The first world war: the real lessons of this savage imperial bloodbath

By Dilip - Tuesday, October 16, 2012

David Cameron wants to turn the first world war into a focus of national pride. That should be resisted every step of the way
In the midst of deepening austerity, David Cameron is desperate to play the national card. Any one will do. He's worked the Queen's jubilee and the Olympics for all they're worth. Now the prime minister wants a "truly national commemoration" of the first world war in the runup to 2014 that will "capture our national spirit … like the diamond jubilee". So £50m has been found to fund a four-year programme of events, visits to the trenches from every school and an ambitious redevelopment of the Imperial War Museum. Ministers have promised there will be no "jingoism", but Cameron says he wants to remember those who "gave their lives for our freedom" and ensure that "the lessons learned live with us for ever."

Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier from the trenches, who died at the age of 111 in 2009. He described the first world war as 'nothing better than legalised mass murder'.

Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

In case there were any doubt about what those lessons might be, the Times has declared that despite the war's unhappy reputation, Britain's cause was "essentially just", a necessary response to aggression by a "xenophobic and anti-democratic" expansionist power (Germany) and that those who fought and died did so to uphold the "principle of the defence of small nations".

It surely must be right to commemorate what was by any reckoning a human catastrophe: 16 million died, including almost a million Britons. It touched every family in the country (and many other countries besides), my own included. Both my grandmothers lost brothers in the four-year bloodletting: one in Passchendaele, the other in Gaza. Seventy years after the event, one of them would still cry at the memory of the postman bringing the death notice in a brown War Office envelope to her home in Edinburgh. My grandfather was a field surgeon on the western front, who would break down as he showed us pictures he had taken of lost friends amid the devastation of Ypres and Loos, and remembered covering up for soldiers who had shot themselves in the legs, to save them from the firing squad. But it does no service to the memory of the victims to prettify the horrific reality. The war was a vast depraved undertaking of unprecedented savagery, in which the ruling classes of Europe dispatched their people to a senseless slaughter in the struggle for imperial supremacy. As Lenin summed it up to the Romanian poet Valeriu Marcu in early 1917: "One slaveowner, Germany, is fighting another slaveowner, England, for a fairer distribution of the slaves".

This wasn't a war of self-defence, let alone liberation from tyranny. As the late Eric Hobsbawm sets out in his Age of Empire, it was the cataclysmic product of an escalating struggle for colonial possessions, markets, resources and industrial power between the dominant European empires, Britain and France, and the rising imperial power of Germany seeking its "place in the sun". In that clash of empires, Europe devoured its children – and many of its captive peoples with them... Read more:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/16/first-world-war-imperial-bloodbath

Also see:

The Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955

http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2012/04/russell-einstein-manifesto-of-1955.html

Rare First World War documents go online + Unseen photographs

http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2011/11/rare-first-world-war-documents-go.html

Paul Fussell, ex-soldier, literary Scholar & critic

http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2012/05/paul-fussell-literary-scholar-and.html

John Mack: The Enemy System

http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2012/09/john-mack-enemy-system.html

John Horgan on erasing war from the human condition

http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2012/01/john-horgan-on-erasing-war-from-human.html