The long read
How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war
The Great War is often depicted as an unexpected catastrophe. But for millions who had been living under imperialist rule, terror and degradation were nothing new.
By Pankaj Mishra
Friday 10 November 2017 06.00 GMT
‘Today on the Western Front,” the German sociologist Max Weber wrote in September 1917, there “stands a dross of African and Asiatic savages and all the world’s rabble of thieves and lumpens.” Weber was referring to the millions of Indian, African, Arab, Chinese and Vietnamese soldiers and labourers, who were then fighting with British and French forces in Europe, as well as in several ancillary theatres of the first world war.
Faced
with manpower shortages, British imperialists had recruited up to 1.4 million
Indian soldiers. France enlisted nearly 500,000 troops from its colonies in
Africa and Indochina. Nearly 400,000 African Americans were also inducted into
US forces. The first world war’s truly unknown soldiers are these non-white combatants.
Ho Chi
Minh, who spent much of the war in Europe, denounced what he saw as the
press-ganging of subordinate peoples. Before the start of the Great War, Ho
wrote, they were seen as “nothing but dirty Negroes … good for no more than
pulling rickshaws”. But when Europe’s slaughter machines needed “human fodder”,
they were called into service. Other anti-imperialists, such as Mohandas Gandhi
and WEB Du Bois, vigorously supported the war aims of
their white overlords, hoping to secure dignity for their compatriots in the
aftermath. But they did not realise what Weber’s remarks revealed: that
Europeans had quickly come to fear and hate physical proximity to their
non-white subjects – their “new-caught sullen peoples”, as Kipling called
colonised Asians and Africans in his 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden.
These
colonial subjects remain marginal in popular histories of the war. They also go
largely uncommemorated by the hallowed rituals of Remembrance
Day. The ceremonial walk to the Cenotaph at Whitehall by all major
British dignitaries, the two minutes of silence broken by the Last Post, the
laying of poppy wreaths and the singing of the national anthem – all of these
uphold the first world war as Europe’s stupendous act of self-harm. For the
past century, the war has been remembered as a great rupture in modern western
civilisation, an inexplicable catastrophe that highly civilised European powers
sleepwalked into after the “long peace” of the 19th century – a catastrophe
whose unresolved issues provoked yet another calamitous conflict between
liberal democracy and authoritarianism, in which the former finally triumphed,
returning Europe to its proper equilibrium.
With more
than eight million dead and more than 21 million wounded, the war was the
bloodiest in European history until that second conflagration on the continent
ended in 1945. War memorials in Europe’s remotest villages, as well as the
cemeteries of Verdun, the Marne, Passchendaele, and the Somme enshrine a
heartbreakingly extensive experience of bereavement. In many books and films,
the prewar years appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with
the summer of 1913 featuring as the last golden summer.
But
today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is
time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of
racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not
remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.
At the
time of the first world war, all western powers upheld a racial hierarchy built
around a shared project of territorial expansion. In 1917, the US president,
Woodrow Wilson, baldly stated his intention, “to keep the white race strong
against the yellow” and to preserve “white civilisation and its domination of
the planet”. Eugenicist ideas of racial selection were everywhere in the
mainstream, and the anxiety expressed in papers like the Daily Mail, which
worried about white women coming into contact with “natives who are worse than
brutes when their passions are aroused”, was widely shared across the west.
Anti-miscegenation laws existed in most US states. In the years leading up to
1914, prohibitions on sexual relations between European women and black men
(though not between European men and African women) were enforced across
European colonies in Africa. The presence of the “dirty Negroes” in Europe
after 1914 seemed to be violating a firm taboo.
Injured Indian soldiers being cared for by the Red Cross in England in March 1915. Photograph: De Agostini Picture Library/Biblioteca Ambrosiana
“These
savages are a terrible danger,” a joint declaration of the German national
assembly warned in 1920, to “German women”. Writing Mein Kampf in the 1920s,
Adolf Hitler would describe African soldiers on German soil as a Jewish
conspiracy aimed to topple white people “from their cultural and political
heights”. The Nazis, who were inspired by American innovations in racial
hygiene, would in 1937 forcibly sterilise hundreds of children fathered by
African soldiers. Fear and hatred of armed “niggers” (as Weber called them) on
German soil was not confined to Germany, or the political right. The pope
protested against their presence, and an editorial in the Daily Herald, a
British socialist newspaper, in 1920 was titled “Black Scourge in Europe”.
This was
the prevailing global racial order, built around an exclusionary notion of
whiteness and buttressed by imperialism, pseudo-science and the ideology of
social Darwinism. In our own time, the steady erosion of the inherited
privileges of race has destabilised western identities and institutions – and
it has unveiled racism as an enduringly potent political force, empowering volatile demagogues in the heart of
the modern west.
Today, as
white supremacists feverishly build transnational alliances, it becomes
imperative to ask, as Du Bois did in 1910: “What is whiteness that one should
so desire it?” As we remember the first global war, it must be remembered
against the background of a project of western global domination – one that was
shared by all of the war’s major antagonists. The first world war, in fact,
marked the moment when the violent legacies of imperialism in Asia and Africa
returned home, exploding into self-destructive carnage in Europe. And it seems
ominously significant on this particular Remembrance Day: the potential for large-scale mayhem in the west
today is greater than at any other time in its long peace since 1945.
When
historians discuss the origins of the Great War, they usually focus on rigid
alliances, military timetables, imperialist rivalries, arms races and German
militarism. The war, they repeatedly tell us, was the seminal calamity of the
20th century – Europe’s original sin, which enabled even bigger eruptions of
savagery such as the second world war and the Holocaust. An extensive
literature on the war, literally tens of thousands of books and scholarly
articles, largely dwells on the western front and the impact of the mutual
butchery on Britain, France, and Germany – and significantly, on the
metropolitan cores of these imperial powers rather than their peripheries. In
this orthodox narrative, which is punctuated by the Russian Revolution and the Balfour declaration in 1917, the war begins with
the “guns of August” in 1914, and exultantly patriotic crowds across Europe
send soldiers off to a bloody stalemate in the trenches. Peace arrives with the Armistice of 11 November 1918, only to be
tragically compromised by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which sets the
stage for another world war.
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