“Childish Unreason”, Then and Now
It is rather late in the day, granted, but perhaps we can learn something from the track record of the British, especially from their mistakes. The British went everywhere, it seems, for various reasons, some good some bad, and created along the way the greatest empire the world has ever seen or ever will see. The problem was, they lost all perspective on what they were doing and why, became too full of themselves, and got hopelessly overextended. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? All roads lead to World War I.
In the summer of 1914, I believe the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, could have halted the slide to war by simply telling the French to calm down and by suggesting to Tsar Nicholas II that he have a talk with his cousin-in-law, Kaiser Wilhelm II, a grandson of Queen Victoria, about the regicide in the Balkans, and for them to work out a deal with Vienna and Serbia. All that could have been done without much difficulty, but was not on the agenda because Sir Edward and others in Whitehall regarded Germany as a danger to British Empire preeminence in the world. The continental brouhaha, which began in the Balkans with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, presumptive heir to the throne of Austro-Hungary, had nothing to do with England, but it was viewed by London as an opportunity to throttle and corral Germany, utilizing France and Russia. Hence, the Great War.
Germany lost big, but so did England and France, although they did not realize it right away and were the nominal winners. The greatest beneficiaries of the war “to make the world safe for democracy” were unscrupulous outsiders, namely, the Communists and the Zionists. They did not start the war. They simply picked up the pieces, and took advantage of the mistakes and the difficulties of the major players. Who can blame them? The most culpable major player in my view was the British establishment, armed with its mindset of meddling and with its proclivity toward combativeness without reason.
Thanks to World War I, the Communists ended up in charge of Russia for decades, after the German General Staff shipped Lenin and his gang to St. Petersburg in a sealed train. The Zionists ended up with Palestine, perhaps forever, when the scheming triumvirate of Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill transferred it to them in 1920 and installed the English/Zionist politician, Mr. Herbert Samuel, as British High Commissioner for Palestine. Never mind why. It has been downhill for the Palestinians and for the Arabs ever since. In short, World War I and John Bull gave us the tinderbox we have today. Washington inherited it after World War II, and instead of rectifying the situation, has been fighting fire with gasoline, producing predictable results ever since.
Which brings me to the Anglo-Irish writer Frank Harris, one of the great critics of the British establishment during its bombastic imperial heyday. Harris is famous for his immodest autobiography, My Life and Loves, but there is plenty in that book which is fascinating and instructive, having nothing to do with Harris’ love life. The book was written in the aftermath of the Great War, or more precisely in the aftermath of the peace conferences and the dishonest arrangements following the war.
Frank Harris was perhaps the most successful editor of his time, astride the two worlds of London and New York. He also knew the Continent well, spoke German and French, and for a brief time taught at Heidleberg University and was, also briefly, a restaurateur and hotelier in Eze and Monte Carlo. He was born in Galway, Ireland in 1856 died and in Nice on the French Riviera in 1931. Harris wrote books, short stories, novels and nonfiction. A life of Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde and three volumes of “Contemporary Portraits”, among others. He wrote a book in 1915 entitled England or Germany? which essentially took the side of Germany in the war. As you may imagine, that did not go over well in London.
My Life and Loves was published in Paris and Berlin in 1922. Harris starts off: “Here in the blazing heat of August, amid the hurry and scurry of New York, I sit down to write my final declaration of Faith as a preface or foreword to the story of my life.... My journalism during the war and after the armistice brought me prosecutions from the federal government. The authorities at Washington accused me of sedition...my magazine (Pearson’s) was time and again held up in the post, and its circulation reduced thereby to one-third. I was brought to ruin by the illegal persecution of President Wilson and his arch-assistant Burleson [Postmaster General] and was laughed at when I asked for compensation.”
Further on, make note of the following: “Now one word to my own people and their peculiar shortcomings. Anglo-Saxon domineering combativeness is the greatest danger to humanity in the world today.... At all cost we must get rid of our hypocrisies and falsehoods and see ourselves as we are--a domineering race, vengeful and brutal...we must study the inevitable effects of our soulless, brainless selfishness as shown in the World War.”
In 1925, Harris wrote in the foreword to Volume II: “The childish unreason of the world fills me with fear for the future of humanity. On all sides I still hear idiotic defenses of the World War in spite of its fifty millions of untimely deaths and the consequent misery and impoverishment of our whole generation. The lying slogan, “the war to end war,” has not even put an end to armaments or munitions-makers. The old lies are as popular as ever and pass uncontradicted, almost unquestioned.”
And then, further on: “The English and American people have enormous, preponderant power, power of numbers, power of wealth, power of almost unassailable position; but who does not see that their strength is out of all proportion to their brains?”
The only point I am trying to make here is that in similar ways, it has all happened before, and that in our current predicament, we cannot just blame the “neocons” and the politicians and the war lobbies in Washington for setting the Middle East ablaze in a self-destructive crusade to nowhere. We should first of all blame ourselves for our own naïveté, gullibility, laziness, arrogance, ignorance and presumption, which qualities have made it all possible, and without which we could not have been so thoroughly hoodwinked and taken advantage of.
Comments
The destruction of the Austro Hugarian Empire was a
crime and so was the destruction of the Second Reich.
Whatever the Kaiser’s faults, the Second Reich was a
civilized country with a lot to admire.
What came afterwards…
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Another great article from Patrick Foy.
It is long past time when the Anglo-
Americans began to examine the mote in
their (our) own eye.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Militarism and empire always lead to no good. Big standing armies and gleaming weapons search for a raison d’etre. Everything that all those soldiers thought they were protecting with all those weapons, they destroyed. In the summer of 1914, the western civilization put a gun to its head and pulled the trigger. So easy to prevent, and because no one did, I get to live in the ruins.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Great article. Germany was the last to mobilize. Not many people know that. And why Germany was penalized at Versaille, I don’t know why but it was malicious and planned. Germany was not responsible for WWI at all. It is all quite a shame. Erik von Kuenhelt-Leddihn point out in “The Menace of the Herd” that the destruction of the Hapsburg Empire was the reason. It is all very very sad.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
I find the pictures of British troops merrily marching to their deaths at the Western Front to be be among the most chilling ever captured - and also perfectly representative of the West’s attitude towards war since.
Barbaric? Brutal? Vengeful? Idiotic? Yes - and even worse.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Amen, Adriana. And what came afterwards was the fault of one man: Wilson.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
There was an ideological reason flaming the fires that
led to WWI Germany had become a formidable economic
presence, and was beating England in industrial
production.
And worse, from the ideologues point of view, they did
it with a command economy, with the State providing
guidance and all kinds of help to the industry. It was
also protectionist, which raised howls and complaints
of how much richer it would have been if it allowed
free trade.
So, there was, on top of that an ideological push to
get rid of the “Prussian” school of economics.
(If you read Hayek, you’ll see that he excoriates
“Prussia” as the way leading to serfdom. It was
idelogogical all right).
So, in name of freedom they destroyed a decent society,
to unleash a democratic experiment on people who did
not have the mental habits to make it work.
The rest if History.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
The 20th century was one long war fought by
NATIONAL mercantilist conglomerates.
Today, these same corporations are now
WORLD mercantilist conglomerates.
Who won the war?
Not flesh and blood.
Who run Border Town? MasterBlaster.
Not the scapegoats.
Hegel, who defined the korporation, warned of a
suffocating corporate evolution and the end of
history. Orwell made a point of this in 1984
with Oceana and the memory hole.
Even the Bible describes the final beast to devour
the earth as an unnatural monster with a childish
unreasonableness.
Is there an irony in the realization that the state
is being usurped by the incorporated kibbutz?
We need to start voting with our dollars, not just
the ballot.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Er, the Kaiser and the Tsar did in fact correspond, right up to the brink - search for the ‘Willy-Nicky telegrams’.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
There is no question that the Kaiser--Willy--and the Tsar--Nicky--did communicate in the run-up to the war in a genuine attempt to avoid conflict. However, English clandestine diplomacy was not helpful in this endeavor. Sir Edward Grey’s man in London, Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador, was urging Russian Foreign Minister Sazonov and other ministers of the Tsar to order a general military mobilization to counter Vienna’s ultimatum to Serbia. Buchanan succeeded. It must be assumed that Buchanan was not acting on his own. In those days, mobilization meant war, and everyone knew it.
Here’s how the Kaiser responded to the news in his telegram to the Tsar on July 31st, 1914: “On your appeal to my friendship and your call for assistance, began to mediate between your government and the Austro-hungarian Government. While this action was proceeding your troops were mobilized against Austro-Hungary, my ally. thereby, as I have already pointed out to you, my mediation has been made almost illusory. I have nevertheless continued my action. I now receive authentic news of serious preparations for war on my eastern frontier. Responsibility for the safety of my empire forces preventive measures of defense upon me. In my endeavors to maintain the peace of the world I have gone to the utmost limit possible. The responsibility for the disaster which is now threatening the whole civilized world will not be laid at my door. In this moment it still lies in your power to avert it. Nobody is threatening the honor or power of Russia who can well afford to await the result of my mediation....”
As has been pointed out, Germany mobilized last. The Kaiser did not seek or want war. A good summary of my general outlook is the speech given by German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg to the Reichstag in 1914 which can be found on Firstworldwar.com as can the complete “Willy-Nicky” Telegrams of July and August, 1914.
The speech begins: “Where the responsibility in this greatest of all wars lies is quite evident to us. Outwardly responsible are the men in Russia who planned and carried into effect the general mobilization of the Russian army. But in reality and truth the British Government is responsible....”
Patrick Foy
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Hm. With all due respect to Mr Foy’s (as always) informative and stimulating article, I notice this bit in the above-linked wikipedia bio of Frank Harris:
“The British occultist, mystic, and sexual revolutionary Aleister Crowley lived with him in 1924”
Well, at the risk of making an ad-hominem argument, I have some reservations about taking seriously any condemnations of “childish unreason” from a man who was a bosom-buddy of an open practitioner of witchcraft, and advocate of licentious sexual deviancy including “sex magic” involving invocation of supernateral spirits, aka demons. “Devil’s advocate” indeed.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
PS,
A few more observations - again, with great respect for Mr Foy, with whom I largely agree on many things, including
the fact that the British government was (partly) responsible for WW I - but we disagree on Mr Foy’s attribution to Britain of principal guilt for that war. With all due respect, Mr Foy, your Irish (and American) is getting the better of you when you try a bit TOO hard to excuse Germany.
(Gloss: I will agree with Mr Foy and most others here, that President Wilson was the main criminal of WW I and its aftermath, and that America never should have gotten into that war.)
HOWever, Mr Foy. Acknowledging Britain’s role in starting that stupid war, is one thing. But vindicating Germany while positing Britain as the origin of all of the main international troubles of the 20th/21st century, is going too far.
A few notes and thoughts and links:
1. Mr Foy, you mentioned the Zionists and Communists as the only two beneficiaries of WWI (well, aside from American industrialists, who I will agree also profited from it in nefarious ways.)
But you neglected to mention the Irish Nationalists. They, too, the bloody barbarian Fenian terrorist bastards, also benefited from the Great War. Irish independence in 1922, was a proximate consequence of the Great War.
1.a, And it was a paradoxical blessing for Britain to be rid of most of Ireland.
Good riddance.
I have never met a single Briton who wishes that the Republic of Ireland had never become independent of the UK. Good riddance, is what they say. And many, or perhaps most, Britons today (well, the real ones, not the recent immigrants from Pakistan etc, I mean the REAL Britons) - most of them would be very happy to see Northern Ireland just, just going away. And generally speaking, there is no great love between the Northern Irish Protestants and the British of England and Wales and Scotland.
HOWever:
1.c, HOWever, I DID have an elderly British friend - some years ago - who was a Countess, whose title was inherited from a (now extinct) “county” in Ireland; she was the hereditary British “Countess” of that Irish county (which is now in the independent Irish Republic.) She was one of the greatest Ladies I have ever known; she demonstrated to me, how and why hereditary aristocracy is usually better than the rule of populist nouveau-riche parvenues.
Well, sometimes I would lunch with her at her occasional apartment in London, and in it, she hung some portraits of her husband’s ancestors, who ruled that county of Ireland for a few hundred years. And...and...one of those oil-painted portraits, had some chars, some burn-marks on it, from a fire from circa 1920…
...because, some Irish-Nationalist terrorists burned down their mansion in Ireland, circa 1920.
Ah, BUT, those Fenian bastards attacked the wrong people. Because my friend’s ancestor (or rather, the ancestor of her husband), fought tooth and nail in Parliament, to TRY to bring some assistance to the Irish during the Great Famine in the 1840s!
And what did that TRULY noble, TRULY aristocratic Lady, say to me, about the burn-marks on her ancestral portraits?
She said, with a smile:
“John, these were damaged in a fire set by the IRA and De Valere’s men. They burned down our mansion. But we can’t blame them too much; they had a point; they had a lot to be angry about.
But I just wish they would have known what our family did for Ireland when we were there. We tried to help them. But the people who burned our mansion, those poor people, they didn’t know that. So I’m not angry at them about the burn-marks on our family portraits; they just didn’t know any better.”
Nobler words have never been said.
2. Mr Foy, I still want to take you to task for quoting from a friend of the PUBLIC Satanist, practitioner of witchcraft and of “sex-magic”, Aleister Crowley, as part of your title for this blog post. Good God, man! Can’t you find any better accuser of Britain than THAT? Francis Harris, the bosom-buddy (and probably an occasional homosexual partner) of the OPEN, PUBLIC Satanist and practitioner of “sex-magic”, bloody Aleister Crowley?
Sometimes, so-called “ad hominem” arguments ARE valid! Because, how can we separate a man’s arguments from his personal character? (We cannot; in this sense, many “ad hominem” arguments ARE valid, unless we believe in the Modern Age superstition of “scientific objectivity")
This is debatable. But what is NOT debatable, Mr Foy, is that your hero, Francis Harris, was the friend and room-mate and bosom-buddy of the bloody OPEN, PUBLIC Satanist practitioner of witchcraft, Aleister Crowley. (Who was, among other things, a vicious racist and antisemite, and I don’t use those terms lightly. Crowley was an OPEN racist and antisemite, and practitioner of witchcraft and advocate of sexual and moral licentiousness.)
3. Mr Foy, with all due respect to you (and I do respect you very highly), if the best “Devil’s Advocate” you can find to vindicate Germany and condemn Britain vis a vis WW I, is a bosom-buddy and probable homosexual lover of the Satan-worshipper Aleister Crowley, then
I will say, you have proved - if anything - that Germany was more on the side of Satan than Britain was, in 1914.
4. Now just a personal gloss: Whenever I hear Irish-Americans of TODAY making apologies for Germany in WW I and WW II, I smell stale cheap lager and I imagine an aggrieved and disappointed Irish-American swimming in many pints of cheap beer in a so-called “Irish” tavern in Philadelphia (my hometown), as he yearns desperately for some kind of “glory” in his life, which he has no imagination to create unless he speaks/writes like a parasite upon old Irish grievances against “The English”.
Mr Foy, with all due (and sincere) respect to you and your great mind - which, God knows, we need, we need you, Mr Foy, and I consider you as my friend and political ally - still, Mr Foy, one friend to another, let me tell you that I think your mind remains a bit distorted by inherited memories from Ireland,
when your (and some of my) ancestors BELIEVED they were shamed by “the English.”
Please. Mr Foy, my friend and ally, please, get over it, for all of our sakes. Ireland-versus-England (AND Germany-versus-England) is, or ought to be, a dead issue, a moot point now that all of Western Christendom is struggling for survival.
Sincerely yours,
John Donald Ball III,
Grandson of a British Catholic,
John D Ball Sr
(1899-1962, who had a Protestant mother)
who married my Irish Grandmother,
Genevieve Reilly,
whose ancestors in Galway experienced
the Great Famine of Ireland.
As the American cartoon-character Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us!” Mr Foy, please lay down your arms against “the English”, and now take up arms WITH the sons and daughters of English Christendom - because now, we all are fighting together against REAL enemies.
A salute and a glass of FINE Australian wine from me to you, Mr Foy!
Click to flag this comment as abusive
@John:
I hope you don’t take it amiss that I count Eamon de
VAlera as one of my political heroes.
Why? Because he took a very nasty nationalistic group,
with the same roots as Nazism and turned it into a
civilized political party. Because he tamed a lot of
terrorists and made them into politicians. Because among
the dictatorship and fascist epidemics running through
Europe, he kept Ireland a democracy with plenty of
respect for the liberties of the public.
Unfortunately for your lady friend, a truly noble woman,
her family had to pay for all those English who
thought of the potato famine a good way to clear the
land from “undesirable people” When one million people
die and another million has to emigrate with the clothe
on their back carrying a grudge is undestable.
Hope I do not disappoint you too much.
As for World War I I carry no brief for the Kaiser, but
to destroy the Second Reich utterly, as the Austro-
Hungarian empire, that was the crime. And it was
committed in the name of democracy.
Which brings to mind the comment of Bertrand Russell
“To call the outcome a success you have to pretend that
Hitler was an improvement over the Kaiser and Stalin
an improvement over the czar.”
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Zionist actions during World War 1 may have had a lot to do with Hitler’s fanatical hatred of Jews and the resulting holocaust.
There have been many reports of a deal between powerful Zionists and the British for the former to do all they could to bring America into the war in exchange for Britain turning Palestine over to the Jews for colonization.
Hitelr’s belief that the Zionists played a decisive role in bringing America into the war undoubtedly was a key factor behind his venomous hate for the Jews and all the consequences that flowed from it.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
As William Sturgis Lind never ceases from pointing out, it is more important to retain stability (order, not chaos) than to worry about the mechanism that keeps things are stable.
Last time it was the communists and the zionists. Now it will be the 4th generation forces often referred to as “terrorists”, though that label is applied only when they do it, not when we do it.
And there is reason to fear - or hope. Ron Paul’s campaign looks much like a 4th generation warfare organization. In a distributed (geodesic) system, there is no heart or head which can kill the beast. And the status quo is singularly unequipped to fight anything that would involve a long and slow, systematic fix - like the occupation of Iraq.
Click to flag this comment as abusive
Post a Comment
By submitting this form, you give Taki's Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. Personal attacks, ethnic slurs, the riding of hobby horses and the beating of dead ones will be deleted as soon as they are detected by our small but alert staff. Repeat abusers of this policy will be barred from leaving comments. All comments reflect only the views of those posting them and not necessarily those of this website, its editors, or authors. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.
Commenting is not available in this section entry.