cxxvii ‘Empty land’ was to be had aplenty in southern Africa following the Europeans bringing a smallpox epidemic there in 1713, which did more than anything else to decimate the indigenous San people. The same was to occur following the 1788 landing of British settlers in Australia, killing tens of thousands of indigenous Aboriginals.(22)
cxxviii In 1837, the US Army again handed out blankets to Indians from Fort Clark on the Missouri River, in what became North Dakota, which had been shipped up river from the smallpox quarantine military hospital in St Louis. Those that became sick were told to seek sanctuary in their villages, rapidly spreading the disease. The smallpox vaccine kept at the fort was not used to help the Indians. The death toll reached more than 100,000. In 1853, a San Franciso newspaper published an article under the heading of the ‘Indian Question’, which read: ‘people are… ready to knife them, shoot them, or inoculate them with small pox — all of which, they have already done.’ On 10th July 1860 the San Franciso Bulletin wrote about the ‘ultimate extermination of the race by disease’.(27)
cxxix The Cherokee are estimated to have lost 55 per cent of their tribe during the trek and subsequent internment.(31)
cxxx Once they had taken their land, it just remained for the settlers to take their culture, through the cruellest of all acts, robbing them of their children. Indian children were sent to boarding schools, many of which had previously been army forts set up to attack and round up Indians. Their children were ‘relieved’ of their meagre belongings, including the medicine bags their mothers had given them to protect them from illness. The pride of the boys, their long hair, was cut short and they were forbidden, with resort to the strictest corporal punishments, to use their native language. In the years that ensued, many Indian children were to return to their parents’ reservations having forgotten their own language and were no longer able to communicate with them. They were then often ostracised by their own. They were taught at these schools that ‘Indians were evil and barbarous savages’ to be ashamed of their own race and their heritage. They were given white man’s clothes, food, religion and a military schooling. What were they left with?(39)
cxxxi But even well into the twentieth century the hunting and killing of Indians for their land continued in many parts of Latin America. During the 1960s and 1970s in Paraguay, 85 per cent of the Ache Indians were hunted down and killed by execution squads.(40) In the 1970s, in Guatemala, land expropriations were continued by the military against the Kekchi and Ixil Indians, estates were carved out in what became known as the ‘Zone of the Generals’. Uprisings have been brutally suppressed. The attitude of the descendents of European colonists can be summed up by the comments made by Fernando Ramos Periera, governor of the Brazilian province of Roraima, who told the press that the area (of the Amazon) ‘is not able to afford the luxury of conserving a half dozen Indian tribes who are holding back development.’(41) Since he made that comment in 1975 the ‘progress’ he spoke of has led to nearly a quarter of the Amazon being deforested. A quarter of those areas have already been abandoned. The Amazon is responsible for 50 per cent of South America’s rainfall and the Brazilian Ministry of the environment has produced figures showing that rainfall levels have fallen in line with deforestation rates. The rape and pillage mentality of the early conquistadors is alive and well and still kicking the natives and the environment alike in the Americas.(42)
cxxxii From the Louisiana purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition of the first decade of the 1800s, America doubled in size at the expense of Spain and France. By the time of the Mexican American Wars of 1846 and 1848 the United States exercised its power to inflict a crushing blow on its southern neighbour, wrenching over half of its territory from it, an area of over 2 million square kilometres, equivalent in size to the modern day European Union. The new states of California, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada, Utah and parts of Colorado, Arizona and Wyoming, were all created from this land grab.(46) The Spanish American War of 1898 turned US attention and aspirations from the continent of North America to the Caribbean and as far as the outer reaches of the Pacific Ocean. In a war that healed some of the wounds created by civil war, which had been fought only a generation earlier, northerners and southerners, blacks and whites were united in their common patriotic endeavour, firmly convinced of the United States’ ‘Manifest Destiny’ to become a great power and bending the isolationist anti-imperialist principals of the Monroe Doctrine beyond all recognition. The US exploited the revolutionary forces of the independence movement in Cuba, as an excuse to fight Spain and force her to cede Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam and end her pretensions to still being a great colonial power. The United States also helped to ‘liberate’ Cuba but it was a very conditional liberation, more a switching of one obvious overbearing old colonial master for a subtle and wilier new one. The US expelled the Spanish colonial authorities from the island and forbade the Cuban authorities from making alliances with any other powers. As part of the 1903 peace treaty with Cuba, the US established a permanent military base at Guantanamo Bay, just to ‘protect’ its interests on the island. Also in 1903, the US intervened in the post-colonial affairs of Colombia by supporting the breakaway region of Panama, sending troops to protect US interests. The Treaty of Bay Banau Virilla effectively made Panama a satellite state of the US. The treaty granted America the right to build and indefinitely administrate the Panama Canal, which opened in 1914. Despite the struggles in Congress and the soul searching over these expansionist policies, the colony had become a colonial power in its own right.(47)
cxxxiii One of Russia’s greatest Tsars, who expanded her empire more than any other, was in fact of German origin; Catherine the Great was born of a German noble family in the Pomeranian city of Stettin.
cxxxiv Kazakhstan is today a multiethnic ‘Eurasian’ society with an identity crisis. A recent BBC report portrayed a country attempting to rediscover its identity and expand the use of its language, and study of its culture, after successive generations of Russification. The Russian community there, which make up nearly half the population, are fearful of the consequences this may bring.
cxxxv Take a look at any First World War map of Europe and see where Russia’s imperial European borders end. She has all of Finland, the Baltic States, most of Poland, Ukraine, Bessarabia and eastern Romania. Her loss of the First World War to Germany, Germany’s subsequent defeat in the west, the chaos of the Russian Revolution and Russia’s defeat by Poland in the war of 1920 allowed these nations to regain their independence, and in the case of Poland, to stretch her eastern border far beyond what she had been given during the peace settlements of 1919. Then take a look at what Stalin wants and takes as a result of his non-aggression pact with Hitler. These states again become part of the now Soviet Russian Empire. Finding himself with a new set of allies at the end of the war, Stalin is not prepared to relinquish his gains, but determined to expand them even further west. (See relevant maps.)
cxxxvi Napoleon is said to have died from inhaling the lead in the paint used to paint the walls during his years of confinement on St Helena.
cxxxvii The Suez Canal was completed by France in 1869, based on designs by an Austrian engineer. The British moved into Egypt, taking advantage of the Egyptian civil war.
cxxxviii Gordon of Khartoum was played by Charlton Heston in the 1966 film starring opposite Sir Laurence Olivier as the Mahdi. The Mahdi’s (Muhammad Ahmad’s) rebellion was seen as potentially dangerous by the British government of the day, not only for Sudan but the wider Muslim world, as the Mahdi claimed dominion over the entire Islamic World. A German journalist, Jacques Schuster, writing for the respected broadsheet Die Zeit, wrote a review of George Brunold’s Book — Winston Churchill: Crusade against the Empire of the Mahdi (about the British imperial wars against the Mahdi Army in Sudan from the1880s). Churchill describes the racism of the Muslims against the indigenous black tribes who they regard as inferior and whom they continued to enslave. The murderous rampages of t
he Mahdi Army, which reduced the population of the upper Nile region by 75 per cent, towns and villages lying in ruins, livestock all killed and the date palm trees cut down, water sources exhausted or poisoned. In short the total devastation of the region. (Resonances of this live on in the genocidal conflict in Darfur in Sudan to this day).(13)
cxxxix The belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority was fashionable and widely held. One of its most eccentric proponents and successful sons of the empire was Cecil Rhodes, known today more for his endowment of the Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. These scholarships were initially open to young white men of Anglo-Saxon origin (which included the original Saxons [Germans] until the outbreak of the First World War), with the aim of educating future world leaders in Britain and thereby spreading British values and influence.
cxl The Jameson Raid was a disastrous failed attempted coup and military takeover of the Afrikaner Transvaal.
cxli The 1916 Easter Risings were led by the Irish Republican Brotherhood and Irish Volunteers, who seized strategic locations in Dublin in an attempt to wrest independence from Britain. The uprising was brutally, some argue murderously, repressed by the Royal Irish Ulster Constabulary Reserve Force, the ‘Black and Tans’, who emptied the jails to help put down the rising, which led to 318 Irish deaths with over 2,200 injured. The ringleaders of the uprising were executed. The last all-island election in Ireland to Westminster in 1918 produced seventy-three Republican MPs (out of a total of 105). The Republic of Ireland gained its independence from Britain in 1922.
cxlii The ‘White Man’s Burden’ was however directed by its author at the United States in its war with Spain, Kipling depicting the Americans as fellow Anglo-Saxons ‘liberating’ their unfortunate southern neighbours.(16)
cxliii The British scholar Thomas Robert Malthus believed the progress and perfectibility of society was threatened by unchecked population growth and propagated the theory that dangerous population growth is necessarily checked by famine, disease and a struggle for resources.
cxliv Unlike most European nation states of the day, Germany had a very homogeneous population, with relatively few foreign minorities. Its population of 41 million were less than 8 per cent non-German speaking, these were composed of 2.4 million Poles mostly in and around the Duchy of Posen (Poznan), 200,000 French speakers in Lothringen (Lorraine) and some 140,000 Danes in Schleswig. The percentage of national minorities in the other large national states of Europe were far higher and their treatment and representation in many cases far worse than in Imperial Germany; if one considers the Celts in Great Britain, especially those in Ireland, or the Basques and Catalans in Spain, or the numerous minorities in France from the Bretons to the Basques — if we look at Russia where less than half of the population of Imperial Russia were Russians, and in post-First World War Poland minorities were to make up over a quarter of the population.(24)
cxlv As much as Churchill is always a great source of quotations in the English language, Otto von Bismarck plays the same role in German. When in retirement, at the turn of the ninteenth century, Bismarck was asked what for him was the most significant factor that would influence the dawn of the twentieth, he said: ‘That North America speaks English.’ Even today 30 per cent of American surnames are of German origin and 20 per cent of the population are of German ancestry.(26)
cxlvi Weltmacht is a word that is oft mistranslated into English. It literally means ‘world power’, practically meaning German foreign policy wanting to play a greater role on the world stage. This is often translated as ‘world domination’, which is a misleading and incorrect translation.
cxlvii Another flaw of German democracy was the three-tier voting system to elect the Prussian parliament, which by 1900 looked totally outdated and harked back to a Europe run by the aristocratic elites from half a century before. Prussia, which had once led the European Enlightenment, was now well behind the curve in terms of its evolution of democratic institutions. The three-tier voting system was based on the old estates and weighted in favour of the landed nobility. However even this outdated and creaking system still enabled the Socialist SPD to become to be the largest parliamentary party before the First World War.
cxlviii In a widely circulated email to garner support for British troops in Afghanistan in 2010 the wording demonstrates the high regard in which the military is still held to this day in Great Britain, in language that would not have been unfamiliar in Wilhelmian Germany. It read, ‘It is the military not the reporter that has given us the freedom of the press, it is the military not the poet that has given us freedom of speech. It is the military not the politicians that ensures our right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is the military that salutes the flag, serves under the flag and whose coffins come home draped in the flag.’
cxlix No evidence has ever been found by Fischer or his adherents of the existence of Germany’s war aims prior to the start of the war. More importantly, the German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, on 29th July 1914 informed the British Ambassador in Berlin that Germany was prepared to guarantee the territorial integrity of both Belgium and France in return for British neutrality. Therefore to ascribe such grandiose and predetermined purpose to German war plans is somewhat telescopic.(34)
6
From Empire To Republic: The First World War and Weimar
Under Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany’s hubris would break the cardinal rule of Prussia’s foreign policy of never taking on all of your enemies at once. Imperial Germany now not only plunged headlong into a two-front war but a World War that pitted her against a host of the world’s greatest empires.
‘The Great War’, as it came to be known, was the first modern war in which not only armies fought each other but in which entire societies became embroiled in a conflict for national survival. The enormous sacrifices and huge material and human cost of the conflict created forces for radical social change and led to unprecedented upheavels that swept away the old world and its established social orders.
Democracy as we understand it today, in terms of having an extensive franchise that encompassed the majority of the population, only came into existence anywhere in Europe after the First World War. But tolerance and democracy were in short supply and short-lived in much of Central and Eastern Europe after the war, where the revolutions that followed among the defeated nations gave rise to the competing new mass movements of Communism and Fascism that surged into power when democracy and the capitalist system appeared to falter in the wake of the great economic crash of 1929.
THE INEVITABILITY OF WAR
Was war inevitable? A.J.P. Taylor wrote:
In the critical years between 1885 and 1913 British industrial production increased by an annual rate of 2.11 percent, Germany at 4.5 percent. The American rate was 5.2 percent, the Russian 5.72 percent… The United States could challenge Germany, even if she dominated the continent of Europe — and at the end Russia was developing more rapidly than any other country in the world. The Germans had an opportunity, but it was not one that would last… (1)
One might then draw the conclusion that the wider economic and geopolitical struggle between the great imperial powers for global domination had an inbuilt tendency towards war; that only a ‘Greater Germany’ which had won the battle for Europe, and was then capable of imperial expansion abroad would be strong enough to take on the emerging powers of the United States and Russia. It has been equally popular to argue that the retarded development of democracy in Germany inevitably led her to war, and that the legacy of Prussia saddled Germany with a weak constitution and insufficient checks and balances on the military, the weaknesses in the system becoming particularly acute in the hands of Kaiser Wilhelm II.(2)
Those who want to keep the focus squarely on Germany will emphasise the proliferation in Wilhelmian Germany of popular extra-parliamentary organisations on the right, which were supported by industrialists looking for new markets, and which collectively counted over one million Germans am
ong their members. These nationalist pressure groups, such as the Agrarian League, Pan-German League, Society for the Eastern Marches, Colonial Society and the Navy League, all had a hotchpotch of aims, but overall they supported the Kaiser’s vision of German Weltmacht. They wanted an expansion of German colonial projects overseas, and for German colonisation and expansion towards the east to be resumed. These organisations became increasingly völkisch (ethnic), racially nationalistic and anti-Semitic, and have even been described as ‘proto-fascist’.(3) However, these groups remained firmly on the extreme fringes of German politics prior to the war and similar organisations and pressure groups were no less prevalent in Great Britain or France. And although there is, of course, an element of truth to all of these arguments, none of them represents a plan for war, nor did they individually or collectively make war inevitable. They also all too often focus on one player in a complex international system and are all examples of looking back through history to find and join up a random set of dots to say ‘x + y = war’. Ever more historians in the run up to the hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of hostilities have looked instead at the roles played by all the major powers. Apportionments of blame for ‘Who started it!’ still vary widely but there are ever fewer who argue that war was inevitable.
It adds a certain poignancy to the situation when you read the front pages of the newspapers of the day, knowing, unlike those at the time, what is to come. To see those on the brink of the crisis continue to keep appointments and go about their business seemingly completely unaware of what lay before them, as if they truly were sleepwalking towards disaster.
During the last week in June 1914 the Kiel sailing regatta was in full swing in Germany, with the Kaiser in attendance and a sizeable Royal Naval detachment including a squadron of the latest King George V class dreadnoughts there as guests of honour.
Death of a Nation Page 39