November 11 marks the armistice that was supposed to bring an end to the Great War in 1918. In fact, it was little more than a temporary and partial truce in a war that has continued, in one form or another, until the present. Hitler’s War and the various Cold War conflicts were direct continuations of the first Great War, and we are even now dealing with the consequences of the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot agreement.
The Great War was at the root of most of the catastrophes that befell the human race in the 20th century. Communism, Nazism and various forms of virulent nationalism all derived their justification from the ten million dead of 1914-18. Even the apparently hopeful projects that emerged from the war, from the League of Nations to the creation of new states like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia ended in failure or worse. And along with war, conquest and famine came the pestilence of the Spanish Flu, which killed many more millions[1].
And yet this catastrophe was brought about under the leadership of politicians remarkable for their ordinariness. Nothing about Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Bethmann Holllweg or the other leaders on both sides marks them out for the company of Attila or Tamerlane or Stalin. How could men like these continue grinding their populations through years of pointless slaughter, and what led people to follow them? In retrospect, it is surely clear that both sides would have been better if peace had been made on the basis of any of the proposals put up in 1917 on the general basis of of “no annexations or indemnities”. The same was true, in reality, at any time from the outbreak of war in 1914 until the final collapse of the Central Powers, and even then the terms of 1917 would have been better for all than those of Versailles.We should think about this every time we are called to war with sweet-sounding slogans.
War is among the greatest of crimes. It may be the lesser evil on rare occasions, but it is always a crime. On Remembrance Day and always, this is what we should remember.
fn1. It’s not clear whether the War exacerbated the pandemic, for example through massive movements of people and widespread privation. But it seems right to consider them together when we remember the War.
John Quiggin 
Indeed war is the greatest of crimes.I have an ancestor who was a liberal politician,member for the isle of wight,who was a soldier and became secretary of state for war in 1913.He survived three years on the western front as a general commanding a canadian cavalry regiment,but his only son was killed not long after he went to the front line as a 17 year old.
The war to end all wars is best summed up by blackadder when told that they were going over the top the next morning.Blackadder drolly opines that general haigh wants to move his drinks cabinet six inches closer to berlin.
A very poignant and impressive summary by Professor Quiggin. The point about the sheer ordinariness of
Bethmann Hollweg, Lloyd George etc is a new one to me, but now that it’s been mentioned, it seems obvious.
“…we are even now dealing with the consequences of the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot agreement.”
True enough. We are also dealing with the consequences of the Habsburg Empire’s dismemberment, and the “hang the Kaiser” mass psychosis, and the Armenian genocide, and the Treaty of Trianon, and the Northcliffe agitprop machine, and the calamitous collapse in France’s birthrate, and the auto-genocide of Britain’s upper-class males in the Western Front’s mud, and the … but why go on? The list appears endless.
Surely only a secular humanist could have come up with the expression the war to end all wars.
It appears our own John Monash was one of the few soldiers to learn anything from boththe US Civil war and the Boer war.
JQ, I could call Lloyd George a number of things but ordinary is surely never one of them.
Why start with WW1? It merely marked the end of the long nineteenth century, which began with the French revolution, and which led Napoleon, 1848, and so on, up until the Great War.
I was, in a fit of post-Timorese neo-Jacobinism, guilty of supporting the current war. The genesis of the current war seems to be folly and iniquity in equal measure. So I warmly endorse Pr Q’s sentiments about the folly of starting wars, and the iniquity of continuing them once their original object has been hopelessly lost.
The Wars greatest woes, as Pr Q brillinantly observes, were brought about more by folly than iniquity. The various Monarchs and their ministers who started and ran the thing were, by and large, pretty decent and reasonable people who acted mainly in self-defence.
The Great War is a perfect example of the “unintended consequences – ironies of history” approach to institutional analysis. It set in train a revolution in social affairs which devoured its parents.
It was waged by imperialist reactionaries to preserve the power and honour of their imperial Crowns from nationalist revolutionaries. But the War ended up destroying the monarchy in five nations (Hapsburg, Hohenzohellern, Romanov, Ottoman and another one whose name escapes me now). The monarchy, and traditional institutions in general, were greatly weakened owing to militarist abuse of the peoples “God, King and Country” sympathies.
Another great turn-around was the disempowerment of Germany, which was heading for European and Global hegemony based on its demographic and technologic dynamism. Now Germany is reduced to the hang-dog accessory to French statism.
Yet another irony is that the Great War was initially opposed by international socialists. Yet this (Bolsheviks, Spartakists) party was the greatest political beneficiary from the chaos and radicalisation that ensued. The international socialists were also critical in hastening the Great War’s end, through civil agitation on the Home Front.
A final irony is that the European Civil War (1914-45), though opposed by international socialists, was, in its second phase, waged most sucessfully by national socialists (Hitler, Stalin). This type was more or less similar in ideological complexion to the chap (Prinzip) who actually started the whole thing.
This progress of the current war empahsises the basic validity of the principles of liberal democracy: international rule of law, ministerial accountability and responsiveness to popular will. One hopes, rather piously, that this is the greatest lesson that people will take home from the current march of folly.
The Spanish flue killed more many people than the war itself, including Les Darcy’s younger brother who was about to become a boxing champion in his own right.
Homer has hit the nail on the head, Lloyd George was an extraordinary genius of evil manipulation. He made a great double act with our Billy Hughes of the Win the War Party.
Lloyd George was also a major instrument in pushing the British Liberal Party in the direction of socialism which gutted the economic performance of the Old Country until the Thatcher revolution.
It all depends what you mean by ‘sides’. (1) The German government (Fischer thesis) started the war because it thought Germany could gain territory. (2)From that point on the government believed, probably rightfully, that it couldn’t agree to withdraw without any gains (they were admittedly prepared to go back to the prewar french borders, and even at a pinch the Belgian borders, provided they were allowed to keep what they’d won at Brest-Litovsk) because that would involve at least the overthrow of the government and at most a socialist revolution. (3) (and this is the only ‘irrational’ bit) the government believed that the difference between a Germany controlled by Junkers and a Germany controlled by socialists was worth the death of many, many million people. Similarly, the Japanese government in WWII believed that the preservation of the Emperor system was worth the death of just about everybody.
And, on the other ‘side’, I can’t believe any french government could have survived a peace that didn’t get Alsace-Lorraine back after 34 years in German hands – the trouble with the ‘no annexations’ bit is that it always needs to be attached to a date, and opinions always differ as to what that date is (in the case of modern Israel, approximately 600 BC).
Jack, while the 2nd International voted to “prevent war by any means” in 1912, socialist parties across Europe, esp England, Germany and France, voted in favour of national military budgets at the begining of the war. It seems even then the left saw a need to move to the right.
Jack, the fifth monarchy was Serbia.
Both sides in 1914 were victims of the rosy scenario syndrome. Both sides got into a bidding war that involved blood and treasure on such a scale that no government could withdraw and survive the wrath of their people.
On JQ’s question about the tolerance of national populations for mass slaught, one of the most fascinating moments in world history in the last 500 years or so happened in late 1917 when the French Army mutinied. If the Germans has found out they would have been in Paris in a week and the entire British Army would have been prisoners of war.
But the Germans never found out. Owing to the negotiating skills of the French government representative, he convinced the Poilus to stay in the trenches on the understanding that they would be expected to fight defensive actions only.
Contrast this intelligent approach to man-management with the ham-fisted Tsarist officers of Russia at the same time who drove their soldiers into the gleeful arms of the Bolsheviks.
Quiggers : a couple of non sequiters thrown in with some dubious causality.Prime example : is war always a crime ? Obviously not if it its to remedy a greater evil than the war itself or if war is unavoidable ; the definitions of a just war .Once you are in a war there is no easy way out. There are too many forces in play for you in general to reach a “rational” solution until some players have been eliminated. Game theorists (e.g. economists) should be able to theorise/describe this process .
Here’s Aldous Huxley, writing in 1946, about the consequences of WWI:
“For the last thirty years there have been no conservatives; there have been only nationalistic radicals of the right and nationalistic radicals of the left. The last conservative statesman was the fifth Marquess of Lansdowne; and when he wrote a letter to The Times suggesting that the First World War should be concluded with a compromise, as most of the wars of the eighteenth century had been, the editor of that once conservative journal refused to print it. The nationalistic radicals had their way, with the consequences that we all know – Bolshevism, Fascism, inflation, depression, Hitler, the Second World War, the ruin of Europe …”
For what my views might be worth, I’ve got a lot of respect for social democrats like Prof Quiggin, whether or not I agree with specific remarks by them. For draft-dodging laptop-bombardiering spin-doctoring pseudo-Tory carpetbaggers I have no respect whatsoever.
I agree with most of the above but there is a sense in which it really was “the war to end all wars”.
There are squabbles and skirmishes but there will never be another stoush like WW1-2.
Here is the text of a talk that the Australian political economist (and decorated war hero) LF Giblin, gave to students at the University of Melbourne in April 1934.
Anzac Day
Anzac Day was instituted to commemorate the entry of Australia into the war, which we may still, I suppose – I don’t know for how much longer – describe as the Great War. The emphasis quickly passed from the exploits of the landing to the memory of 60,000 Australians who lost their lives in that war.
The issues that led to that war have now dwindled, and become submerged in the greater issues that sprang out of it. As the years have passed the purpose of this day has broadened and – I hope most of us can feel – heightened, till it takes in, not only our own Australian dead, but the millions of all countries, British and German, French and Russian, who died in that war. From every country they came out to fight, seeking no private or personal advantage – in the simple faith that they were fighting in a righteous cause in defence of their country. One tomb might hold them all, with one sentence for epitaph – the old Athenian phrase – ‘They gave their lives that their fellows might have a better and fuller life.’
That is, I think, broadly true. I am conscious that I am speaking today mostly to a younger generation for whom our war is not even a memory. You quite naturally grow suspicious of the sentimentalities of your elders. You know something of human nature, you have some acquaintance with returned men, and you are reasonably sceptical about armies of single-minded heroes setting out on the quest of a Holy Grail. I am not suggesting to you any such romantic picture. It is true that there were a large number of Australians – and doubtless of all countries – who went to the war and played their part in it from a single sense of duty – against all personal inclination and all personal advantage. For the majority, motives were more mixed. Some few no doubt found it an escape from domestic embarrassments or financial difficulties. For many more the lure of adventure or the desire for change and novelty entered largely into motives. Others again, consciously or unconsciously, found it impossible to stand aloof from a great experience which it seemed everyone else was sharing. Let us concede all that. However mixed some individual motives may have been, the fact remains that it was the war that swept these 60,000 Australians away from home and family and their chosen life, and laid them finally to rest in the graves of Gallipoli, and France and Palestine, and brought back almost double that number permanently disabled to a greater or lesser degree.
It is an appalling wastage. Our 60,000 dead were nearly one in five of our young men between 20 and 30, who were of a decent standard of health and strength. The permanently disabled make another two out of every five. The damage to our manpower for any useful purpose is very grave, even on a basis of numbers. And the loss is greater than the numbers. Nearly all the best of our young men who went to the war and it was inevitably the best who took the greatest chance of death. Any old soldier, recalling one by one the losses that touched him most dearly as they happened in the field, can hardly help feeling that it was always the best men who stopped the bullet or the shell.
This is of course an exaggeration. But it is certainly true that death was grimly selective in all armies.
The war, then, in life alone, brought us very heavy loss. Our first duty to the dead is to see that it does not happen again. Can we learn our lesson?
You students have lately made public record of your resolve never to fight for king and country. It might be read as an Anzac Day gesture, a little perversely expressed. Probably you know in your hearts that if the events of 1914 came again, very few of you would be strong enough to hold to that determination. You must dig deeper. No pious resolutions will save a country when the stage is set for war. The same sweep of events would carry you through a more terrible period of slaughter till again you made peace – with an even greater vengeance.
In this matter we can win salvation only by works. We have to learn as a nation to live from day to day with other nations, on the same elementary Christian principles that we try to practice as individuals with one another. The ego, the distempered devil of self, partly suppressed in our personal relations, is still given full scope – cheered on, in fact, by press and pulpit – in our dealings as nations, one with another.
‘That captain of the scorned
The coveter of life in soul or shell,
The fratricide, the thief, the infidel,
The hoofed and horned.’
There is the enemy. We can pay our debt to the dead only by taming him.
The current events in Iraq are a reminder why war should be a last resort. The application of violence to a complex problem usually has unpredictable results, though it could be argued that in this instance it wasn’t that unpredictable.
Carl von Clausewtiz had some good advice in this regard. Though his work is often misrepresented, most famously by the saying that war is the continuation of politics by other means, which tends to portray war as just another technique for achieving political goals. But Clausewitz was making just the opposite point. He wanted to avoid unnecessary conflict and wars dragging on for no other reason than that they had started. He stated that there should be clear objectives and that conflict should cease either when those objectives had been achieved or when it becomes clear that they can’t.
It’s advice that the US could apply to the situation in Iraq. The self-proclaimed primary goal was an Iraq free of WMD – it is. It isn’t too hard to work out what comes next is it?
Look, bugger it, stop it with all this historical justification crap, you are no better than the the bloody pope and all his little dick, history rewriting predecessors, blokes will be blokes and that means there’s always a fight out the back alley over who owns the future, hey, news flash, its women OK?…we do the hard work and hold up the planet, there is no turtle…grandma says go into space and leave the earth to us mothers….you have made enough mess, the arctic is melting, go away…
Michael, the trouble in Iraq usn’t the “self-proclaimed goal” of WMD (which was based on lies). Its all the “non-proclaimed goals” that represent the truth. In other words, following the leads of Zbigniuew Brezinski and the PNAC, control of the stupendously important area of the middle east and former Russian republics, with their wealth of oil, natural gas and other raw materials. Its control of the global economy at the behest of the elites and establishment within the U.S. As I write, U.S. forces are slaughtering Iraqi’s with impunity in Falluja. All part of the same, non-proclaimed plan. Forget the verbiage about the “horrors of war”, because those in the Bush/Cheney junta are using war to justify what international attorney Richard Falk calls the “Global Domination Project”. Heck, Richard Perle informs us that we are in a “Total war, with “No Stages”, and that if we continue to wage this “Total war”, then “Our children will sing great songs about us in the future”. Thus war becomes sanctified. Although the lawyers at the Nuremburg trials called aggression the “Supreme international crime”, to those in the DC axis of evil war, via aggression, is a useful tool (with the phoney “war on terror” as a convenient pretext) to achieve the kind of global hegemony previous administrations in the U.S. could only dream of.
It was WWI (I think) that gave Bertrand Russell his lifelong suspicion of the idea that people act in their own self-interest. From what he’d seen he reckoned that on the important things in life, humans had a pretty bad record of acting in their own self-interest.
JQ,
the more I reflected on your comments of ordinary politicians the moe I felt you were dead set wrong.
Indeed I think it was a golden age of politicians.
The were plenty of times when a war could have erupted during these times but they never did until the German government lost some important people.
N-one really expected war to develop. If the politicians were ordinary I don’t think war would have eventuated. The problem was they were so good that they all took it so far until they couldn’t go back depite their self confidence.
Mike Pepperday thinks there will never be another “stoush” like the two World Wars of the twentieth century. I’m not so sure. I tend to see those conflicts as outcomes of Great Power politics coupled with executive government which had escaped from the control and scrutiny of legislatures/representative bodies. On that analysis, we are heading in the same direction, with the UN playing a smaller and smaller role, the Great Powers again calculating their advantages in a diplomatic/military sense, and executive government in the US, Russia, the UK and even Australia (not to mention China) becoming increasingly unaccountable. I wish I could share Mike’s sanguine outlook, but…