Murderous World War I, known as the Great War then, ended one hundred years ago on November 11, 1918. It might be impossible to overestimate the impact of this war upon world history. It was by far the bloodiest war in history until that time. The slaughter horrified even those many patriots who had anticipated it and had celebrated when it began.
The Great War was pure imperialist—that is, capitalist—slaughter for empire and territory. There were no reasons behind it that could be called recmotely morally redeeming.
It wasn’t for “freedom”, whatever that means, or for “national self-determination”, or for an end to colonialism, or against racism or brutality. All these notions mask the fact that, in essence, World War II was also imperialist.
No such ideological excuses can hide the fact that the Great War was over the division of the earth, a war FOR, not against, subordination, colonialism, empire.
It was a war among “democracies” — in that Germany was no less “democratic” than the United Kingdom (both were parliamentary monarchies) or, the monarch aside, than the United States.
The Great War led millions of people worldwide to seriously question or even reject “patriotism” as a cover-up for capitalist and imperialist rule.
This massive revulsion against imperialist slaughter and the misery it brought to the vast majority of the peoples of the world led to social and political progress. The Russian Revolution and the International Communist Movement; the militancy of organized labor; the certainty that a better world than capitalism, imperialism, and the devastation they produce must be possible.
The Great War was an event with mighty lessons for all of us today. No wonder it is neglected, Although largely forgotten those lessons were dynamite in 1918, and still are today.
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Letter
Today I commemorate my great-uncle, George Devine, a veteran and a victim of the Great War. He went off to war in 1917, at the age of 21. In 1918 he returned “shell-shocked”—the name at that time for what is today called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He had been driven insane—literally—by the stress and shock of trench warfare. He never recovered.
For his family, this was worse than if he had been killed—to witness his unending suffering, year after year. My late mother remembered him living with her and her parents for brief periods in the 1920s. But then he had to return to the Veterans Administration hospital for the brain injured at Perry Point, MD, where he lived for the rest of his life.
He died there on January 31, 1941. Poor young man! His whole bright future at the age of 21 ruined, and it was not to defend his country, or any noble ideal at all. To save J.P. Morgan & Sons, and other American banks, whose huge loans to the United Kingdom would have been lost if Germany had won the war. To put the capitalists of the United States ahead of the capitalists of Europe.My grandmother, his only sibling, could never speak of her younger brother George without weeping. Not wishing to cause her distress, we never asked her about him. And now it is far, far too late; Grandmother died in 1994, at the age of 99.
I think of him today, on the 100th anniversary of the end of the war that ruined his life.Yet he was but one of millions of young men, and tens of millions of men, women, and children the world around, whose lives were blasted by that terrible, imperialist war.
For me, great-uncle George stands in for all of them—all the people killed by wars for exploitation, for the enrichment of the few at huge cost to the many.And I prefer to believe this: As long as I—we—learn the lessons of the Great War, and struggle for a world of justice, free of exploitation, free of capitalism, free of inequality— then my great-uncle George, and the myriad of those like him throughout the history of the awful 20th century, did not die entirely in vain.