How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war. By Pankaj Mishra
Today on the Western
Front,” the German sociologist Max Weber wrote in September 1917, there “stands
a dross of African and Asiatic savages and all the world’s rabble of thieves
and lumpens.” Weber was referring to the millions of Indian, African, Arab,
Chinese and Vietnamese soldiers and labourers, who were then fighting with
British and French forces in Europe, as well as in several ancillary theatres
of the first
world war. Faced with manpower
shortages, British imperialists had recruited up to 1.4 million Indian
soldiers. France enlisted nearly 500,000 troops from its colonies in Africa and
Indochina. Nearly 400,000 African Americans were also inducted into US forces.
The first world war’s truly unknown soldiers are these non-white combatants.
Ho Chi Minh, who spent
much of the war in Europe, denounced what he saw as the press-ganging of
subordinate peoples. Before the start of the Great War, Ho wrote, they were
seen as “nothing but dirty Negroes … good for no more than pulling rickshaws”.
But when Europe’s slaughter machines needed “human fodder”, they were called
into service. Other anti-imperialists, such as Mohandas Gandhi and WEB
Du Bois, vigorously supported the war aims of their white overlords, hoping
to secure dignity for their compatriots in the aftermath. But they did not
realise what Weber’s remarks revealed: that Europeans had quickly come to fear
and hate physical proximity to their non-white subjects – their “new-caught
sullen peoples”, as Kipling called colonised Asians and Africans in his 1899
poem The White
Man’s Burden.
These colonial
subjects remain marginal in popular histories of the war. They also go largely
uncommemorated by the hallowed rituals of Remembrance Day. The
ceremonial walk to the Cenotaph at Whitehall by all major British dignitaries,
the two minutes of silence broken by the Last Post, the laying of poppy wreaths
and the singing of the national anthem – all of these uphold the first world
war as Europe’s stupendous act of self-harm. For the past century, the war has
been remembered as a great rupture in modern western civilisation, an
inexplicable catastrophe that highly civilised European powers sleepwalked into
after the “long peace” of the 19th century – a catastrophe whose unresolved
issues provoked yet another calamitous conflict between liberal democracy and
authoritarianism, in which the former finally triumphed, returning Europe to
its proper equilibrium.
With more than eight
million dead and more than 21 million wounded, the war was the bloodiest in
European history until that second conflagration on the continent ended in
1945. War memorials in Europe’s remotest villages, as well as the cemeteries of
Verdun, the Marne, Passchendaele, and the Somme enshrine a heartbreakingly
extensive experience of bereavement. In many books and films, the prewar years
appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with the summer of
1913 featuring as the last golden summer.
But today, as racism
and xenophobia return
to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the
background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose
consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at
all, on Remembrance Day. At the time of the
first world war, all western powers upheld a racial hierarchy built around a
shared project of territorial expansion. In 1917, the US president, Woodrow
Wilson, baldly stated his intention, “to keep the white race strong against the
yellow” and to preserve “white civilisation and its domination of the planet”.
Eugenicist ideas of racial selection were everywhere in the mainstream, and the
anxiety expressed in papers like the Daily Mail, which worried about white
women coming into contact with “natives who are worse than brutes when their
passions are aroused”, was widely shared across the west. Anti-miscegenation
laws existed in most US states.
In the years leading up to 1914, prohibitions
on sexual relations between European women and black men (though not between
European men and African women) were enforced across European colonies in
Africa. The presence of the “dirty Negroes” in Europe after 1914 seemed to be
violating a firm taboo… read more:
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