'Every gun that is made,
every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft
from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not
clothed.'
Yup, the famous pre-amble to Eisenhower's denunciation of the "Military-Industrial-Complex" which he thought he'd just "throw out there" for general rumination prior to leaving office much to the discomfort of the resident gung-ho hawks. Probably the most oft-reported yet under acted upon speech/warning ever delivered as the trillions spent annually daily testify. "God bless our contractors" - as one Congressman put it recently tying up a multi-billion dollar deal for a fleet of F-16's with the nepotistic un-elected Saudi gerontocracy who usually just park them unused and abandoned in some hole in the desert. As long as jobs aren't being out-sourced and the gravy train of cheap oil keeps running who cares? Certainly not the thousand plus 'royal' off-spring of Ibn Saud who have an unaccountable cheque cut for them each month from the proceeds of one tenth global oil supply to flitter away on hawking, harems, yachts, Afghan madrassa or ISIL training camps & armaments ... but I digress, there's little reason to suspect WWI was any less a racket then the caper we have before us today.
Empire-building in itself creates a concomitant rise in the production of ideological propaganda that valorises the fighting man & the adventurer. The Irish militaristic youth band Na Fianna were probably modelled on Robert Baden-Powell's Boy Scout brigade; itself a by-product of this process. The British novelistic fiction of 1890-1916 is choc-a-bloc with imperial adventure stories valorising the fighting man. Ever since 'Brave Gordon' fell at Khartoum a plethora of pro-war, pro-conquest, pro-"civilizing" narratives emerged. Some would date it to the "New Imperialism" of Disraeli spawned in part by the vanities of the "Empress of India" which carved up Africa in the 1870's birthing those inter-imperial rivalries which ended up in the Anglo-French Entente of 1904 effectively isolating Germany from the main power alliances.
From this point (1904), the fiction focuses on German invasion threats producing a dozen titles annually. This is the time Baden Powell's Boy Scouts (1905) are set up, and four years later in Ireland, closely modelled, come Na Fianna, conceived and organised by Constance Markievicz. P.G. Wodehouse mocked the lot in "How Clarence saved England: A Tale of the Great Invasion" (1909) where our hero is an inquisitive Boy Scout of the Famous Five variety. So ubiquitous were invasion scares in this paranoiac "alter-world" that a newsvendor's placard read "SURREY DOING BADLY. 147 FOR 8." followed underneath in smaller case by "German army lands in England".
Ubiquitous militarism is a cross-diffusion of imperial over-reach and if children look dumb playing soldiers think of their adult counter-parts and the mythology of "it will all be over by Christmas". Home Rule suspended "for the duration of the war" indeed. Ivan Bloch's massive six-volume study "Is War Now Impossible?" (publ.1899) predicted, for three reasons, a major European war would be unprecedented in scale and destructiveness. First, military technology had transformed the nature of warfare; 'the day of the bayonet was over', rapidity & accuracy of machine-gun fire would mean "the next war ... would be a great war of entrenchments". Second, increased size of European armies meant any war would involve tens of millions of men with fighting spread "over an enormous front". Third, and consequently, economic factors would be decisive. War would mean; "the entire dislocation of all industry". How, in addition, can people square the notion "it will be all over in six weeks" with British Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey's equally prophetic remarks - "The lights are going out all over Europe, they will not be lit again in our lifetimes".
Every European military adviser and head of state was aware of these arguments - how could they not be? It was the most substantial and informed tome written on the changing face of warfare in a generation.
Yet, the imperial juggernaut continued ...
Cannon Fodder and the End of Reason as such.
The most disgraceful conflict ever to blemish the annals of humankind.
As a small sample of the type of slaughter imperial armies were already well accustomed to and the paradoxical rules of "fair play" which they contrariwise imposed on opponents, particularly embedded IRA flying columns during the Anglo-Irish War, consider the following -
"War between white men should be carried out in a sportsmanlike manner, and not like fights between savage tribes" - C.H. Foulkes, British Army Officer critiquing Irish guerrilla warfare tactics.
This remember, is the same Foulkes who advised British army use of chemical warfare to suppress the "uprisings" (re: independence struggles) in Afghanistan (1919) and Waziristan (1920). Did he, I wonder, expect the Irish to stand like lemmings in open ground and be strafed indiscriminately by machine-gun fire like the slaughter of the Matebele by Rhode's brigands, the massacre of Indians at Amritsar (1919) or the annihilation of the Sudanese at Omdurman (1884)? This latter encounter, the Battle of Omdurman, which perhaps typifies the type of asymmetrical warfare the British army were accustomed to prior to the insanity of the trenches was the first successful outing of the newly perfected Maxim gun which could fire 500 rounds a minute. After this "battle", 10,800 Sudanese lay dead and 16,000 were wounded with Kitchener recording 48 British casualties. Half a million bullets had been fired in less than three hours.
Now that was "sportsmanlike".
In an embarrassing and sobering volte-face for Connolly and many others in the Internationalist movement socialists disowned their "workers of the world unite" slogans and enlisted in their droves into the ranks of imperialist armies. To compound the misery, inspirational French socialist Jean Jaurés was assassinated at the outbreak of the Great War. Friedrich Engels was prophetic in every respect except this last crucial detail, writing in 1887 -
"... a world war of never before seen extension and intensity, if the system of mutual outbidding and in armament, carried to the extreme, finally bears its natural fruits. ... Eight to ten million soldiers will slaughter each other and strip Europe bare as no swarm of locusts has ever done before. The devastations of the Thirty Years War condensed into three or four years and spread over all the continent: famine, epidemics, general barbarization of armies and masses, provoked by sheer desperation; utter chaos in our trade. industry and commerce, ending in general bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their traditional wisdom in such a way that the crowns roll in the gutter by the dozens and there will be nobody to pick them up ............. absolute impossibility to foresee how all this will end and who will be victors in that struggle; only one result absolutely certain; general exhaustion and the creation of circumstances for the final victory of the working class".."
The adult world always sanctions this nonsense. The culture of militarism at this time is a by-product of imperialism which holds the globe by dint of force of arms. Looking at the Wiki-leaks videos of 'virtual reality' drone strikes which de-humanises safely distant targets or off-duty soldiers in Iraq tied to their shoot-em-up Playstations before going out 'on patrol' reminds me that some things never change.
I'll confess war comics bored me to tears as a child and I despise US gun culture with its lingering frontier mentality, top-down Hollywood 'product placement' action-flik promotionals, Republican apologetics over high-school shootings (which seems to think more guns is the solution!) and basically the whole panoply of lies & evasions which ensures arms manufacturers continue to profit peddling death and human misery via clever marketing focusing on 'home defence'. A world of trigger-happy morons and every parent who buys their child toy guns, war comics, "action" consuls or gratuitous blood-letting gun fliks is implicated, whether they like it or not.
Perhaps it is our recognition of just how dreadful wars are, that increases our respect for those who fight in them, especially when we know that in many cases they felt they had no option but to do otherwise. History is littered with the prosecution of many just wars simply because belligerent tyrants crop up with such remarkable frequency - were they not stopped in their tracks by the combined efforts of many brave men it is arguable we could be even having this conversation right now. But cranking up the war ante by appealing to a shallow sense of patriotism followed by the post-hoc glorification of the martyred dead as a stratagem to recruit more cannon fodder is deplorable.
The stunning waste of life in the trenches of the Great War has always made me nauseous and nothing I've read has ever swerved me from the conviction that this was essentially an imperial conflagration where European powers fought like ravenous dogs over control over the world's resources.
Gavrilo Princip set the fuse but the powder trail stretched back to the New Imperialism which carved up Africa in the 1870's - the subsequent rivalries poisoned politics irreparably.
There's no questions here, just a general meditation.
I'm not a pacifist and I believe many wars are intrinsically justified, rather its the cultural valorisation of martial vigour to the point of yawn-inducing tedium & the unending surplus production of military paraphernalia to the equivalent point of "carbon lock-down" i.e. its that the "complex" (MIC) has become so super-entwined in every facet of life (social, cultural, economic, political) its difficult to see it ever been shifted into the background - where it belongs, not in your face, where it remains.
Yup, the famous pre-amble to Eisenhower's denunciation of the "Military-Industrial-Complex" which he thought he'd just "throw out there" for general rumination prior to leaving office much to the discomfort of the resident gung-ho hawks. Probably the most oft-reported yet under acted upon speech/warning ever delivered as the trillions spent annually daily testify. "God bless our contractors" - as one Congressman put it recently tying up a multi-billion dollar deal for a fleet of F-16's with the nepotistic un-elected Saudi gerontocracy who usually just park them unused and abandoned in some hole in the desert. As long as jobs aren't being out-sourced and the gravy train of cheap oil keeps running who cares? Certainly not the thousand plus 'royal' off-spring of Ibn Saud who have an unaccountable cheque cut for them each month from the proceeds of one tenth global oil supply to flitter away on hawking, harems, yachts, Afghan madrassa or ISIL training camps & armaments ... but I digress, there's little reason to suspect WWI was any less a racket then the caper we have before us today.
Empire-building in itself creates a concomitant rise in the production of ideological propaganda that valorises the fighting man & the adventurer. The Irish militaristic youth band Na Fianna were probably modelled on Robert Baden-Powell's Boy Scout brigade; itself a by-product of this process. The British novelistic fiction of 1890-1916 is choc-a-bloc with imperial adventure stories valorising the fighting man. Ever since 'Brave Gordon' fell at Khartoum a plethora of pro-war, pro-conquest, pro-"civilizing" narratives emerged. Some would date it to the "New Imperialism" of Disraeli spawned in part by the vanities of the "Empress of India" which carved up Africa in the 1870's birthing those inter-imperial rivalries which ended up in the Anglo-French Entente of 1904 effectively isolating Germany from the main power alliances.
From this point (1904), the fiction focuses on German invasion threats producing a dozen titles annually. This is the time Baden Powell's Boy Scouts (1905) are set up, and four years later in Ireland, closely modelled, come Na Fianna, conceived and organised by Constance Markievicz. P.G. Wodehouse mocked the lot in "How Clarence saved England: A Tale of the Great Invasion" (1909) where our hero is an inquisitive Boy Scout of the Famous Five variety. So ubiquitous were invasion scares in this paranoiac "alter-world" that a newsvendor's placard read "SURREY DOING BADLY. 147 FOR 8." followed underneath in smaller case by "German army lands in England".
Ubiquitous militarism is a cross-diffusion of imperial over-reach and if children look dumb playing soldiers think of their adult counter-parts and the mythology of "it will all be over by Christmas". Home Rule suspended "for the duration of the war" indeed. Ivan Bloch's massive six-volume study "Is War Now Impossible?" (publ.1899) predicted, for three reasons, a major European war would be unprecedented in scale and destructiveness. First, military technology had transformed the nature of warfare; 'the day of the bayonet was over', rapidity & accuracy of machine-gun fire would mean "the next war ... would be a great war of entrenchments". Second, increased size of European armies meant any war would involve tens of millions of men with fighting spread "over an enormous front". Third, and consequently, economic factors would be decisive. War would mean; "the entire dislocation of all industry". How, in addition, can people square the notion "it will be all over in six weeks" with British Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey's equally prophetic remarks - "The lights are going out all over Europe, they will not be lit again in our lifetimes".
Every European military adviser and head of state was aware of these arguments - how could they not be? It was the most substantial and informed tome written on the changing face of warfare in a generation.
Yet, the imperial juggernaut continued ...
Cannon Fodder and the End of Reason as such.
The most disgraceful conflict ever to blemish the annals of humankind.
As a small sample of the type of slaughter imperial armies were already well accustomed to and the paradoxical rules of "fair play" which they contrariwise imposed on opponents, particularly embedded IRA flying columns during the Anglo-Irish War, consider the following -
"War between white men should be carried out in a sportsmanlike manner, and not like fights between savage tribes" - C.H. Foulkes, British Army Officer critiquing Irish guerrilla warfare tactics.
This remember, is the same Foulkes who advised British army use of chemical warfare to suppress the "uprisings" (re: independence struggles) in Afghanistan (1919) and Waziristan (1920). Did he, I wonder, expect the Irish to stand like lemmings in open ground and be strafed indiscriminately by machine-gun fire like the slaughter of the Matebele by Rhode's brigands, the massacre of Indians at Amritsar (1919) or the annihilation of the Sudanese at Omdurman (1884)? This latter encounter, the Battle of Omdurman, which perhaps typifies the type of asymmetrical warfare the British army were accustomed to prior to the insanity of the trenches was the first successful outing of the newly perfected Maxim gun which could fire 500 rounds a minute. After this "battle", 10,800 Sudanese lay dead and 16,000 were wounded with Kitchener recording 48 British casualties. Half a million bullets had been fired in less than three hours.
Now that was "sportsmanlike".
In an embarrassing and sobering volte-face for Connolly and many others in the Internationalist movement socialists disowned their "workers of the world unite" slogans and enlisted in their droves into the ranks of imperialist armies. To compound the misery, inspirational French socialist Jean Jaurés was assassinated at the outbreak of the Great War. Friedrich Engels was prophetic in every respect except this last crucial detail, writing in 1887 -
"... a world war of never before seen extension and intensity, if the system of mutual outbidding and in armament, carried to the extreme, finally bears its natural fruits. ... Eight to ten million soldiers will slaughter each other and strip Europe bare as no swarm of locusts has ever done before. The devastations of the Thirty Years War condensed into three or four years and spread over all the continent: famine, epidemics, general barbarization of armies and masses, provoked by sheer desperation; utter chaos in our trade. industry and commerce, ending in general bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their traditional wisdom in such a way that the crowns roll in the gutter by the dozens and there will be nobody to pick them up ............. absolute impossibility to foresee how all this will end and who will be victors in that struggle; only one result absolutely certain; general exhaustion and the creation of circumstances for the final victory of the working class".."
The adult world always sanctions this nonsense. The culture of militarism at this time is a by-product of imperialism which holds the globe by dint of force of arms. Looking at the Wiki-leaks videos of 'virtual reality' drone strikes which de-humanises safely distant targets or off-duty soldiers in Iraq tied to their shoot-em-up Playstations before going out 'on patrol' reminds me that some things never change.
I'll confess war comics bored me to tears as a child and I despise US gun culture with its lingering frontier mentality, top-down Hollywood 'product placement' action-flik promotionals, Republican apologetics over high-school shootings (which seems to think more guns is the solution!) and basically the whole panoply of lies & evasions which ensures arms manufacturers continue to profit peddling death and human misery via clever marketing focusing on 'home defence'. A world of trigger-happy morons and every parent who buys their child toy guns, war comics, "action" consuls or gratuitous blood-letting gun fliks is implicated, whether they like it or not.
Perhaps it is our recognition of just how dreadful wars are, that increases our respect for those who fight in them, especially when we know that in many cases they felt they had no option but to do otherwise. History is littered with the prosecution of many just wars simply because belligerent tyrants crop up with such remarkable frequency - were they not stopped in their tracks by the combined efforts of many brave men it is arguable we could be even having this conversation right now. But cranking up the war ante by appealing to a shallow sense of patriotism followed by the post-hoc glorification of the martyred dead as a stratagem to recruit more cannon fodder is deplorable.
The stunning waste of life in the trenches of the Great War has always made me nauseous and nothing I've read has ever swerved me from the conviction that this was essentially an imperial conflagration where European powers fought like ravenous dogs over control over the world's resources.
Gavrilo Princip set the fuse but the powder trail stretched back to the New Imperialism which carved up Africa in the 1870's - the subsequent rivalries poisoned politics irreparably.
There's no questions here, just a general meditation.
I'm not a pacifist and I believe many wars are intrinsically justified, rather its the cultural valorisation of martial vigour to the point of yawn-inducing tedium & the unending surplus production of military paraphernalia to the equivalent point of "carbon lock-down" i.e. its that the "complex" (MIC) has become so super-entwined in every facet of life (social, cultural, economic, political) its difficult to see it ever been shifted into the background - where it belongs, not in your face, where it remains.
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