non-annexationist peace and recognized the cold reality of the failure of the Kaiser and his generals in their war, was the only sensible option open to the new government. In fact, if the leaders of the Entente Powers had shown more judgment and restraint in the peace negotiations than greed and the general spirit of banditry that they did - leading the ineffectual Woodrow Wilson by the nose along with them - they would have imposed far fewer punitive conditions than they did on Germany.

But the bullheadedness and stupidity of David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau and the fecklessness of Wilson at the Paris Conference that produced the travesty known as the Treaty of Versailles is not in itself an indictment of new German government to accept the ceasefire terms. (A "Carthaginian" ceasefire? Please.)

For all the faults of the political policies of the Majority SPD of Ebert and Scheidemann during the war, they were consistent in demanding a non-annexationist peace. Keeping a defeated army in the field fighting even longer would have resulted in far more deaths and destruction to the German Army. War is war, so it's no surprised that there were jingoistic-minded Brits and Frenchmen like those Bremm cites would would have preferred to see the German Army further chopped up on the field, even if that meant many more of their own fellow Brits and French killed. War makes people do and say stupid things.

But for Bremm to take those as some kind of meaningful indictment of the new German government's policy on the ceasefire is just plain silly.

It's worth noting, too, that the previous year the Kerenski government in Russia that took power in the February 1917 revolution also made the fateful decision to continue their war against Germany. It didn't work out well for them. Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann weren't fools enough to ignore that experience, either!

As Machtan writes:

Von Anfang an blies ihnen überdies ein eisiger Wind aggressiver Ablehnung durch diejenigen Kreise entgegen, die die deutsche Kapitulation und die deutsche Revolution für ein Versagen der Verantwortlichen, ja für ein Verbrechen hielten und nicht müde wurden, die vermeintlich Schuldigen schonungslos an den Pranger zu stellen. Das provozierte jenen fatalen ideologischen Bürgerkrieg, der wesentlich zur Zerstörung der Weimarer Republik beitrug.

[From the beginning on, an icy wind of aggressive rejection blew against them from those circles who held the German capitulation and the German revolution to be a failure of the responsible official, and even a crime, and who never tired of ruthlessly pillorying the alleged guilty ones. Which provoked that fatal ideological civil war that contributed in an essential way to the destruction of the Weimar Republic.]

This was a circular process. The Kaiser and his generals failed in their plan to snatch territory, colonies and power from their neighbors on the basis of which they launched the war in 1914. As Bremm himself describes at some length, the German generals had constantly declared victories, hidden their failures and systematically presented a sanitized version of the reality of the war to the home front. When they could no longer hide their ultimate failure, they turned the collapsing mess over to the Social Democrats so they cold take the blame for the failure. Then they and their allies in the nationalist movement proceeded to loudly blame the Social Democrats (and the Bolsheviks and the Jews) for their own failures.

"The Kaiser has abdicated!" SPD special edition cover

Gerd Krumeich also writes of the roots of the stab-in-the-back myth:

So ist beispielsweise bereits der mangelnde Nachschub in den Kämpfen um Verdun im Jahre 1916 in der soldatischen Literatur als »Dolchstoß« bezeichnet worden. Bereits im Juli 1917 formulierte General von Seeckt den archetypischen Vorwurf: »Wozu fechten wir noch? Die Heimat ist uns in den Rücken gefallen, und damit ist der Sieg verloren«. Durch Streikaktivitäten und Anti-Kriegsagitation, z. B. des Spartakusbundes im Frühjahr 1918, wurde dieser Vorwurf zunehmend nachdrücklicher. Auch die Tatsache, daß den heimkehrenden Soldaten ab Nov. 1918 immer wieder in öffentlicher Rede bestatigt wurde, sie seien »im Felde unbesiegt« geblieben, festigte vielfach die Uberzeugung, daß die Niederlage nicht militärische Gründe gehabt hatte, sondern von »den Zivilisten«, »den Arbeitern«, »den Juden« usw. zu verantworten sei.

[So, for example, the shortage of reinforcements in the battles around Verdun in the year 1916 already had been labeled in the soldiers' literature as a "stab-in-the-back." Already in July 1917 General von Seeckt formulatede the archetypical accusation: "What are we still fighting for? The homeland has attacked us from behind and therefore the victory is lost." By strike activities and antiwar agitation, for example that of the Spartacus League early in the year 1918, this accusation became more and more insistent. Also the fact that the returning soldiers starting November 1918 continually claimed in public speeches that they remained "undefeated in the field," reinforced many time over the conviction that the defeat didn't have military grounds, but rather than "the civilians," "the workers," "the Jews," and so forth were responsible.]

In other words, this idea was constructed by the military as a fallback alibi long before the end. We've seen this in other situations, as well. The US military promoted a very similar claim about the Vietnam War.

Bremm even cites Von Seeckt's 1917 whining, but cites it as though it were a statement of the obvious rather than an ideological and political construction.

And, as as the undated article Die "Dolchstoßlegende" from the SPD Ortsverein Feldmoching-Hasselbergl puts it, "Hindenburg und Ludendorff hatten nach der gescheiterten Sommeroffensive von 1918 die Reichsregierung am 29. September 1918 ultimativ aufgefordert, Waffenstillstandsverhandlungen aufzunehmen." ("Hindenburg and Ludendorff after the failed summer offensive of 1918 demanded in an ultimative way that the Imperial government start ceasefire negotiations.") Kaiser Bill (Wilhelm II) abdicated on November 9. The same day, the Kaiser's last Chancellor Max von Baden turned over the government to Friedrich Ebert and his Social Democrats.

Cover of a book on the Dolchstoß Trial

Both Bremm and Krumeich refer to the Munich Dolchstoß Trial of October-November 1925, in which an editor was sued for by the head of a conservative publication over the latter's accusing the Social Democrats of having performed a stab-in-the-back in the First World War. (This sides are a bit confusing: Martin Gruber of the Münchener Post had accused Paul Nikolaus Cossmann of the conservative of spreading poisonous propaganda by promoting the stab-in-the-back myth, and Cossman sued Gruber over the criticism; it was the conservative side that initiated the suit.) The court found narrowly that the SPD could not be accurately accused of such a thing, but nevertheless reinforced the idea that the stab-in-the-back had taken place. Krumeich:

Das Ergebnis des Prozesses war, daß die Mehrheitssozialdemokratie der Kriegszeit vom Vorwurf entlastet wurde, sich am »Dolchstoß« beteiligt zu haben. Es bestand aber für das Gericht kein Zweifel daran, daß erhebliche Versuche unternommen worden waren, die Front zu destabilisieren.

[The result of the trial was that the Majority Social Democracy of the time of the war was acquitted of the accusation that they had taken part in the stab-in-the-back. But there remained for the court no doubt that significant attempts had been undertake to destabilize the front.] [my emphasis]

Bremm's description of the Dolchstoß Trial runs like this:

Im Münchener „Dolchstoß-Prozess", den der Publizist und zum Katholizismus konvertierte Jude Paul Nikolaus Cossmann im Oktober 1915 unter großer offentlicher Aufmerksamkeit gegen den leitenden Redakteur der Münchener Post wegen Verleumdung angestrengt hatte, bestand selbst fur das Gericht bei aller Abwagung der bekannten Fakten kein Zweifel, dass im zurückliegenden Krieg erhebliche Anstrengungen in der Heimat unternommen worden waren, die deutsche Front zu destabilisieren. Wenn auch die hauptsachlich attackierte Sozialdemokratie vom Vorwurf, dem Heer in den Rücken gefallen zu sein, durch das Verfahren insgesamt entlastet wurde, war damit doch der Dolchstoß-Topos nun auch gerichtsnotorisch.

[In the Munich "Dolchstoß Trial" which Paul Nikolaus Cossmann, a publicist and a Jew who had converted to Catholicism brought in October 1915 under great public attention against the chief editor of the Münchener Post on the grounds of defamation, there remained for the court after all consideration of the known facts no doubt that in the previous war substantive efforts had been undertaken on the homefront to destabilize the German front. Even though the Social Democrats, who were the main ones accused {in the case of the stab-in-the-back}, were acquitted on the whole of the accusation of having attacked the Army from behind, the stab-in-the-back theme was thereby also given judicial notoreity.] [my emphasis]

Bremm cites a separate 2002 article by Gerd Krumeich at the end of that paragraph. But Krumeich's description in the 2009 article cited above not only frames it notably differently, he explicitly describes the partisan nature and repercussions of the court's decision endorsing the idea of the stab-in-the-back myth: the decision "schuf insgesamt eine eindeutig parteipolitische Ausrichtung der Frage nach den Gründen des deutschen Zusammenbruchs von 1918" ("altogether created a clear party-political bias to the question of the reasons for the German collapse of 1918.")

"The trial," as the SPD Ortsverein Feldmoching-Hasselbergl article puts it, "was a pure conservative propaganda maneuver" ("Der Prozeß war eine reines konservatives Propagandamanöver").

Bremm presents it rather as producing a judicial verification of the stab-in-the-back claims.

To say it again, this is a ridiculous conclusion on Bremm's part.

Tags: dolchstoßlegende, first world war, erster weltkrieg, stab-in-the-back, world war i

First World War propaganda and the stab-in-the-back legend (1 of 2)

Klaus-Jürgen Bremm in Propaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg (2013) gives us an overview of the propaganda operations by Britain, France, Germany and the United States to promote support and enthusiasm for the war efforts at home and to influence where possible public opinion in neutral countries.

Bremm introduces his readers to a cast of interesting characters, like Max von Oppenheim of the Cologne Oppenheim banking family and noted archaeologist. (Max von Oppenheim und der Schatz der Aramäer Zeit Online 29.09.32009) He tried to convince the German Imperial government they could promote a revolutionary uprising in the Islamic world including India against Britain and France. The Kaiser's government agreed to the project and Von Oppenheim established a bureau in Constantinople to promote jihad against the Entente Powers, though without much success. Central Power ally Turkey wasn't so enthusiastic about the project because they wanted to keep ruling Islamic lands it was occupying.

Max Freiherr von Oppenheim (1860-1946) who hoped to get up an Islamic revolution on behalf of Kaiser Bill

Oppenheim was acquainted with Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī (ca. 1838 – 1897), influential advocate of combining modern learning and rationalism with Islām. Oxford Islamic Studies Online's entry on Al-Afghānī says of him:

As a young man, al-Afghani traveled to India. Witnessing the effects of colonization on that country probably inspired his lifelong dislike for the British. He became an outspoken critic of Britain and its presence in India, Egypt, and other Islamic countries. ...

From 1871 to 1879 , al-Afghani lived in Cairo. A grant from the government enabled him to spend most of his time teaching. With Islamic scholar Muhammad Abduh, he introduced an interpretation of Islam that called for modernization and education while encouraging strict adherence to Islamic principles. He promoted political activism, urging his students to publish political newspapers, while he himself gave speeches and headed a secret society engaged in reformist activities. Several of his followers later became the leaders of Egyptian political and intellectual life. Meanwhile, al-Afghani's fiery speeches against the British soon brought him another expulsion, and he returned to India. Here he did much of his important writing, which consisted mainly of collecting and publishing his speeches. His most famous work, The Refutation of the Materialists, includes a defense of Islam against attacks made by Europeans.

Al-Afghānī is a significant figure in the development of what we know as Islamism today. John Voll writes, "Al-Afghani advocated a synthesis of Islam and modern science on the premise that there is no incompatibility between science, knowledge, and the foundations of the Islamic faith. ... The thinking of 'Abduh and al-Afghani provided the basis for Islamic modernism, the effort to combine a modern, Western-style scientific rationalism with an Islamic faith." ("Fundamentalism in the Sunni Arab World" in Martin Marty and Scott Appleby, eds. Fundamentalisms Observed 1991)

Oppenheim understood the revolutionary anticolonial potential in a political Islam. But it didn't turn out to be very helpful to Kaiser Bill's cause.

Most of the figures involved in the propaganda operations weren't nearly so exotic as Von Oppenheim. But newspaperman George Creel (1876-1953), Woodrow Wilson's propaganda chief as head of the U.S. Committee on Public Information was an interesting character in his own right. One of his initiatives was the "Four-Minute Men" program that recruited volunteers to give short speeches in public settings pumping up the war effort.

George Creel (1876-1953), head of Woodrow Wilson wartime propaganda office

Intellectuals on all sides famously rallied to the flag when the war began August 1914 after the unfortunate experience that befell Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo that June. In Britain, H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle were among those who agreed to produce work funded on the QT by the British government. Even for fictional stories by famous writers intended primarily for home consumption, it was considered advantageous to not advertise the government funding of fiction contributions by writers.

This inspired me to go back and re-read Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story His Last Bow: An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes, which was unusual in being narrated in the third person rather than by Watson, who also appears in the story. In it, Holmes and Watson nail a Prussian spy in early August 1914, just as the war is about to begin, "the most terrible August in the history of the world. One might have thought already that God's curse hung heavy over a degenerate world, for there was an awesome hush and a feeling of vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant air."

Holmes is distinguished as an Irish-American helping the Prussian Von Bork. Von Bork explains to him how he chose the combination to open his safe:

"So it's not quite as simple as you thought. It was four years ago that I had it made, and what do you think I chose for the word and figures?"

"It's beyond me."

"Well, I chose August for the word, and 1914 for the figures, and here we are."

The American's face showed his surprise and admiration.

"My, but that was smart! You had it down to a fine thing."

"Yes, a few of us even then could have guessed the date. Here it is, and I'm shutting down to-morrow morning."

That was Von Bork, not Holmes, who guessed the date four years before.

At the end, Holmes resorts to uncharacteristically flowery language as he says to Watson:

"Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared. ..."

I don't know for sure if that particular story was hired by British propaganda office. But it's lower quality compared to other Holmes short stories is a clue that it was. As Holmes himself would surely have observed. (And what was up with having a third-party narration instead of Watson telling the story? Yeesh!)

This 1915 British poster used a bit of shame as well as an appeal to protect one's family to promote enlistment in the armed forces:

Bremm's book is interesting in describing the various marketing strategies the four nations used for their wartime propaganda. But he doesn't have much to say about how effective the official propaganda operations were, or even what considerations one would need to keep in mind in evaluating its effectiveness.

He does note that military censorship kept a lot of failure of the national armies from the homefront public. But he also doesn't give much insight into whether that made sense as a propaganda approach. It was no doubt helpful in concealing the incompetence of various military leaders from their publics. But it also meant that the folks back home were getting a cynical, sanitized and often false picture of how the war was actually going.

That is especially relevant in the eyebrow-raising defense he makes of the stab-in-the-back myth (Dolchstoßlegende) that became a staple of rightwing propaganda in Germany after the war.

I'll discuss that aspect in Part 2.

Tags: first world war, erster weltkrieg, world war i

Getting historical controversies, or rather, not getting them

Am I just having a bad hair day today? Or does this Spiegel International article turn out to be a real stinker? World War I Guilt: Culpability Question Divides Historians Today by Dirk Kurbjuweit 02/14/2014.

I generally like their articles on history, which are more substantive than what you expect from American news magazines. And I guess this one is, too. It's a pretty good discussion of two major German discussions over history, the "Fischer controversy" over the First World War and the "Historikerstreit" of the 1980s.

But when Kurbjuweit reports on his interview with the ancient Nazi apologist Ernst Nolte, it pretty much goes off the tracks and into the canyon far below.

After quoting Nolte blaming Britain and Poland for starting the Second World War, he shares this on Nolte: "In his last book 'Späte Reflexionen' (Late Reflections), he insisted on ascribing to the Jews their 'own share of the 'gulag,'' because some Bolsheviks were Jews. Based on his logic, the Jews were partly responsible for Auschwitz. This has long been an argument of anti-Semites."

I'm guessing an editor made him add the last sentence, because Kurbjuweit sounds pretty clueless at best. Saying the Holocaust was the Jews' own fault? That's "long been an argument of anti-Semites"? Gol-lee, who would have guessed?

In their photo display #8 of 9, the caption says:

The crimes of the Third Reich were vast and it remains controversial in Germany to suggest that Hitler was anything but a murderous maniac. Historian Baberowski does anyway. "Hitler was no psychopath, and he wasn't vicious," he says. "He didn't want people to talk about the extermination of the Jews at his table. Stalin, on the other hand, delighted in adding to and signing off on the death lists. He was vicious. He was a psychopath."

Baberowski sounds in the article like someone who's encourage a the-Commies-are-to-blame-for-everything position.

But that caption is also a bit goofy. Hitler was obvious murderous. But to what extent he was psychotic or otherwise mentally disturbed is certainly a matter for discussion. Someone can be evil and destructive without being clinically insane.

On the other hand, the example Baberowski is quoted as using is a pretty trivial matter to hang such a sweeping judgment on. Assuming Kurbjuweit quoted him in a representative way.

Dirk Kurbjuweit did an interesting column last year about Angela Merkel's political style and what he called the "Second Biedermeier" era in German politics. Good description of Angie's style, shaky on the broader era concept.

Maybe he's a competent journalist who would be better off staying away from Big Picture efforts. In the article linked, he writes, "History is not open in the same way as the future is, but it is open nonetheless. In both debates, the combatants behaved as if there were historical truths, but they don't exist. All that exists is a state of research that includes gaps, which are filled with speculation and interpretation." [Bangs head against wall. Ouch!]

If this guy's English is good, he has career opportunities in the US as a climate denier, or a creationist, or a neo-Confederate. Or as a booker for Meet the Press. Some people say the world ended yesterday, others claim it didn't. Opinions differ. Yeah, he could make some serious money in the US media market.

Tags: ernst nolte, first world war, world war i

Woodrow Wilson in the Great War and the sorry peace that followed it

I'm already losing track of the number of bad 1914 analogies I'm seeing this year. Anne-Marie Slaughter thinks that the South China Sea is shaping up as "Sarajevo, 21st-century version"? Please.

That's what we learn in the opening paragraph of Hans Hoyng's 'We Saved the World': WWI and America's Rise as a Superpower Spiegel International 01/24/2014.

My first rule on 1914 analogies: if it doesn't involve the eurozone, it's almost certainly a bad one.

It's also generally a bad sign if a writer quotes a Kagan in the second paragraph with approval, as Hoyng does, Robert in this case.

Third paragraph: "leaders in Beijing have responded to such attempts to encircle their country with a similar sense of outrage as that displayed by the German Reich." This is truly going to be the Year Of Bad Analogies.

But once the nails-on-the-chalkboard introductory paragraphs are done, Hoyng gives a pretty decent sketch of Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy. Including how the power brokers of Britain and France completely punked him on the Treaty of Versailles that made a new war all but inevitable.

I have a grudging respect for the internationalist and rule-of-law elements in Wilson's foreign policy outlook. Wilson himself I find a really unsympathetic character. That's based in significant part on the book co-authored by Sigmund Freud and the famous and colorful William Bullitt, Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study, first published in 1967. The nature of Freud's co-authorship has been the cause of some consternation. Freud's daughter Anna found it hard to believe that Freud was satisfied with the text that Bullitt presented to him based on their joint work, but assumed he was willing to approve it without further revisions because his priorities were elsewhere at the time. Freud and Bullitt co-signed the chapters of the manuscript, and Freud did his own introduction to it, in which he writes, "For the analytic part we are both equally responsible; it has been written by us working together."

Freud's biographer, the historian Peter Gay, in Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988) calls the Wilson book "an embarrassing production." Gay writes, "Freud had solemnly proclaimed that psychoanalysis, his creation, must not be employed as a weapon of aggression. But at his advanced age, with his infirm health, in his embittered mood, Freud was prepared to make an exception with Woodrow Wilson." And the harshly judgmental tone, unusual for Freud's work, comes across even in the introduction, for which his authorship is uncontroversial. Gay's judgment strikes me as correct when he writes of the supposedly jointly authored text, "Throughout, the tone is scornful, as though Wilson's neuroses were somehow a moral failing." He also notes, the style and tone are notably different in the short introduction, though Freud says there in the opening paragraph that "the figure of the American President, as it rose above the horizon of Europeans, was from the beginning unsympathetic to me, and ... this aversion increased in the course of years the more I learned about him and the more severely we suffered from the consequences of his intrusion into our destiny." Freud proceeds to say, "With increasing acquaintance it was not difficult to find goo reasons to support this antipathy." He suggests that Bullitt could even have made changes to the text after Freud signed off on it.

Freud had patriotic and political motives for his judgments on Wilson's politics. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a wobbly construction in 1914. In retrospect, even aside from the not inconsiderable possibility of a social revolution, the Empire's increasing involvement in the fanaticism-drenched mire of the Balkans had sealed its doom even before Gavrilo Princip assassinated his target in Sarajevo. By the end of 1916, Austria-Hungary's losses in the war and dire economic straits had made it practically the appendage of Germany. And in the remaining years of the war, Erich Ludendorff's military dictatorship was not primarily interested in preserving the postwar status of the Habsburg Empire.

Germans and Austrians of democratic orientation, of which Freud was one, hoped that the United States would act on Wilson's proclaimed goals of a fair peace, had legitimate reason to be bitterly disappointed in the vultures' peace that Wilson eventually agreed to in the Versailles Treaty. John Maynard Keynes, who had been part of the British delegation to the peace conference, wrote an early warning about the disastrous nature of the peace that was shaping up in his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace.

John Kenneth Galbraith refers to Keynes' verdict on the Versailles Conference in The Age of Uncertainty (1977):

The mood in Paris in the early months of 1919 was vengeful, myopic, indifferent to economic realities, and it horrified Keynes. So did his fellow civil servants. So did the politicians. In June he resigned and came home, and, in the next two months, he composed the greatest polemical document of modern times. It was against the reparations clauses of the Treaty and, as he saw it, the Carthaginian peace.

Europe would only punish itself by exacting, or seeking to exact, more from the Germans than they had the practical capacity to pay. Restraint by the
victors was not a matter of compassion but of elementary self-interest. The case was documented with figures and written with passion. In memorable
passages Keynes gave his impressions of the men who were writing the peace. Woodrow Wilson he called " this blind and deaf Don Quixote." Of [French President] Clemenceau he said: "He had one illusion - France; and one disillusion, mankind ... " On [British Prime Minister] Lloyd George he was rather severe:

How can I convey to the reader, who does not know him, any just impression of this extraordinary figure of our time, this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity.

Alas, no man is of perfect courage. Keynes deleted this passage on Lloyd George at the last moment.

Galbraith relates that Keynes' basically accurate but highly unwelcome view of the Versailles Treaty earned him the defensive scorn of the British Establishment. Galbraith judges that this rejection was valuable to Keynes intellectual development:

It was not that the great men of the Treaty and the Establishment were suffering under the onslaught [of Keynes' criticism], although that, of course, was the real point. Rather, the criticism was [said by them to be] causing rejoicing to the nation's enemies. It's a device to which highly respectable men regularly resort. "Even if you are right, it is only the Communists who will be pleased."

Those familiar with Galbraith's own career will recognize that he spoke from experience and undoubtedly identified with Keynes position in that regard.

And it is when they are wrong that great men most resent the breaking of ranks. So they greatly resented Keynes. For the next twenty years he headed an insurance company and speculated in shares, commodities and foreign exchange, sometimes losing, more often winning. He also taught economics, wrote extensively and applied himself to the arts, old books and his Bloomsbury friends. But on public matters he was kept outside. He had broken the rules. We saw earlier that, as often as not, the intelligent man is not sought out. Rather, he is excluded as a threat.

This is the phenomenon that Paul Krugman calls that of the Very Serious People. It is far more acceptable in the view of the VSPs to be conventionally wrong than to be unconventionally right. What Jesus told Judas in the Bible about the poor is apparently also true of the VSPs: we seem to have them with us always, as well. (I know I used a similar reference in the previous post. So I like the Biblical references, so what?)

"Keynes's exclusion," writes Galbraith, "was his good fortune. The curse of the public man is that he first accommodates his tongue and. eventually his thoughts to his public position. Presently saying nothing but saying it nicely becomes a habit. On the outside one can at least have the pleasure of inflicting the truth." Freud's friend and presumed co-author Bullitt was also known for ruffling the feathers of the VSPs of the day over his public criticism of the Versailles Treaty.

Freud, of course, also had his lifelong experience of exclusion, even as he became one of the most celebrated scientists of his day. And he could see some of the same sense of unjust exclusion in that fate of Austria after the Versailles Conference. Though Vienna still conveys a sense of the onetime glory of the great Habsburg Empire, postwar Austria was a tiny rump remnant of what the Empire was in 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand made his ill-fated visit to Sarajevo. One of Wilson's perhaps less idealistic premises that was incorporated into the peace was the notion that major ethnic groups should have their own nations, an embrace of the European ethnic concept of nationalism whose application after the First World War had decidedly ambiguous results. And, as Gay writes, Wilson's own "conduct during the tortuous peace negotiations was erratic and counterproductive."

Austria in the ethnic scheme was predominantly German in language and culture. And, not inconsequentially, in the view and aspirations of the majority of Austrians, including the Social Democrats who headed the postwar government. Austria's official name in the postwar constitution was "German Austria," and they wanted to merge with Germany. But the Allies did not considered it advantageous to allow ethnic unity to prevail in the case of Austria and Germany, and under the terms of the peace treaty, such a merger could not take place without Allied permission, which was never forthcoming. For those who know of Austrian merger with Germany in the context of the forcible Anschluss (annexation) of 1938, this can appear to be a strange concept that Austrians aspired to merge with Germany.

Hoyng is more generous to Wilson on this score than I'm inclined to be:

Wilson vehemently advocated the creation of the League of Nations. He noted with irritation that the British and the French were more intent on what they could demand from Germany. Wilson would even have been prepared to postpone the negotiations over new borders and reparations -- but not the talks on the League of Nations -- by a year until emotions had cooled down. "Our greatest error would be to give (Germany) powerful reasons for one day wishing to take revenge," Wilson warned. But he was unable to prevail, and the Germans soon felt betrayed by Wilson.

But he also notes, "Wilson signed the Treaty of Versailles, despite his own reservations and external warnings that the pact contained the germ of the next war."

It's one of the great mistakes of postwar Allied foreign policy that they did not allow the merger of Germany and Austria. The Weimar Republic was considered the model democracy in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1920s, and a merger into it would have both placed Austrian democracy on a more solid basis and removed a major nationalist grievance from the German rightwing parties. It would be too much of a stretch to say that it would have prevented the Nazis' rise to power. Hitler was very much an Austrian, after all, and his National Socialist ideology came out of the dysfunctional brand of multiculturalism he experienced in Vienna and the toxic soup of political anti-Semitism in which he immersed himself there prior to the First World War. On the other hand, it's hard to see how an annexation of Austria to Germany circa 1920 could have made Weimar democracy less stable and durable, and the opposite is more likely the case.

Freud may have identified with Moses. But he was also suspicious and skeptical about people with messianic pretensions. As Gay puts it, Freud "saw in Wilson a melodramatic specimen of" the particular type of "infliction on humanity" that Freud saw embodied in "prophets and religious fanatics." Freud, in Gay's formulation, "encountered in Wilson what the American historian Richard Hofstadter has felicitously called 'the ruthlessness of the pure in heart.' Worse: Wilson's vain attempt to make the map of Europe conform to his exalted ideals, and to purify European politics, proved his ruthlessness to be empty bluster - the most hateful of combinations."

God was on Woodrow Wilson's side in the First World, because God always supports America. He also sided with Kaiser Bill:

God also included Austro-Hungarian Franz Joseph (r) in his support (Kaiser Bill on the left), though I'm not sure this "God is with us" postcard was entirely meant to celebrate that joint blessing:

Freud found Wilson to suffer from the kind of rejection of reality that we see today in the American Christian Right:

Wilson ... repeatedly declared that mere facts had no significance for him, that he esteemed highly nothing but human motives and opinions. As a result of this attitude it was natural for him in his thinking to ignore the facts of the real outer world, even to deny they existed if they conflicted with his hopes and wishes. He, therefore, lacked motive to reduce his ignorance by learning facts. Nothing mattered except noble intentions. As a result, when he crossed the ocean to bring to war-torn Europe a just and lasting peace, he put himself in the deplorable position of the benefactor who wishes to restore the eyesight of a patient but does not know the construction of the eye and has neglected to learn the necessary methods of operation.

This same habit of thought is probably responsible for the insincerity, unreliability and tendency to deny the truth which appear in Wilson's contacts with other men and are always so shocking in an idealist. The compulsion to speak the truth must indeed be solidified by ethics but it is founded upon respect for fact.

I must also express the belief that there was an intimate connection between Wilson's alienation from the world of reality and his religious convictions. Many bits of his public activity almost produce the impression of the method of Christian Science applied to politics. God is good, illness is evil. Illness contradicts the nature of God. Therefore, since God exists, illness does not exist. There is no illness. Who would expect a healer of this school to take an interest in symptomatology and diagnosis? [my emphasis]

Freud, himself a non-believer - who nevertheless took religion as a social and psychological phenomenon very seriously and was well-versed in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles - was struck by how God managed to back different sides in the same war, not unlike the divisions in the Court of Olympus during the Trojan War or the catholic willingness of arms manufacturers to sell their wares to different sides in the same conflict:

It was reported that Wilson, as President-elect, shook off one of the politicians who called attention to his services during the presidential campaign with the words: "God ordained that I should be the next President of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal or mortals could have prevented it." The politician was William F. McCombs, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. I do not know how to avoid the conclusion that a man who is capable of taking the illusions of religion so literally and is so sure of a special personal intimacy with the Almighty is unfitted for relations with ordinary children of men. As everyone knows, the hostile camp during the war also sheltered a chosen darling of Providence: the German Kaiser. It was most regrettable that later on the other side a second appeared. No one gained thereby: respect for God was not increased. [my emphasis]

Tags: first world war,
john kenneth galbraith, keynes, sigmund freud, william bullitt, versailles treaty, world war i

Sönke Neitzel on Germany in the First World War

Sönke Neitzel's Blut und Eisen: Duetschland im Ersten Weltkrieg (2003) gives an account of the First World War with particular emphasis on Germany's decision-making and war aims.

One striking thing that emerges from Neitzel's narrative is the amazing self-confidence on the part of both the Entente and Central Powers that they could win more-or-less quickly and easily. It was, very obviously in retrospect, an astonishing delusion.

It's also amazing in retrospect, as it surely must have been to many at the time, that the commanders on all sides were so unwilling to adjust their approach of mass human wave charges against enemy lines despite the obvious effectiveness of the machine-gun technology of the time.

Mass hanging of Serbians by k.u.k. (Austro-Hungarian) forces

The First World War was the largest and most costly and deadly war in history up until the Second World War. But it's also striking that all sides were able to not only able to largely maintain military discipline in the ranks but also support for the war on the home fronts until 1917, when the February and October Revolutions in Russia expressed the extreme distress the war was imposing on the populations of many countries, in this case in one of the Entente powers. The home fronts in Germany and the Habsburg lands also experienced a great deal of hardship the longer the war went on. In the case of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it resulted in a complete disintegration of the prewar dysfunctional multinational empire into separate countries. Both Germany and Austria emerged from the war with new democratic republics lead by the Social Democratic Parties, which worked out somewhat less well in Germany than in Austria in the subsequent decade or so.

Britain's complete sea blockade of Germany, which was technically a violation of international law of the time, contributed in a major way to serious food shortages in the Central Powers. Germany's fleet and U-boat (submarine) warfare, even the unrestricted U-boot warfare that was also a violation of international law and eventually brought the US into the war - was unable to offset the blockade to more than a limited extent. The winter of 1916-17 is known as the Turnip Winter (Steckrübenwinter) in Germany. Also known as the Rudabaga Winter (Kohlrübenwinter). As Neitzel puts it (page 188):

Die durchschnittliche Kalorienzuteilung fur den Normalverbraucher fiel im »Steckrübenwinter« 1916/17 auf 1200 Kalorien pro Tag ab - wobei es regional allerdings erhebliche Unterschiede gab. Für die Soldaten war mit 2200 Kalorien der Mindestbedarf eines Erwachsenen knapp sichergestellt. Der Vorkriegsdurchschnittsverbrauch hatte bei 3000 Kalorien gelegen. 1917 gab es dann die schlechteste Getreideernte des Krieges. Sie erbrachte im Durchschnitt nur 6o Prozent der Vorkriegserträge. Immerhin verbesserte sich das Ergebnis der Kartoffelernte, so dass ein zweiter Steckrübenwinter verhindert werden konnte. Die Brotration verringerte sich unterdessen immer mehr. Im Sommer 1918 betrug sie nur noch 160 Gramm pro Tag. Fleisch gab es nur noch in ganz geringen Mengen, Milch ohnehin nur noch fur Kinder und stillende Mütter.

[The average calorie rationing for the normal consumer fell down in the "Turnip Winter" of 1916-17 to 1200 calories per day - whereby there were in any case regional differences. For the soldiers, the minimal requirements of 2200 calories for an adult were barely secured. The average prewar consumption had lain at 3000 calories. In 1917, there was the worst grain harvest of the war. It produced only 60% of the prewar yield. At least the result of the potato harvest improved, so that a second Turnip Winter could be avoided. Meanwhile, the bread ration shrank more and more. In the summer of 1918, it amounted to only 160 grams per day [about four slices of bread]. Meat was available only in small quantities, with milk only left for children and nursing mothers.]

Announcement of  potato rationing, city of Pirmasens, Germany, Feb 1917

This was not just the result of the British blockade. It was also a consequence of the German government's incredible optimism about how quickly they could defeat France and Russia. There was little prewar planning to put the German economy on a full wartime basis. It was Walter Rathenau, President of the firm AEG, and one of his AEG executives, Wichard von Mollendorff, that took the initiative in the early days of the war (August 2014) to push the Imperial government to set up an office to requisition essential war materials in a systematic way. Germany was heavily dependent on food imports, as well.

Turnip rationing card, city of Erfurt, Germany, 1917

But planning for a long-term war on a fully industrialized basis wasn't done before the war. The German High Command figured that they could repeat the accomplishments of the three wars of the Bismarck era that created the German Empire as it existed in August of 1914: the German-Danish War of 1864 over Schleswig-Holstein, the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-German War of 1870-1. In those wars, Prussia/Germany had been able to achieve relative quick victories through massive frontal assaults. The Austro-Prussian War is also known to history as the Seven Weeks War.

Times and technology had changed by 1914. And the quick victories of the German wars of unification were not to be had. Even in 1918, when Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff had been effectively exercising a military dictatorship in Germany since 1916 - really more by Ludendorff with Hindenburg as a figurehead - Ludendorff still insisted on a desperate offensive in the West during the first part of the year, thinking that he cold force a peace with France on the basis of German military victory before the Americans could fully engage in the war.

It was only after the failure of that initiative that Ludendorff began to face reality and pulled off a brilliant if sinister political move that Neitzel describes well. Briefly put, Ludendorff didn't want the military to take the rap for the failure of the German war effort and the inevitably nasty consequences that would result from an Entente-dictated peace. So he shrewdly set up for a postwar stab-in-the-back myth (Dolchstoßlegende) to blame the Social Democrats for the military defeat. A plan into which the Social Democratic Party (SPD) under the leadership of Philipp Scheidemann (1865-1939) and Friedrich Ebert (1871-1925) clumsily played into. They wound up being the government that accepted the vultures' peace treaty of Versailles on behalf of defeated Germany for which the rightwing nationalists and militarists then proceeded to blame them.

Postwar propaganda image of the stab-in-the-back myth from a German nationalist party

The history of the German Social Democrats' support of the Kaiser's war is a complex one and especially fascinated to me, not least because it doesn't lend itself to easy explanations. Suffice it here to say that the SPD - or the MSPD (Majority SPD), as the largest Social Democratic grouping in Parliament became known during the war - was compliant enough with the official war policies that they became known as "the Kaiser's Social Democrats." On the other hand, they did consistently oppose annexionist policies during the war. Neitzel's description of the SPD's politics during the war and the popular revolutionary upheavals of 1918-9 in Germany is solid.

The SPD was able eventually to form wartime alliances in the Reichstag with the left-liberal Progressive People's Party and the Catholic Center Party to demand a non-annexionist peace from the Imperial government. This alliance would soon become the core "Weimar" parties that were dedicated to preserving a democratic republic: the SPD, the German Democratic Party and the Center. But, not least as a result of the bad deal they made to assume governing responsibilities under Ludentdorff's scheme, the SPD's voting percentage peaked in 38% in 1919 and never recovered that level of support against during the life of the Weimar Republic.

Tags: first world war, hindenburg, ludendorff, spd, world war i

Bill Kristol's fond memories of the First World War

Professional warmonger Bill Kristol is noticing that 1914 is the anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. And he's worried that reminiscences of what a massive, preventable, destructive slaughter that was will tarnish his comic-book faith in war and killing.

In Pro Patria Weekly Standard 01/13/2014, he writes that memories of the First World War tend to focus on all the unpleasantries of the business. But he's hopeful that this year people can see beyond that to the redemptive glory of mass slaughter:

This year, a century later, the commemorations of 1914 will tend to take that rejection of piety and patriotism for granted. Or could this year mark a moment of questioning, even of reversal?

Today, after all, we see the full consequences of that rejection in a way Owen and his contemporaries could not. Can’t we acknowledge the meaning, recognize the power, and learn the lessons of 1914 without succumbing to an apparently inexorable gravitational pull toward a posture of ironic passivity or fatalistic regret in the face of civilizational decline? No sensitive person can fail to be moved by Owen’s powerful lament, and no intelligent person can ignore his chastening rebuke. But perhaps a century of increasingly unthinking bitter disgust with our heritage is enough.

Besides being the centennial of World War I, 2014 also happens to be the bicentennial of the Battle of Fort McHenry, a minor battle during a conflict of infinitely lesser significance than World War I, the War of 1812. The bombardment of the American fort near Baltimore produced a poem. "Defence of Fort McHenry" is far less likely to appear in anthologies of the greatest poems of the English language than "Dulce Et Decorum Est." But the greater work of art is not always the better guide to life.

It always feels a bit silly to treat words flowing from the keyboard of Dan Quayles' former speechwriter Bill Kristol seriously. Especially when it comes to war, about which he has a remarkable public record extending over decades of being spectacularly wrong. And singularly unreflective about his spectacular wrongness.

Bill Kristol's "better guide to life": the glories of war and mass destruction

But in all the commentary I've seen about the First World War, none at all comes to mind that specifically rejects "piety and patriotism" as such. Certainly not in the triumphalist narratives so common in American commentary. Not even the poem he cites beforehand.

And how can a piously patriotic American warmonger like Kristol say that the War of 1812, in which Britain invaded the US and tried to reassert its dominance on the North American continent at the expense of the American Republic, was "a conflict of infinitely lesser significance than World War I"? Piety and patriotism are shocked!

Charlie Pierce cites Kristol's article and quotes the middle paragraph included above, and concludes (Bill Kristol and Marital Virtue Esquire Politics Blog 01/16/2014):

So saith the Moloch of the Green Room, from whose hands still drips the blood of Other People's Children.

Decent folk should spit on him. Daily.

Tags: first world war, world war i

John Kenneth Galbraith's "Age of Uncertainty: Lenin and The Great Ungluing"

Today's episode of John Kenneth Galbraith's 1977 The Age of Uncertainty is Episode 5 Lenin and The Great Ungluing, which deals with the First World War and its aftermath:

Galbraith in the companion book notes, "No subject known to history, not even the reasons for the long decline of Rome (the more interesting question is how it lasted so long), has been so much debated as the causes of World War I."

But that doesn't stop him from offering his own observations. This is an important one. He takes issue with Marxist theories of imperialism that held capitalism to be especially prone to generating wars, and the First World War more specifically:

The better explanation lies in the traditional territorial attitudes of predominantly rural societies. Their governments, at least in that time, were dangerously belligerent - more so, Marx notwithstanding, than those of the capitalist world.

Ever since the beginning of historical experience, land and men had been the basis of both wealth and military power; the two went together. The wealth of a prince had always been in proportion to the extent and quality of the land be controlled. For varying with the extent and quality of the land were the number, and perhaps also the quality, of the peasantry it supported and therewith of the soldiers he could muster. Thus his military power. Thus the territorial imperative, the belief that nothing should stand in the way of acquisition or defense of territory.

In 1914, the belief in land and men- this territorial imperative - was part of the deepest instinct of the old ruling houses. It was a factor as between France and Germany. Had Germany won, something more of France would have been added to Alsace and Lorraine. Between the Hapsburgs and the Romanovs, and in the Balkans, it was mortal. It was for this reason that the rulers eyed each other with suspicion; each believed that his neighbor wanted the territory that was decisive for wealth and power. [my emphasis]

He also spends some time to discuss Lenin's leadership, including the following:

Marx, no one could doubt, was a revolutionary; the free-flowing beard, piercing eye, exceptionally untidy appearance were all in keeping. It may, indeed, be Marx who has given us our mental image of how a revolutionary should look. Far more than Marx, Lenin was a revolutionary. Marx wrote; Lenin led . He remains the revolutionary colossus who stands astride a whole age, the point of reference still for the long, slowly moving lines beside the Kremlin Wall. With his high for ehead greatly accented by the bald dome above, his neat mustache, dark, quiet suit and something very near a VanDyck beard, he looked like the head of a firm of chartered accountants. Leon Trotsky, with his fi erce and glittering eye and much less disciplined beard, was a man of far more satisfactory aspect.

Once quite a few years ago a Soviet historian visited Harvard. He was an old man and had served in Budenny's cavalry during the Revolution. He had known Lenin well and told with amused pride that Lenin had once paid him a high compliment; he was, Lenin had said, the world's only known case of a cavalryman with brains. I asked him the source of Lenin's leadership - a man so tidy, looking so much like a clerk. He replied: "When Lenin spoke, we marched."

Galbraith also relates this anecdote, which he presents as like apocryphal, talking about the time Lenin spent at the library in the British Museum while in exile: "Years later [after the Boshevik Revolution], according to legend, it occurred to someone to ask one of the library attendants if he remembered Lenin. He did, a most diligent little man. The librarian wondered whatever had become of him."

He also discusses the vexatious issue of the adjustments made by capitalist countries in their method of rule after the First World War:

In the West the war ended, Germany was defeated but the glue seemed to hold. In Germany Friedrich Ebert, a Social Democrat, became President. Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht led a militant minority whose view of revolution was as Lenin's. But the moderate opposition in Germany, the counterpart of the Mensheviks, was far stronger than in Russia. Gustav Noske, a Social Democrat, became Minister of Defense and put down their revolt. Luxembourg and Liebknecht were both killed by anti-Communists. But in the Western countries too, the United States partly excepted , there was a quiet revolution, one that deserves the name.

In all European countries the old coalition of capitalists and traditional rulers [aristocratic landowners, more or less] was at an end. There would still be a ruling coalition; it would be of business interests, large and small, and the trade unions and their parties. Sometimes these joined in power. More often they traded it back and forth, increasingly sharing it with yet other groups. So it was in Britain, France and the British Dominions. And so, with the passage of time, it would be in the United States. It was a prospect that Marx did not foresee.

Tags: age of uncertainty, colonialism, john kenneth galbraith, lenin, world war i