Analysis by Keith Rankin.
World War One is really the first conflagration of a Great World War which lasted between 1914 and 1945. That great war was a ‘”game” of two halves’ with an extended and less violent mid-war phase; total war, with an interregnum which exacerbated rather than resolved the trigger issues of early twentieth century ideologies.
These mid-war events – in particular (but not only) the rise of the Stalin and Hitler regimes in Russia and Germany – could not have happened as they did without their being embedded in the Great World War. These regimes epitomised socialist and nationalist social pseudoscientific belief systems; two of the great pseudoscientific Utopias, Marxist Historicism and Social Darwinism. To them we may add the capitalist social pseudoscience (economic liberalism; liberal mercantilism; ‘Social Newtonism’ to coin a new label) which gave the Euro-dominant world the calamitous Great Depression of the early 1930s. These three potentially catastrophic ‘scientific’ Utopias dominated the intellectual ether, so to speak, before 1914. They manifested in their various deeply problematic and distorted ways within the context of the 1914-1945 world war experience. Fascism and economic liberalism had their roots in biology and physics. The socialist pseudoscience – aka Marxism – had its roots in historical materialism, a conflation of (Ricardian) classical economics and Hegelian historicism, an attempt to create a social science of history.
In this regard, we may see the denouement (WW2) of the Great World War as a battle between three problematic personalities: Stalin, Churchill, and Hitler. Each representing their own false depiction of the world as ‘scientific’ Utopia: Marxian Socialism (aka ‘Communism’, in its pejorative sense), Economic Liberalism, and National Ethno-Supremacism. (And we note that each of these pseudoscientific belief-systems carried seeds of each other. For example, Winston Churchill’s liberal mercantilist worldview was imperial, nationalist, and deeply racist. Adolf Hitler [with no interest in appeasing aristocratic or bourgeois interests] pitched his ‘Aryan’ nationalist poison to the German working precariat. And Josef Stalin terrorised and starved his own people, especially but not only in the 1930s while the world was distracted, as the mismatch between reality and Marxian ‘science’ became increasingly evident.)
(We note that, for the post-great-war generation, these issues of the three Utopias were practically resolved in ‘The West’, through for example decolonisation, Keynesian economics, and non-Marxian socialism. Though the Stalinist Utopia took on an even more demonic second phase in Mao Zedong’s China. The Social Darwinist Utopia took on a new life in South Africa and Israel; and for a while continued to inform the Dixie states of the US south. Racism never really left the United States. And Economic Liberalism – initially as neoliberalism, now as Liberal Mercantilism – returned to the world with a vengeance in the 1980s. Today, just as Stalin could not reconcile Marxism with reality; our western liberal elites cannot reconcile the diktats of the prevailing [and increasingly mercantilist] capitalist ideology with reality.)
Were there Goodies and Baddies in 1914?
However we choose to see this 1914 to 1945 period of widespread humanicide, it’s difficult to see a clear group of ‘Goodies’ and a clear group of ‘Baddies’ in June 1914. Thus, we can at least start our analysis of this war without succumbing to the ‘Goodies’ versus ‘Baddies’ (Good versus Evil) narrative. I would argue that the emergence of this as the predominant narrative of modern warfare, and its conflation with Winner versus Loser (‘we won, you lost, eat that!’) narrative, were themselves the single biggest cause of the world’s greatest conflagration to date. (For interest, see this New Zealand Journal of History review of Paul Goldsmith’s book We Won, You Lost. Eat That!; a book which derives its title from the late Michael Cullen, former Minister of Finance of New Zealand. Indeed it is Goldsmith who is easily the most qualified current politician in New Zealand to be Minister of Finance.)
Nevertheless, there is a compelling argument that Germany was ‘The Bad Guy’ in WW1 because it was the ‘principal aggressor’, evidenced by the fact that most of the fighting took place on other countries’ territories. True, but the story of aggressor versus aggressee – invader versus invaded – is more nuanced than that. Two comments here: the most significant battle in 1914 – in August 1914 – was the Battle of Tannenberg, fought in Germany (East Prussia); and much of the important action of the war was fought in Germany’s proxy territory, the lands of Austria-Hungary. Though almost none of these battle-sites are in modern Austria, Hungary, or Germany. On the western front, the earliest battles were fought in Alsace-Lorraine, territory then held by Germany.
In reality, the three-way war that ended inconclusively and abruptly in November 1918 (albeit with a clear but not huge ‘advantage’ to the Western Powers) was ‘settled’ as if there had been a decisive military victory to The West. (For the first half of 1918, Germany had won the war in the East and was winning the war in the West.) Victors’ justice soon followed, although the Americans prevented it from descending to show trials of war criminals only the losing side. (We note that a similar process had taken place on the Eastern Front, with Germany able to impose victors’ justice over Russia; indeed the German state had done all that it could to facilitate the second [Bolshevik] Russian Revolution of 1917. Leon Trotsky signed the humiliating Brest-Litovsk Treaty in March 1918, which among other things granted most of Ukraine to Germany. Further, the Western Powers then [ie early in 1918] involved themselves in the subsequent Russian Civil War; see The Allied Intervention.)
In WW1, the victors – the western powers – became ‘The Good’; the ‘victors’ usurped the narrative (as victors do), and would consequently place themselves in the predominant position to determine how the subsequent ‘peace’ would play out.
In WW2, the sequence was reversed. Rather than the victors becoming The Good, ‘The Good’ became the victors (but not the only victors). Indeed from 1944 The Good puzzled over why it took so long for their adversaries to see ‘the writing on the wall’. The answer was largely obvious, the English-speaking ‘Good’ (aka The West) waged relentless terror campaigns against ‘The Bad’; most of The Bad had presumed they were The Good (and fought hard on that basis). The Good had (inadvertently?) reinforced the belief that The West was The Bad, through their malicious and relentless bombing of civilians. Who would surrender to such aerial firebombers; what other kinds of evil could they cook up? In reality The War – as are most wars – was waged between The Bad and The Bad; or – as in the Great World War, it became The Bad versus The Bad versus the Bad versus the Bad (now including Japan). In the end it was victor’s justice that prevailed, posing as the Judgement of The Bad by The Good. The West and Soviet Russia got away with their many pre-war crimes and war crimes, scot-free.
World War One was not a decisive victory on either front
In the land war, while in a stalemate on the western front in 1916 and 1917, Germany had the military upper hand in the first half of 1918. In the end though, the most vital factor was the British naval blockade, and the associated economic war. Germany was being starved. Yet the worst of the food shortages in Germany were in the winter of 1916/17. By early 1918, Germany was able to redeploy battle-hardened troops from the Eastern to the Western Front. And Germany now had access to food supplies from Ukraine.
On the adverse side for Germany, however, was the arrival of American troops into France. These were ‘green’ troops who could not compete with Germans in direct military combat. But they did bring with them, unintentionally, the lethal weapon which may have won the war for the West: influenza.
As I see it, Germany lost its advantage in World War One for three reasons: the economic blockade, the lack of strategic vision of what ‘success’ on the Western Front actually meant, and the influenza brought by the American troops. (The 1918 influenza pandemic was most likely due to a hybrid novel H1N1 virus, forged in France as a result of a combination of the lethal influenza strain traced back to military barracks in Kansas in 1917 and a severe seasonal strain of ‘Asian flu’ already present in France.)
With the lack of strategic direction and military setbacks from July 1918, the German leadership – a dynamic flux, with an overall focus on civilianisation – sought to freeze (or even make concessions in the form of withdrawals from occupied territories) the western frontline so that it could end the war with its eastern gains intact. To this end, a new liberal Chancellor – Prinz Maximillian von Baden (interestingly, in light of later Nazi developments, a known homosexual) – was appointed early in October 1918. Also interesting, Prinz Baden and half a million other German civilians, became “seriously ill” with influenza that spring.
Returning soldiers from the western front were the main transmission vectors of the 1918 influenza pandemic, the ‘Black Flu’, the misleadingly named ‘Spanish Flu’. It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that the influenza, brought in initially by the American troops, played a vital role in Germany’s military setbacks in the late-summer and spring of 1918.
There seems to be very little written about the contribution of either the influenza or the naval blockade to Germany’s truce (a truce which began through Germany’s leaders reaching out to US President Woodrow Wilson; but which morphed into a substantial political defeat) which, to the West, ended the war, but which to many Germans looked very much like a ‘stab in the back’. Hence, from the German point of view, scapegoats had to be found, and the events which led to an eventual continuation of the Great World War were set in train. This was not helped by poorly considered attempts (especially at Versailles in 1919) by France and Britain to make Germany – now firmly ensconced in the western mind as a comprehensive Loser – pay for the war. And, perhaps most significantly, Germany being stripped by the Western powers of the full suite of its military gain in the East. Ukraine and other German-acquired territories were returned to the Russian Empire; now in the form of the ‘Communist’ Soviet Union, although in 1919 very much in a state of a civil war in which the West had intervened.
These events clearly represent the foundations of the Nazi doctrine of Lebensraum; more than anything, Germany wanted Ukraine back. Germany’s main weakness in World War One had been its resource base, especially its inability to feed itself. Germany, from the 1870s onwards, had become a food importer following its rapid industrialisation and imperial outreach (which included Samoa and New Guinea). And Germany also needed time to repopulate, to breed a new generation who could fill and administer what it saw as its ‘rightful’ empire in the west, and in the world.
We can clearly see Germany’s growing vision to replace its former far-flung empire by acquiring – as a proxy empire – France’s overseas territories. We saw this play out in 1940, with the creation of ‘Vichy France’ a nominally independent client state of Nazi Germany, and to whom the whole of the French Empire was designated. (In this light, had Germany’s military plans worked out in the early 1940s, France’s interests in the Northern Levant – Syria and Lebanon today – represented a possible solution for the alleged ‘Jewish problem’ of Eastern Europe. The West had a similar ‘Jewish problem’, which was resolved initially in 1924 by shutting down Jewish immigration to the United Kingdom and United States; that shutdown was still in place post-1945, meaning that The West used the Southern Levant as a repository for its erstwhile Jewish immigrants.)
We might note that, today, Germany is very well aware that it has the same resource vulnerability that it had from 1914 to 1940; and must look East for a solution. In addition, many people in Germany are well aware of a new form of demographic ‘crisis’ that Germany is facing, and that immigration from Eastern Europe (and a further degree of proxy absorption of Eastern Europe) represents its only plausible hope for an ‘ethnic European’ future.
What Happens if The Bad wins a World War (or any war for that matter)?
In 1918 the politically victorious West was able to create a Goody-Baddy narrative, facilitating a victors’ justice by presenting it as Good judging and punishing Bad. One consequence, reinforced by the western campaign of terror over Germany, half of which took place from November 1944 to April 1945. (Documents which have since come to light suggest that this bombing campaign – with the loss of 800,000 German civilian lives through horrible fiery deaths – was a failed genocide. The Morgenthau Plan, for example, advocated what amounted to bombing Germany ‘into the stone age’ – an expression which, applied to Vietnam, resurfaced in the 1960s – reducing Germany’s population from 80 million in 1939 to 30 million. 80 million people standing side-by-side along the equator-line would complete a circle of the world; now imagine randomly executing five-of-every eight people in that circle. Nuclear weapons were one means of making that genocide of civilians and refugees ‘more efficient’, as was actually done in Japan. Britain’s genocide plans included Operation Vegetarian, a dastardly scheme of biological warfare.)
In the end The Good was able to conceal most of its many very Bad contemplations, in large part because it was becoming more concerned to turn its killing attentions onto its erstwhile ally, Stalin’s Russia. Interestingly, as A C Grayling noted in Among the Dead Cities, the British leader of its terror-bombing force equated his efforts (killing 800,000 civilians in Germany) with the numbers of civilians estimated to have died of starvation or malnutrition in World War One as a result of the naval blockade.
Of course, whoever ‘wins’ a world war will use the victors’ prerogative to call themselves The Good. But, if, during a world war, ‘we’ have fully convinced ourselves that we are The Good, and we are suffering unsustainable losses, at what point do we (aka The Good) surrender to The Bad? Do we fight on, futilely, to the last man and woman, as it seemed the Germans and the Japanese were doing in 1945? Do we call a truce, as ‘we’ did eventually in Korea in 1953, and in Vietnam in 1972? Looking back, we are truly grateful that we did end those two Asian wars, one with a result that would be called a ‘draw’, the other becoming a clear defeat in 1975.
In the Good versus Evil narrative, Good never capitulates to Evil; not even if the alternative is the nuclear destruction of all life on Earth.
Truth and Reconciliation versus Accountability and Retribution
As we have seen at the end of World War One, an attempt by Germany at reconciliation to end the conflagration – including a willingness to have war crimes assessed and adjudicated in an international court – turned into a humiliation of Germany; that humiliation, in turn, ensured that the conflagration would recommence at a time of Germany’s choosing.
Fortunately, we have the South African experience of the end of Apartheid as a template for another way: Truth and Reconciliation. The former can always win out over the latter. Processes of humiliation and punishment are accompanied by large-scale processes of evasion and concealment; the incentives are to conceal rather than reveal the evidence of what really happened. It is better to know and not punish, than to punish a few scapegoats and to conceal the rest.
The best outcome is Remembrance, not Punishment and Vengeance. Sunlight is the strongest disinfectant. And to remember all; not to over-remember some things while severely under-remembering most things. For most younger people in the world today, World War One is understood as gritty soldiering in the trenches of the Somme, or under the cliffs at Gallipoli. And World War Two is reduced to Adolf Hitler’s genocidal mania, and Winston Churchill’s ‘heroic’ campaigns to defeat Goering, Rommel and Hitler (thereby, though too late, to save the Jews). Even the Pacific War is largely forgotten, except for reminders every five-years or so of Pearl Harbour and Hiroshima; the rest is unfathomable nuance.
Today
The western powers have tried hard to present themselves as ‘The Good’ in a biblical struggle through their Ukraine client regime, against Vlad ‘The Bad’. Yet the paucity of western Goodness has been so deeply exposed by the western alliance’s complicity in the genocide by Israelis of their co-semitic Palestinians, with whom they share the land known from 1918 to 1948 by some as ‘Mandatory Palestine’ and by others as ‘Eretz Israel’. Whatever we think of the virtue of the various western alliances (starting with the French-British Entente of 1904), clearly they are not ‘The Good’. Like all the other dirty wars in the twentieth and twenty-first century, the contests are between The Grubby and The Grubby, each looking for an opportunity to impose victor’s justice over the other.
Israel is trying to create a nationalist ethno-Utopia in accordance with the principles of Lebensraum. Israel has been doing so since the newly formed United Nations inflicted WW2 victor’s justice upon an indigenous third party in 1948.
Truth and Reconciliation is the answer; researching what happened and how and why, noting the root of the word ‘publication’ is ‘public’. Not one-sided Accountability and Retribution.
Conflicts will always exist. If we can get past the Good versus Bad narratives, we can make deals which are never perfect for either party; but better for all three parties (noting that world wars have major impacts on third parties, such as the indigenous people of the Levant; and such as the birds, bees, people and trees, all of whom will lose big-time in the case of a self-inflicted extinction event).
Two Interesting Historical Deals
In the Napoleonic Wars – World War Zero – we had the British on one side defending the ancien regime European orders of feudalism and merchant capitalism; versus the French side which (under Napoleon Bonaparte) both advocated for and subsequently destroyed the new revolutionary liberalism.
As in World War One, the British Navy played a major role. Important territories for France were the Indian Ocean islands of Isle de France (now Mauritius) and La Réunion. In 1810, Réunion Island was captured by the British. In 1814 a deal was done. Réunion was swapped for the more economically valuable Isle de France. Great Britain had the military advantage of having captured the less populated part of this ‘France in the Indian Ocean’. Hence, Britain in 1814, leveraging off its relative military success, instigated a swap deal; Britain gained Mauritius (reverting to its former Dutch name), and Réunion was restored to France. (As usual in those times, indigenous people didn’t get a look in!) For France, the only alternative was to continue the fight; in that event, France would eventually have lost both islands. Pragmatism prevailed; the 1814 swap took place.
A second event – also an allegory for our present times – involved a genocide; an event in the Banda Islands (in present Indonesia) described by Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh, in his 2021 book The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. This particularly problematic genocide was perpetrated by the Dutch East India Company (Dutch abbreviation ‘VOC’; Abel Tasman’s employer) in the 1620s. (Mauritius was then also part of the VOC territory; indeed that’s who ruled Mauritius when the dodo became extinct, in 1662.) At that time, England and the Netherlands were the great mercantile rivals in the North Sea, Atlantic Ocean and Indian Ocean spheres. England had possessed one of the more remote Banda Islands, Rhun. To settle the second Anglo-Dutch War in 1667, the Dutch formalised a land-swap deal which at the time seemed very advantageous to them (Manhattan or Pulau Rhun? In 1667, Nutmeg Made the Choice a No-Brainer, New York Times, 2024). England got the last laugh, however. It had acquired Manhattan Island; and, as they say, the rest was history – world history – the island in which fortunes were made from real estate deals.
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
