Conservative and strongly pro-Israel Professor Bill Rubenstein has had a letter published in the April edition of Quadrant which ends with the following observation:
It might also be worth noting that all of the infamous twentieth-century genocides in the period from 1914 to 1980, from the Armenian massacres in 1915-16 through the Nazi Holocaust to Asian communism, were plainly the result of the breakdown of the European elite and governmental structure in the First World War, and the consequential rise to power of fascism and communism. It is as certain as any counterfactual can be that none of these genocides and massacres would have occurred had the European powers not gone to war in 1914.
William D. Rubinstein
(Professor of History),
University of Wales–Aberystwyth,
Penglais, UK.
I can claim to have anticipated the kernel Professor Rubenstein’s argument in this letter which I had published in the Australian on 24 April 2004:
THIS Anzac Day we will again hear [that] the Australians and their allies in WWI were fighting for freedom. Implicit in this is that the cause of freedom and democracy benefited from the allied victory in the war.
While not intending any disrespect to returned service-people or the memory of our war dead, I must disagree. The best thing the Allies could have done would have been to stay on the sidelines and let the war which began in 1914 remain an Eastern European regional war between Germany, the Hapsburg Empire and Russia. The evils of German/Hapsburg victory in such a war would have been much less than those of the destructive conditions which the actual war produced, facilitating the rise of fascism and Stalinism and by 1940 producing wall-to-wall totalitarianism from Lisbon to Vladivostok, and a second world war.
A further benefit of Allied abstention would have been that Britain and France would not have got their hands on the former Ottoman possessions in the Middle East. Anglo-French mismanagement of their post-war mandates is a major historical cause of the misfortunes of that region, which continue to bedevil the world.
Whilst there are some differences between the positions of Bill Rubenstein and myself, we agree on the key historical point that World War One was an unqualified disaster for the human species, that there were no “goodies” and “baddies” amongst the contending powers, and that the real heroes of the war were those people in all the belligerent countries who had the good sense and courage to oppose it, sometimes at the cost of the careers, their liberty and their lives.
Paul,
Very interesting. My understanding of WWI started in primary school in Italy, where this war is seen partly as a continuation of the wars of independence against the Austro-Hungarian empire. Italy ‘won’ that war, but this did not prevent Italians inventing fascism.
BTW sorry for poor blogging etiquette, but I got a new blog if anyone is interested (or want to change links etc.)
Paul
I dunno.
If you look at that grainy footage of the funeral of King Edward VII, the looong basket-case procession of European military heads of state was a cannon just waiting to be fired. I believe the context of pre-WWI politics was little more than an excuse for a great big testosterone brawl.
Given the pathological extremes of militarism and imperialism that permeated all levels of most European societies at the time, it’s unlikely that any major European power could have NOT gone to war. It would have been a major loss of face – especially as the perceived outcome was to directly appoint who would control the world for the next 50 years.
And … lest we forget, it all seems to be happening again.
Paul,
I fully agree that “World War One was an unqualified disaster for the human species”. However, I think your other conclusions are deeply mistaken.
If you read a detailed account of the lead-up to war, you will observe that German plans never entailed simply fighting in the east. While in many ways that would have been convenient for them, they could never be sure that France would not suddenly come in on the side of Russia, and attack Germany while the German army was half-way to Kiev.
So for that reason German military planning always envisaged attacking France first in preference to Russia. Wiki has the crucial details:
The British proposal could never have succeeded once Germany made the demand for those fortresses, which were well inside France. The French would never conceivably have given them up. Why should they have meekly handed over territory that was indisputably part of France? That would have been even more shameful than the French defeat of 1940.
Germany then declared war on Russia and on France. What were Russia and France to do — just instantly surrender?
Germany then invaded Belgium. Wiki notes, “This act violated Belgian neutrality, the status to which Germany, France, and Britain were all committed by treaty. It was inconceivable that Great Britain would remain neutral if Germany declared war on France.”
What was Britain to do — tear up its defence treaty with Belgium? That would have been one of the most pathetic and disgraceful acts of British history.
The French and British (and us, as part of the British Empire) were fighting a defensive war in which the only other option was capitulation. We were therefore, to use your term, the “goodies”.
Allow me to quote from Professor Trevor Wilson, this country’s leading WW1 historian. (I had the privilege of taking an honours subject with him a few years ago.) In “The First World War”, he observes:
The problem is that the Germans invaded Belgium to attack France long before the first German took a pot-shot at the first Russian.
France had no option but to fight or to capitulate. Britain did have an option of leaving Belgium in the lurch, but it would have been a national humiliation.
The big counterfactual moment came at the end of 1916 when Wilson offered “Peace without victory”.
If Germany had accepted this offer, Germany would have been masters of Europe. Britain was bankrupt, deeply in debt to US banks and with no prospect of reparations from the Germans.
Britain dared not reply to Wilson’s overtures. When asked what he would do if Germany accepted and Britain rejected, Wilson said that he would not shrink from war against Britain.
Kaiser Wilhelm was inclined to accept the overture, but was talked out of it by a fanatical Erich Ludendorff, who opined that the German U-Boats would bring complete victory.
Germany answered Wilson’s overture by sinking American shipping.
The US went to war against Germany, and not Britain.
One final observation.
While the points made by Professor Rubenstein in that paragraph are quite correct, it is wrong and silly to be effectively blaming the soldiers and statesmen of Britain, France, Russia, Belgium and Serbia for not capitulating to the Central Powers.
Yes, much later evil might have been avoided if they had all just raised the white flag.
But they had no way of knowing that — the time machine not having been invented yet, and the crystal ball being rather unreliable.
They were just trying to do the right and honourable thing for their nations. The servicemen of the Allied Powers deserve our thanks and gratitude.
Blaming them for what happened later is like blaming the Russians for not surrendering in WW2. Hey, they might have avoided 20 or 30 million dead and the devastation of most of Europe if they had just quietly given in …
Gee Paul I commend your courage (or madness?) in submitting such a thesis on the antecedents of two world wars by way of a letter in the OZ a day before ANZAC Day 2004. I wonder what sort of response you got?
My reading of ANZAC Day commemorations over the past couple of decades is that they have become more zenophobic, irrational and base populist. The MSM has much to answer for and I can predict now that we will be assailed by reports of increased crowds at parades, huge numbers of all ages at Gallipoli mixed in with quirky stories of forgotten heroes, unrecognised legions and enemy cruelty.
As a street theatre activist I recall doing a skit on the-one-day-of-the-year a couple of decades before your letter. It was chaser stuff but I would fear for my safety nowadays.
And here my history book says Germany mobilised in reaction to what the Russian army was doing.
The good prof’s statement is too simplistic, generalised and sweeping. History is simply more complex than this statement indicates. His account of the Armenian Genocide being an artifact of 1915 is also demonstrably false as the 1915 onwards genocide was a result of deliberate policy inside the CUP utilising standard jihadist fervour. But all it did was continue a long history of regional genocides visited on Armenians and Pontic Greeks by their islamic lords.
‘During the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid, the Ottoman Turks massacred over 200,000 Armenians between 1894-96. This was followed, under the Young Turk regime, by the Adana massacres of 25,000 Armenians in 1909, and the first formal genocide of the 20th century, when in 1915 alone, an additional 600,000 to 800,000 Armenians were slaughtered. [26] The massacres of the 1890s had an “organic” connection to the Adana massacres of 1909, and more importantly, the events of 1915. As Dadrian argues, they facilitated the genocidal acts of 1915 by providing the Young Turks with “a predictable impunity.” The absence of adverse consequences for the Abdul Hamid massacres in the 1890s allowed the Young Turks to move forward without constraint.
…
Contemporary accounts from European diplomats make clear that these brutal massacres were perpetrated in the context of a formal jihad against the Armenians who had attempted to throw off the yoke of dhimmitude by seeking equal rights and autonomy.’
See Andrew Boston’s review of Dadrian’s work here. [link]
MarkL
Canberra
Nah, us Alt Hist. nerds have gamed CP victory/ no WW1 scenarios for decades, it always ends up in France going fascist and Italy and the UK going commie followed by a big influx of monarchists to Australia and Canada (blech) and a clash in the far East between Germany and Japan.
Sometimes you get a stable Social Democratic Russia though, which is neat.
Pablo
‘The MSM has much to answer for and I can predict now that we will be assailed by reports of increased crowds at parades, huge numbers of all ages at Gallipoli mixed in with quirky stories of forgotten heroes, unrecognised legions and enemy cruelty.’
You left out the mandatory ‘outraged digger’ story – that is … someone, somewhere has to be publicly shamed by some RSL spokesman for doing something on/around Anzac Day that is deemed disrespectful to the memory of the fallen.
Backpackers littering Lone Pine, breakfast shows holding fake Dawn Services etc might upset the fallen somewhat … but ballooning in Canberra is a bit of a stretch, even for the RSL.
#9 Lienad
hail fellow well met. Agree, it does tend to go that way except for the Empire. With a CP win it is left pretty much intact and helps Japan later on, with no WWI we’ve had a lot of variations - so much depends on Ireland in 1914-15. Once we got a strange Russian result, they became an Orthodox theocracy and went proselytising with the sword in a really big way. Southwards towards warm water. They got there too in that one.
We viewed that one as the exception which proves the rule.
MarkL
canberra
Everyone:
If the woman who threw the axe from her window at Kauser Wilhelm II had taken better aim, she would have rid the Kingdom of Prussia of its worst ever king, Germany of its worst ever Emperor and the world of its most dangerous ratbag.
What’s more, our current environmental disasters would never have happened.
War? Of course there would have been wars but none on the industrial scale that happened in The Great War and in World War II …. an international body, perhaps similar to the League Of Nations, would have come into existence and prevented such a war ever expanding..
“What’s more, our current environmental disasters would never have happened.”
That’s novel.
Kaiser Bill may have been guilty of many misdeeds, but I wouldn’t attribute global warming or global deforestation or biodiversity loss or water shortages to him.
Nor would I, Paulus, but I’m yet to read David Blackbourne’s history of German hydrology that looks rather intriguing. Seriously:
[link]
[link]
Mark [14]:
Thanks a lot for those links. Shall try to get The Conquest Of Nature on interlibrary loan [here in The Other Australia, we are lucky enough to have very good local librarians].
Paulus [13]:
It took a century for populations in parts of Europe to recover from the Thirty Years War; it will take several centuries - if ever - for parts of Europe to recover from the environmental damage caused in the Great War.
Leinad [9]:
Have your fellow gamers cure Kaiser Friedrich III of his cancer and go on to celebrate his Silver Jubilee in 1913 in his round-the-world flight on SMFS Leignitz - together with three of his grandsons: Eitel, Adalbert and the future Kaiser Wilhelm II.