How industrial militarism got underway – the pioneers.
Becoming a militarized world did not happen by accident. As industrialization took place, it was planned by those who wanted to make and sell manufactured weapons. The early figures like Krupp and Armstrong were pioneer entrepreneurs and engineers out to forge a business. Profits came with economies of scale and they set out to increase scale. The first book looked at the growth of arms manufacturing companies in the 19th century selling arms initially at home and then throughout the world. From Japan to Paraguay, states were persuaded by political vanity, bribery and scares to purchase arms. Then their neighbours could be persuaded to buy some as well. Politicians were taught that force was the name of the game, force against national force. Autocratic leaders had long surrounded themselves with soldiers, but these did not melt away with democracy, but democracy was managed to continue militarism. Usually this involved pushing people towards nationalism and patriotism. States built up their armed forces, went looking for countries to control as colonies like Alexander the Great or Caesar, and then probably went to war. The British elite learned Latin and looked at Rome in their public schools and went out and ran a similar empire with British made weapons. The arms companies ran the show and then provided the wherewithal with industrial scale arms production and profits.
The Great War was about weapons, not territory.
Companies like Krupp, Armstrong, Vickers, Schneider, Mauser, Skoda, BSA, Nobel, Du Pont and Remington became among the biggest industrial companies on the planet. They conversed with Prime Ministers and Emperors, and promoting arms to big and small nations. Arms “races” and wars became normal, and by 1914 there were four great arms races pushing Europe to the edge. Each state was watching the others, and their military build-up, for a decade. Arms companies and warship manufacturers stoked fear. They developed propaganda machines and pushed their agenda in newspapers and through pressure groups. Then, military competition pushed over the edge, into the greatest war of all. Austro-Hungary‘s Skoda had tried to sell arms to Serbia, but failed. It was miffed. Serbia would not buy Skoda arms because Austro-Hungary was her most likely enemy. Then the so-called Pig War ensued between 1906-08, and with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand the Austrian Empire was ready to issue an ultimatum and then invade. This was the starting gun for all those other arms races to start – France-Germany, Germany-Russia, England-Germany and Russia/Serbia-Austro Hungary. The Great War saw the production of arms explode in the greatest output of weapons the world had ever seen, many times over. After the Great War with four years of maximum production and growth, these companies controlled the biggest industry in the world.
The Buried History of Disarmament.
There were many before the Great War who understood the danger of the arms industry and militarism. They included Gladstone, Leo Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw, Keir Hardie, President Wilson, Pope Benedict XV, Bertha von Suttner, Frédéric Passy, Jeanette Rankin, Ramsey McDonald, Charles Trevelyan, Arthur Ponsonby, Bertrand Russell, Maude Roydon, Mahatma Gandhi, Alfred Fried, Jane Addams and many more. They had waged a widespread and articulate war against war, militarism and the arms trade. At this time Britain was seen as an unprincipled imperial aggressor, side-stepping the Hague Peace Conference in 1899 to fight the Boer War. Arms companies had sold weapons to Japan, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Serbia and many other countries priming them for conflict. During the early years of the century the pacifists named the escalation of arms, pointing out the stupidity of teaching mass murder, the destructiveness of war and the arrogance of rulers and the armaments industrialists. They were right; if murder was wrong, mass murder did not suddenly become patriotic. There was no way round that argument, but the argument did no win. Jingoism, a stirring up of popular warlike patriotism won the day. Jean Jaures was shot to get rid of his opposition. Keir Hardie, the Labour Leader, became a hate figure because he opposed the war, and everybody went off to fight in a euphoria of presumed success. When the War came its horrors mounted month on month. They promised it would be over by Christmas, and the Pope suggested a Christmas Truce which looked like holding with the troops, but it was broken and the carnage went on and on with millions of shells, and then gas, crossing the front to kill and maim.
The Reality of the Great War.
Superficially, the War was about who won, and the patriotic stuff was there on all sides. But soon no-one had won. Everyone was bogged down in the trenches with young soldiers dying at about six thousand a day. The War Poets said it, but everybody knew it. Oh what a lovely War! “Up to your waist in water, Up to your eyes in slush, Using the kind of language, That makes the sergeant blush.” And it was worse than that. Russia collapsed with about three million deaths. Germany eventually ran out of equipment and the people and its fighting collapsed in 1918. The United States had moved from supplying weapons and explosives to engagement. It had it relatively easy, because it only had 117,497 deaths and 204,002 injured, a light burden compared to other countries. Overall, some twenty million died and a further twenty million were injured. The United States partly entered the War because the Britain and France (and Russia, who defaulted) owed so much that the US had to make sure they would repay their debts. They in turn needed Germany to pay reparations in order to pay the Americans. The debts of the War crippled the economy of the world through to Hitler.
Yet it was the personal reality of it which bit. People had seen themselves killing and being killed. The reality of War was horrific with bodies in mud and craters across the horizon. Murder destroys you. The German High Command invented the myth that the Jews had stabbed them in the back to disguise the fact that they had pursued the War and they had lost. The biblical idea of the scapegoat, the one who would carry the sins, was vested in the Jewish race to get the military off the hook. Really, everyone knew that this was the travesty of civilization. It was the War to End All Wars. It must never happen again. Yet, it was worse than that. The returning soldiers carried flu around the world and at least fifty million more people, weakened by the war, died all across the globe. Two great tidal waves of grief traversed the globe touching all those mourning a hundred million dead and injured. Then, there were those suffering PTSD – full of rage, silent, sleepless, raw at the inhumanity they had seen. Often, they took it out on their women – another brutal undercurrent to the War. Then, frozen winters without food, resources, young people, fuel, shelter in Russia and Eastern Europe. The suffering cannot be imagined. So, millions just tried to cope, but underneath they knew War must be addressed and ended. The statesman of the era were chastened. They had often bought into chauvinism and the arms trade, and knew that the sale of weapons was the underlying problem. As Lord Grey, British Foreign Secretary in the decade before the War said, “The moral is obvious; it is that great armaments lead inevitably to war.” There was widespread repentance at this false trust in militarism. The Tragedy is that is clear understanding was defeated in a mere twenty five years; and few understand how it was defeated and the militarists have hidden it…
Postponing the Great Geneva Disarmament Conference.
Alongside the great pre-war pacifists, another generation emerged who knew war was wrong because they were in it. Vera Brittain, Lord Robert Cecil, Clem Attlee, Arthur Henderson, George Lansbury, R.H.Tawney, Charles Raven, Philip Noel-Baker, the explorer Nansen, Field-Marshall Sir William Robertson and even the main architect of Britain’s War effort, Lloyd George, saw the problem of militarism and were determined to do something about it. Pacifists including Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, The Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, In France the ex-servicemen, the anciens combattants, shared pacifism with a primary school movement in which children understood how militarism was wrong. There was a massive world-wide popular movement which involved tens of millions of people, still perhaps the biggest in human history. The movement grew. Key was the Catholic Church which under Benedict XV had opposed WW1 throughout. He described it as a “useless massacre” which did not endear him to the fighting statesmen. The Catholic Church mobilized millions for peace. There were rallies of thousands of women well before Hitler thought of mass rallies. The Anglican Church also woke up. People saw the problem was arms and wanted to end the power of the Merchants of Death, as they came to be known. They had pushed arms, naval confrontation and military rivalry; millions lay dead while the arms manufacturers made their profits. Their weapons were undeniably evil. Statesmen and millions of ordinary people sought and worked for world disarmament to make the Great War the War to end all Wars.
But the British Conservative Government, the key one at this stage, did not co-operate. The Coalition Conservatives learned to prevaricate on disarmament until 1924. In the 1924 second election, a minority Labour Government was overthrown in unusual circumstances. A fake telegram, purporting to come from the USSR Minister, Zinoviev, was acquired by the Conservative Party and published in the Daily Mail four days before the election purportedly telling Socialists to rise up and have a revolution. Labour was actually resolutely democratic, and distrusted the Soviets, but the mud stuck and Labour lost enough seats to face a new Conservative Government. This Government, with Churchill as Chancellor buckled down against disarmament. It did as little as it could between 1924-9 and successfully held off the Disarmament Conference. This delay was crucial. It allowed the arms companies to organize themselves. In 1927 an arms company paid William Shearer $20,000 for six weeks work on disrupting the 1927 Coolidge Naval Conference on reducing warships. He and others were successful. Lord Cecil resigned from the Government over its failure to agree naval reductions. Britain wanted to hang on to its navy and was in rivalry with the States. The arms companies were now in control behind the scenes. But the public was for the League of Nations and against the Conservatives and in June 1929 Labour was returned with twenty seven more seats than the Conservatives in a minority Government. So again the momentum for the Disarmament Conference speeded up.
They continued through a decade, an amazing programme of persistence. This now-ignored disarmament movement came to a head in the great Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932, backed by organisations representing nearly half of the world’s population, especially Christian and women’s organisations, along with most of the world’s statesmen. It had been planned since 1925 and was a long time coming, but come it did, backed in Britain by the King, Archbishops, Prime Ministers, military leaders. Sadly, before it started Nansen, the explorer and humanitarian and Stresemann, the key German politician, was also dead of a stroke.
No, Appeasement is Different.
You are now entering a historical black hole. The history of disarmament has been covered up and papered over by those who want it to disappear. Mainly, one word has done it – “appeasement”. Churchill was against Appeasement and Disarmament is appeasement – End of Discussion. This is a travesty of history. “Appeasement” was British leaders running the Conservative Government in 1938-9 who were pro-Nazi even when war was likely, because they were against socialism. Britain was rearming fast at the time, so it was not about not arming.
Churchill saw Hitler coming, but so, too, did everyone at the Disarmament Conference, even Sir John Simon, and knew disarmament would sideline him and the Nazis for ever. Churchill, of course, was against disarmament and for the Navy, and was one of the British politicians undermining the Conference. Later, he was fighting members of his own party who were appeasers and in the Conservative Government. They were the “Big Four”, Chamberlain, Simon, Hoare and Halifax, the same Simon who had scuppered the Great Geneva Disarmament Conference.. So, Appeasement was not disarmament. They were different in time and focus. Churchill had great respect for the disarmers like Lord Cecil and Clem Attlee, and the attempt at World Disarmament occurred in 1932 before Hitler came to power. Appeasement came five years later from Fascist Sympathizing Conservatives, a group who for obvious reasons later tried to disappear..
Airbrushing Disarmament out of History.
World Disarmament has been covered up because it makes sense, it nearly happened before Hitler came to power and the arms companies do not want us to even think about it as a possibility. It is also covered up because British Conservative politicians prevented it. We did so because we were jealous of the United States as the new world superpower and wanted a big Navy so that we could control the Empire. It was that pathetic. The whole world was waiting on the acceptance of President Hoover’s plan, and we Brits were jealous, and put it into treacle. They discussed treacling in Cabinet. Sir John Simon funked it. Lloyd George said that “Sir John Simon sat on the fence so long that the iron entered his soul” Eden expressed his contempt for him, and Harold Nicholson, an ally of Churchill, just called him “a toad and a worm”. It was an appalling event in British history which opened the way to the Second World War before Hitler came to power. So we try to blot it out.
The Conference was also undermined by the Japanese invading Manchuria, the arms companies using agents to prevent it working, and the various military people at the Conference, but mainly it was the British. If we had worked with Hoover and the United States disarmament would have happened. All aggressive weapons – bombers, howitzers, tanks and submarines – would have been closed down, and the rest cut by a third immediately. Hitler storming about the unfairness of the Versailles outcome, would have had nothing to rant about and could show his armpits to the doctor. When in January 1933 the Oxford Union voted overwhelmingly that “This House would not fight for King and Country” it was voting its contempt at the handling of the Geneva Disarmament Conference. Ordinary people the world over did not understand what had happened, because the Conference just stalled. They continued to believe disarmament must take place, because all of this was done in secret, in committees by politicians committed to doing nothing. The Conservative Party said it was a peace party when we were rearming and then went for appeasement. The arms companies had won and soon they would be quietly back in business.
American Corporatist Capitalism.
By 1918 the American economy was several times bigger than Britain’s and the dominant economy in the world as immigrants poured in, resources were opened up, oil became abundant and the Midwest prairies produced their crops. But American capitalism had been turned by the Great War in two respects. First, the arms companies had grown faster than the others and were quite dominant among the New York Capitalist elite. They were used to running the show and running Washington. In the twenties they controlled both political parties, dominated the world economy and knew only expansion, even while Europe still struggled.
Then in 1929 American capitalism faced the crisis of the Wall Street Crash. Often the big capitalists like Du Pont had got out in time and had vast amounts of capital. They bought up other businesses, like General Motors in the case of the Du Ponts. Much of their capital could not easily be used in the domestic US economy in recession. They were already deeply engaged in financing the German economy and had Fascist sympathies, so money flowed to Germany and its rearmament, and also similarly to the USSR. They were still running the show internationally. But in December 1932 they faced Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of their own class who had turned to attack, “the money-makers in the Temple” in his inaugural address and was deeply critical of their capitalism and prepared to act for the public good. They actually tried a US Fascist coup attempt in 1934 against the “Socialist” Roosevelt, but it failed thanks to the whistle blowing of General Smedley Butler. That is another suppressed bit of history. Then they tried to turn elections, but were again defeated by Roosevelt.
The Pro-Nazi Americans
But the US capitalist elite had no constraints on their international business and they moved to support Hitler. The Harriman Bank had long been lending funds to Thyssen, Hitler’s patron, and as Hitler moved to power, they became the conduit for heavy US loans funding Nazi economic development and rearmament. We ask how Germany moved from an economy on its knees in 1932/3 to one able to defeat and subdue Europe in 1939, the answer is mainly that the Nazis were enabled by finance and munitions from the United States, channeled especially by the Harriman Bank and its key representative Harriman Bush.. The help of banks and munition companies, often with Fascist sympathies, made the Nazis able to fight the Second World War. The munitions companies also encouraged and funded Fascism in many other countries, helping create the chaos that supposedly required arms to sort them out. The War between Japan and China and the Spanish Civil War got the arms gravy train going again. Thus, the process of funding and promoting arms sales defeated the great peace and disarmament movement of the early 1930s. Both World Wars had the same main cause – those who pushed munitions and made money out of them and profited from war. The Second World War was thus formed against large populations in most major countries avid for peace and disarmament. Few people understood how capital and the arms companies had undermined disarmament and opened the door to World War Two. American funding of the Nazis carried on right up to Pearl Harbour.
The World’s Biggest Ever Industrial Complex.
The Allies eventually won the Second World War in the greatest military drama in human history. The actual victory over Hitler and Fascism was such a dominant story that winning the War dominated the munitions transformation of the years 1935-45; it was vast. In fact, of course, military manufacture and finance mushroomed in Germany, France for a while, Italy, Japan and especially in the USSR and the United States. The military machine amounted to perhaps more than a quarter of the entire world economy, the biggest industrial complex the world had ever seen. The Second World War created a militarized world with mega arms companies, enormous armies, bases throughout the world and a generation whose business was fighting. It is the elephant in the room and we ignore it. A massive organizational change took place in the five to ten years of the War and its preparation. During this period arms companies, defence departments, scientific research, technological direction, the military establishments, transport, information gathering and many other areas of life were all integrated into the military machine. Such a vast establishment was not going to disappear, especially in the victorious nations, without serious planning. It was to drive for its place in the continuing post-war world, and it won.
World War Two and the Construction of Peace.
But it faced a mighty, uphill task. The Great War had been a horror beyond imagining, and tens of millions were determined to fashion disarmament, and now another twenty one years later one even worse had taken place. Militarism had a dirty name, personified in the frog-marching Fascists. Many people remembered the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932 had been defeated. A War of unimaginable proportions had been loosed on the world with atrocities and genocide in the Holocaust, the far East, the vast spaces of Eastern Europe and around the globe. Some seventy million had died. Millions were walking around with PTSD, or still living with charred flesh and bombed houses. Millions more were mourning husbands, sons, daughters and colleagues. They faced the poverty of rationing small bits of food, queuing for necessities and shivering through cold winters with no fuel because War Lays Waste. There were some 1.9 billion soldiers serving in World War Two, and for most their deepest conviction was not about who won or lost. They knew War was wrong, wrong, wrong. The United Nations was formed largely by Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace, before Roosevelt died. It was set up with some commitment to peace and disarmament. Although this was quickly dissipated, millions hoped for something better. More than this, Fascism had fought the war and Socialism had been attacked. Now socialists would have to rebuild the world. So, when the British Election took place there was no question that Clement Attlee should be in charge in July 1945 even before the war ended, because Churchill the War Leader and the old militarist, was not the man for the job. The nation was grateful to Churchill as war leader, though millions still hated him, but they were not going to have a militarist in charge. So, Churchill looked for allies across the pond.
Thus, after the War, while hundreds of millions of people were trying to get back to ordinary living, a titanic battle was going on for the shape of the post-war world around the military. At one level the Government in Britain were clearing streets, repairing buildings and roads, getting soldiers back to work, putting together a national health service, nationalized industries, rationing, the Welfare state, prefab housing, milk and orange juice for kids, addressing shortages of food, clothes, furniture, caring for distressed families and getting coal distributed for the winter, and at another level the post-world war world had to be addressed. Immediately, it was easy. The Government was bankrupt and, provided the armed forces were treated well, economies in the military had to be made. But, in this theatre Britain did not count. It was intent on its domestic recovery with a clapped-out Empire.
The United States and the Truman Era.
The United States dominated the world. In 1945, as a result of the devastation in Europe, Russia, China, Japan and elsewhere the US accounted for an amazing half of the world monetized economy. It was owed money by the other Allies and had a buoyant economy through war production. What the United States did would sway history. Its internal politics would be played out across the globe. Here, too, millions were trying to put together their lives again after serving in the military or undertaking arduous war work, but something else was going on in Washington, the Pentagon and among what was soon to be known as the military-industrial complex. It was working at its own survival, and the continuation of the war machine it had constructed. The people who were in a position to do this were hard, knew what they wanted and knew how to run the American system. Often, as with John Foster Dulles, Alan Dulles, James Forrestal, Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush, Douglas McArthur and others they had been part of the American financial elite dealing with the Nazis and their sympathies were there and against Socialism.. During the War events they were often in charge inside Government and strategically placed. Of course, some quick footwork was needed. The Fascist sympathizers melted into top posts and sought to turn the West against the Socialist USSR, the real heroes of the fight against Hitler. The US Right Wing was forming things their way long before Roosevelt died, fighting him for control of the United States Government. They got rid of Roosevelt’s Vice-President, Wallace, who had a strategic international perspective and replaced him with a little man, Truman, who would largely do their bidding. That did not fully work out, but in the big scheme of events their agenda won and the world eventually rearmed. We look at this process.
Demonizing the USSR.
Military systems need enemies and the only one available was the USSR. It was the West’s greatest ally against Hitler. Indeed, on most impartial reckonings, the USSR took the brunt of fighting the Nazis and defeated the German War machine; they turned the War. It was an awesome, courageous victory in which the costs were enormous; the USSR lost 25 million people in the Second World War, while the United States and Britain lost half a million each. We in Britain crow about defeating Hitler, but the Russians can crow ten times louder. Many USSR villages, towns and cities were destroyed by the fighting and bombing which the USSR suffered while the West delayed opening a second front. The scale of that devastation we cannot imagine, or the long-term cost of putting it right. Yet soon the Brits and the Americans “Won The War” and within months the USSR had been marginalized, denied aid, and was the new enemy, while the Nazi sympathizing groups became the new establishment within the Truman Presidency. Aid was even given to Germany and denied to the USSR. The speed of this transition was amazing. In August 1945 Stalin was supporting the US attack on Japan, as he promised Roosevelt he would, with forces in Manchuria and in October was strongly supporting the formation of the United Nations. Then suddenly in the four months or so before Churchill’s Fulton Missouri speech on 5th March, 1946 the Soviet Union had become the enemy to be armed against. This transition needs a massive re-evaluation. Churchill, the War leader, was part of setting up another war against his hated USSR and receiving adulation for it, but he was exactly fitting the needs of the old pro-nazi brigade. Suddenly, Fascism and the Far Right’s militarism which had caused both World Wars was no longer the problem but Communism, even as Socialists and Communists were being elected to governments throughout eastern and western European.
From 1945 a big propaganda machine kicked in. Churchill and the Truman Americans were discussing nuking the Soviets. It was not practicable, mainly because the US was very short of atomic bombs, but the temptation was there. Stalin found out what was going on and international relations were soured. We make a fuss about the “traitor spies”, but Stalin needed spies; we were nasty allies. Soon, before the second Red Scare and the McCarthyite Movement, it was Socialists, not Fascists who were the traitors who needed hunting down. Within months the Nazi and Fascist sympathizers were rehabilitated and Socialism was the scapegoat. The “Iron Curtain” was put in place by Churchill’s Fulton Missouri speech of 5th March, 1946 and there were “reds under the bed”. Forrestal’s two Atomic tests in July 1946, supposedly to test how battleships stood up to nuclear bombing, showed the USSR that the US was backing arms and the Cold War was on.
Of course, Stalin is supposed to be the bete noir of these events, trying to dominate Eastern Europe. He had carried out evil mass purges in the 30s, the horrific Gulag, and he was a paranoid dictator. But this too had a background, though not a justification. The Tsarist regimes were autocratic and often violent. The Great War led to Germany’s brutal defeat of Russia and chaos with the Revolution. When the Great War ended Churchill as Minister for War led a personal attack on Red Russia which together with a war with Poland until 1921 led to a devastating war in which Bolsheviks were inured to fighting. Lenin was indeed violent. The challenge of holding the USSR together was vast. Stalin came to power without trust and knew as soon as Hitler came to power that Russia would be attacked. He armed for the inevitable fight against the Nazis and the USSR’s defence against the Nazis was magnificent and the most costly in history. At the end of the War he had a massive war machine, which he, too, set about downsizing. He was scavenging for anything that could improve the lot of his hungry, war-weary, devasted people. The USSR armed forces fell from 13-2.8 million while the US forces fell from 12.2-1.6 million.
A Recap -The Journey to 1945.
How industrial militarism got underway – the pioneers.
Becoming a militarized world did not happen by accident. As industrialization took place, it was planned by those who wanted to make and sell manufactured weapons. The early figures like Krupp and Armstrong were pioneer entrepreneurs and engineers out to forge a business. Profits came with economies of scale and they set out to increase scale. The first book looked at the growth of arms manufacturing companies in the 19th century selling arms initially at home and then throughout the world. From Japan to Paraguay, states were persuaded by political vanity, bribery and scares to purchase arms. Then their neighbours could be persuaded to buy some as well. Politicians were taught that force was the name of the game, force against national force. Autocratic leaders had long surrounded themselves with soldiers, but these did not melt away with democracy, but democracy was managed to continue militarism. Usually this involved pushing people towards nationalism and patriotism. States built up their armed forces, went looking for countries to control as colonies like Alexander the Great or Caesar, and then probably went to war. The British elite learned Latin and looked at Rome in their public schools and went out and ran a similar empire with British made weapons. The arms companies ran the show and then provided the wherewithal with industrial scale arms production and profits.
The Great War was about weapons, not territory.
Companies like Krupp, Armstrong, Vickers, Schneider, Mauser, Skoda, BSA, Nobel, Du Pont and Remington became among the biggest industrial companies on the planet. They conversed with Prime Ministers and Emperors, and promoting arms to big and small nations. Arms “races” and wars became normal, and by 1914 there were four great arms races pushing Europe to the edge. Each state was watching the others, and their military build-up, for a decade. Arms companies and warship manufacturers stoked fear. They developed propaganda machines and pushed their agenda in newspapers and through pressure groups. Then, military competition pushed over the edge, into the greatest war of all. Austro-Hungary‘s Skoda had tried to sell arms to Serbia, but failed. It was miffed. Serbia would not buy Skoda arms because Austro-Hungary was her most likely enemy. Then the so-called Pig War ensued between 1906-08, and with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand the Austrian Empire was ready to issue an ultimatum and then invade. This was the starting gun for all those other arms races to start – France-Germany, Germany-Russia, England-Germany and Russia/Serbia-Austro Hungary. The Great War saw the production of arms explode in the greatest output of weapons the world had ever seen, many times over. After the Great War with four years of maximum production and growth, these companies controlled the biggest industry in the world.
The Buried History of Disarmament.
There were many before the Great War who understood the danger of the arms industry and militarism. They included Gladstone, Leo Tolstoy, Bernard Shaw, Keir Hardie, President Wilson, Pope Benedict XV, Bertha von Suttner, Frédéric Passy, Jeanette Rankin, Ramsey McDonald, Charles Trevelyan, Arthur Ponsonby, Bertrand Russell, Maude Roydon, Mahatma Gandhi, Alfred Fried, Jane Addams and many more. They had waged a widespread and articulate war against war, militarism and the arms trade. At this time Britain was seen as an unprincipled imperial aggressor, side-stepping the Hague Peace Conference in 1899 to fight the Boer War. Arms companies had sold weapons to Japan, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, Serbia and many other countries priming them for conflict. During the early years of the century the pacifists named the escalation of arms, pointing out the stupidity of teaching mass murder, the destructiveness of war and the arrogance of rulers and the armaments industrialists. They were right; if murder was wrong, mass murder did not suddenly become patriotic. There was no way round that argument, but the argument did no win. Jingoism, a stirring up of popular warlike patriotism won the day. Jean Jaures was shot to get rid of his opposition. Keir Hardie, the Labour Leader, became a hate figure because he opposed the war, and everybody went off to fight in a euphoria of presumed success. When the War came its horrors mounted month on month. They promised it would be over by Christmas, and the Pope suggested a Christmas Truce which looked like holding with the troops, but it was broken and the carnage went on and on with millions of shells, and then gas, crossing the front to kill and maim.
The Reality of the Great War.
Superficially, the War was about who won, and the patriotic stuff was there on all sides. But soon no-one had won. Everyone was bogged down in the trenches with young soldiers dying at about six thousand a day. The War Poets said it, but everybody knew it. Oh what a lovely War! “Up to your waist in water, Up to your eyes in slush, Using the kind of language, That makes the sergeant blush.” And it was worse than that. Russia collapsed with about three million deaths. Germany eventually ran out of equipment and the people and its fighting collapsed in 1918. The United States had moved from supplying weapons and explosives to engagement. It had it relatively easy, because it only had 117,497 deaths and 204,002 injured, a light burden compared to other countries. Overall, some twenty million died and a further twenty million were injured. The United States partly entered the War because the Britain and France (and Russia, who defaulted) owed so much that the US had to make sure they would repay their debts. They in turn needed Germany to pay reparations in order to pay the Americans. The debts of the War crippled the economy of the world through to Hitler.
Yet it was the personal reality of it which bit. People had seen themselves killing and being killed. The reality of War was horrific with bodies in mud and craters across the horizon. Murder destroys you. The German High Command invented the myth that the Jews had stabbed them in the back to disguise the fact that they had pursued the War and they had lost. The biblical idea of the scapegoat, the one who would carry the sins, was vested in the Jewish race to get the military off the hook. Really, everyone knew that this was the travesty of civilization. It was the War to End All Wars. It must never happen again. Yet, it was worse than that. The returning soldiers carried flu around the world and at least fifty million more people, weakened by the war, died all across the globe. Two great tidal waves of grief traversed the globe touching all those mourning a hundred million dead and injured. Then, there were those suffering PTSD – full of rage, silent, sleepless, raw at the inhumanity they had seen. Often, they took it out on their women – another brutal undercurrent to the War. Then, frozen winters without food, resources, young people, fuel, shelter in Russia and Eastern Europe. The suffering cannot be imagined. So, millions just tried to cope, but underneath they knew War must be addressed and ended. The statesman of the era were chastened. They had often bought into chauvinism and the arms trade, and knew that the sale of weapons was the underlying problem. As Lord Grey, British Foreign Secretary in the decade before the War said, “The moral is obvious; it is that great armaments lead inevitably to war.” There was widespread repentance at this false trust in militarism. The Tragedy is that is clear understanding was defeated in a mere twenty five years; and few understand how it was defeated and the militarists have hidden it…
Postponing the Great Geneva Disarmament Conference.
Alongside the great pre-war pacifists, another generation emerged who knew war was wrong because they were in it. Vera Brittain, Lord Robert Cecil, Clem Attlee, Arthur Henderson, George Lansbury, R.H.Tawney, Charles Raven, Philip Noel-Baker, the explorer Nansen, Field-Marshall Sir William Robertson and even the main architect of Britain’s War effort, Lloyd George, saw the problem of militarism and were determined to do something about it. Pacifists including Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, The Anglican Pacifist Fellowship, In France the ex-servicemen, the anciens combattants, shared pacifism with a primary school movement in which children understood how militarism was wrong. There was a massive world-wide popular movement which involved tens of millions of people, still perhaps the biggest in human history. The movement grew. Key was the Catholic Church which under Benedict XV had opposed WW1 throughout. He described it as a “useless massacre” which did not endear him to the fighting statesmen. The Catholic Church mobilized millions for peace. There were rallies of thousands of women well before Hitler thought of mass rallies. The Anglican Church also woke up. People saw the problem was arms and wanted to end the power of the Merchants of Death, as they came to be known. They had pushed arms, naval confrontation and military rivalry; millions lay dead while the arms manufacturers made their profits. Their weapons were undeniably evil. Statesmen and millions of ordinary people sought and worked for world disarmament to make the Great War the War to end all Wars.
But the British Conservative Government, the key one at this stage, did not co-operate. The Coalition Conservatives learned to prevaricate on disarmament until 1924. In the 1924 second election, a minority Labour Government was overthrown in unusual circumstances. A fake telegram, purporting to come from the USSR Minister, Zinoviev, was acquired by the Conservative Party and published in the Daily Mail four days before the election purportedly telling Socialists to rise up and have a revolution. Labour was actually resolutely democratic, and distrusted the Soviets, but the mud stuck and Labour lost enough seats to face a new Conservative Government. This Government, with Churchill as Chancellor buckled down against disarmament. It did as little as it could between 1924-9 and successfully held off the Disarmament Conference. This delay was crucial. It allowed the arms companies to organize themselves. In 1927 an arms company paid William Shearer $20,000 for six weeks work on disrupting the 1927 Coolidge Naval Conference on reducing warships. He and others were successful. Lord Cecil resigned from the Government over its failure to agree naval reductions. Britain wanted to hang on to its navy and was in rivalry with the States. The arms companies were now in control behind the scenes. But the public was for the League of Nations and against the Conservatives and in June 1929 Labour was returned with twenty seven more seats than the Conservatives in a minority Government. So again the momentum for the Disarmament Conference speeded up.
They continued through a decade, an amazing programme of persistence. This now-ignored disarmament movement came to a head in the great Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932, backed by organisations representing nearly half of the world’s population, especially Christian and women’s organisations, along with most of the world’s statesmen. It had been planned since 1925 and was a long time coming, but come it did, backed in Britain by the King, Archbishops, Prime Ministers, military leaders. Sadly, before it started Nansen, the explorer and humanitarian and Stresemann, the key German politician, was also dead of a stroke.
No, Appeasement is Different.
You are now entering a historical black hole. The history of disarmament has been covered up and papered over by those who want it to disappear. Mainly, one word has done it – “appeasement”. Churchill was against Appeasement and Disarmament is appeasement – End of Discussion. This is a travesty of history. “Appeasement” was British leaders running the Conservative Government in 1938-9 who were pro-Nazi even when war was likely, because they were against socialism. Britain was rearming fast at the time, so it was not about not arming.
Churchill saw Hitler coming, but so, too, did everyone at the Disarmament Conference, even Sir John Simon, and knew disarmament would sideline him and the Nazis for ever. Churchill, of course, was against disarmament and for the Navy, and was one of the British politicians undermining the Conference. Later, he was fighting members of his own party who were appeasers and in the Conservative Government. They were the “Big Four”, Chamberlain, Simon, Hoare and Halifax, the same Simon who had scuppered the Great Geneva Disarmament Conference.. So, Appeasement was not disarmament. They were different in time and focus. Churchill had great respect for the disarmers like Lord Cecil and Clem Attlee, and the attempt at World Disarmament occurred in 1932 before Hitler came to power. Appeasement came five years later from Fascist Sympathizing Conservatives, a group who for obvious reasons later tried to disappear..
Airbrushing Disarmament out of History.
World Disarmament has been covered up because it makes sense, it nearly happened before Hitler came to power and the arms companies do not want us to even think about it as a possibility. It is also covered up because British Conservative politicians prevented it. We did so because we were jealous of the United States as the new world superpower and wanted a big Navy so that we could control the Empire. It was that pathetic. The whole world was waiting on the acceptance of President Hoover’s plan, and we Brits were jealous, and put it into treacle. They discussed treacling in Cabinet. Sir John Simon funked it. Lloyd George said that “Sir John Simon sat on the fence so long that the iron entered his soul” Eden expressed his contempt for him, and Harold Nicholson, an ally of Churchill, just called him “a toad and a worm”. It was an appalling event in British history which opened the way to the Second World War before Hitler came to power. So we try to blot it out.
The Conference was also undermined by the Japanese invading Manchuria, the arms companies using agents to prevent it working, and the various military people at the Conference, but mainly it was the British. If we had worked with Hoover and the United States disarmament would have happened. All aggressive weapons – bombers, howitzers, tanks and submarines – would have been closed down, and the rest cut by a third immediately. Hitler storming about the unfairness of the Versailles outcome, would have had nothing to rant about and could show his armpits to the doctor. When in January 1933 the Oxford Union voted overwhelmingly that “This House would not fight for King and Country” it was voting its contempt at the handling of the Geneva Disarmament Conference. Ordinary people the world over did not understand what had happened, because the Conference just stalled. They continued to believe disarmament must take place, because all of this was done in secret, in committees by politicians committed to doing nothing. The Conservative Party said it was a peace party when we were rearming and then went for appeasement. The arms companies had won and soon they would be quietly back in business.
American Corporatist Capitalism.
By 1918 the American economy was several times bigger than Britain’s and the dominant economy in the world as immigrants poured in, resources were opened up, oil became abundant and the Midwest prairies produced their crops. But American capitalism had been turned by the Great War in two respects. First, the arms companies had grown faster than the others and were quite dominant among the New York Capitalist elite. They were used to running the show and running Washington. In the twenties they controlled both political parties, dominated the world economy and knew only expansion, even while Europe still struggled.
Then in 1929 American capitalism faced the crisis of the Wall Street Crash. Often the big capitalists like Du Pont had got out in time and had vast amounts of capital. They bought up other businesses, like General Motors in the case of the Du Ponts. Much of their capital could not easily be used in the domestic US economy in recession. They were already deeply engaged in financing the German economy and had Fascist sympathies, so money flowed to Germany and its rearmament, and also similarly to the USSR. They were still running the show internationally. But in December 1932 they faced Franklin D. Roosevelt, one of their own class who had turned to attack, “the money-makers in the Temple” in his inaugural address and was deeply critical of their capitalism and prepared to act for the public good. They actually tried a US Fascist coup attempt in 1934 against the “Socialist” Roosevelt, but it failed thanks to the whistle blowing of General Smedley Butler. That is another suppressed bit of history. Then they tried to turn elections, but were again defeated by Roosevelt.
The Pro-Nazi Americans
But the US capitalist elite had no constraints on their international business and they moved to support Hitler. The Harriman Bank had long been lending funds to Thyssen, Hitler’s patron, and as Hitler moved to power, they became the conduit for heavy US loans funding Nazi economic development and rearmament. We ask how Germany moved from an economy on its knees in 1932/3 to one able to defeat and subdue Europe in 1939, the answer is mainly that the Nazis were enabled by finance and munitions from the United States, channeled especially by the Harriman Bank and its key representative Harriman Bush.. The help of banks and munition companies, often with Fascist sympathies, made the Nazis able to fight the Second World War. The munitions companies also encouraged and funded Fascism in many other countries, helping create the chaos that supposedly required arms to sort them out. The War between Japan and China and the Spanish Civil War got the arms gravy train going again. Thus, the process of funding and promoting arms sales defeated the great peace and disarmament movement of the early 1930s. Both World Wars had the same main cause – those who pushed munitions and made money out of them and profited from war. The Second World War was thus formed against large populations in most major countries avid for peace and disarmament. Few people understood how capital and the arms companies had undermined disarmament and opened the door to World War Two. American funding of the Nazis carried on right up to Pearl Harbour.
The World’s Biggest Ever Industrial Complex.
The Allies eventually won the Second World War in the greatest military drama in human history. The actual victory over Hitler and Fascism was such a dominant story that winning the War dominated the munitions transformation of the years 1935-45; it was vast. In fact, of course, military manufacture and finance mushroomed in Germany, France for a while, Italy, Japan and especially in the USSR and the United States. The military machine amounted to perhaps more than a quarter of the entire world economy, the biggest industrial complex the world had ever seen. The Second World War created a militarized world with mega arms companies, enormous armies, bases throughout the world and a generation whose business was fighting. It is the elephant in the room and we ignore it. A massive organizational change took place in the five to ten years of the War and its preparation. During this period arms companies, defence departments, scientific research, technological direction, the military establishments, transport, information gathering and many other areas of life were all integrated into the military machine. Such a vast establishment was not going to disappear, especially in the victorious nations, without serious planning. It was to drive for its place in the continuing post-war world, and it won.
World War Two and the Construction of Peace.
But it faced a mighty, uphill task. The Great War had been a horror beyond imagining, and tens of millions were determined to fashion disarmament, and now another twenty one years later one even worse had taken place. Militarism had a dirty name, personified in the frog-marching Fascists. Many people remembered the Geneva Disarmament Conference of 1932 had been defeated. A War of unimaginable proportions had been loosed on the world with atrocities and genocide in the Holocaust, the far East, the vast spaces of Eastern Europe and around the globe. Some seventy million had died. Millions were walking around with PTSD, or still living with charred flesh and bombed houses. Millions more were mourning husbands, sons, daughters and colleagues. They faced the poverty of rationing small bits of food, queuing for necessities and shivering through cold winters with no fuel because War Lays Waste. There were some 1.9 billion soldiers serving in World War Two, and for most their deepest conviction was not about who won or lost. They knew War was wrong, wrong, wrong. The United Nations was formed largely by Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace, before Roosevelt died. It was set up with some commitment to peace and disarmament. Although this was quickly dissipated, millions hoped for something better. More than this, Fascism had fought the war and Socialism had been attacked. Now socialists would have to rebuild the world. So, when the British Election took place there was no question that Clement Attlee should be in charge in July 1945 even before the war ended, because Churchill the War Leader and the old militarist, was not the man for the job. The nation was grateful to Churchill as war leader, though millions still hated him, but they were not going to have a militarist in charge. So, Churchill looked for allies across the pond.
Thus, after the War, while hundreds of millions of people were trying to get back to ordinary living, a titanic battle was going on for the shape of the post-war world around the military. At one level the Government in Britain were clearing streets, repairing buildings and roads, getting soldiers back to work, putting together a national health service, nationalized industries, rationing, the Welfare state, prefab housing, milk and orange juice for kids, addressing shortages of food, clothes, furniture, caring for distressed families and getting coal distributed for the winter, and at another level the post-world war world had to be addressed. Immediately, it was easy. The Government was bankrupt and, provided the armed forces were treated well, economies in the military had to be made. But, in this theatre Britain did not count. It was intent on its domestic recovery with a clapped-out Empire.
The United States and the Truman Era.
The United States dominated the world. In 1945, as a result of the devastation in Europe, Russia, China, Japan and elsewhere the US accounted for an amazing half of the world monetized economy. It was owed money by the other Allies and had a buoyant economy through war production. What the United States did would sway history. Its internal politics would be played out across the globe. Here, too, millions were trying to put together their lives again after serving in the military or undertaking arduous war work, but something else was going on in Washington, the Pentagon and among what was soon to be known as the military-industrial complex. It was working at its own survival, and the continuation of the war machine it had constructed. The people who were in a position to do this were hard, knew what they wanted and knew how to run the American system. Often, as with John Foster Dulles, Alan Dulles, James Forrestal, Averell Harriman, Prescott Bush, Douglas McArthur and others they had been part of the American financial elite dealing with the Nazis and their sympathies were there and against Socialism.. During the War events they were often in charge inside Government and strategically placed. Of course, some quick footwork was needed. The Fascist sympathizers melted into top posts and sought to turn the West against the Socialist USSR, the real heroes of the fight against Hitler. The US Right Wing was forming things their way long before Roosevelt died, fighting him for control of the United States Government. They got rid of Roosevelt’s Vice-President, Wallace, who had a strategic international perspective and replaced him with a little man, Truman, who would largely do their bidding. That did not fully work out, but in the big scheme of events their agenda won and the world eventually rearmed. We look at this process.
Demonizing the USSR.
Military systems need enemies and the only one available was the USSR. It was the West’s greatest ally against Hitler. Indeed, on most impartial reckonings, the USSR took the brunt of fighting the Nazis and defeated the German War machine; they turned the War. It was an awesome, courageous victory in which the costs were enormous; the USSR lost 25 million people in the Second World War, while the United States and Britain lost half a million each. We in Britain crow about defeating Hitler, but the Russians can crow ten times louder. Many USSR villages, towns and cities were destroyed by the fighting and bombing which the USSR suffered while the West delayed opening a second front. The scale of that devastation we cannot imagine, or the long-term cost of putting it right. Yet soon the Brits and the Americans “Won The War” and within months the USSR had been marginalized, denied aid, and was the new enemy, while the Nazi sympathizing groups became the new establishment within the Truman Presidency. Aid was even given to Germany and denied to the USSR. The speed of this transition was amazing. In August 1945 Stalin was supporting the US attack on Japan, as he promised Roosevelt he would, with forces in Manchuria and in October was strongly supporting the formation of the United Nations. Then suddenly in the four months or so before Churchill’s Fulton Missouri speech on 5th March, 1946 the Soviet Union had become the enemy to be armed against. This transition needs a massive re-evaluation. Churchill, the War leader, was part of setting up another war against his hated USSR and receiving adulation for it, but he was exactly fitting the needs of the old pro-nazi brigade. Suddenly, Fascism and the Far Right’s militarism which had caused both World Wars was no longer the problem but Communism, even as Socialists and Communists were being elected to governments throughout eastern and western European.
From 1945 a big propaganda machine kicked in. Churchill and the Truman Americans were discussing nuking the Soviets. It was not practicable, mainly because the US was very short of atomic bombs, but the temptation was there. Stalin found out what was going on and international relations were soured. We make a fuss about the “traitor spies”, but Stalin needed spies; we were nasty allies. Soon, before the second Red Scare and the McCarthyite Movement, it was Socialists, not Fascists who were the traitors who needed hunting down. Within months the Nazi and Fascist sympathizers were rehabilitated and Socialism was the scapegoat. The “Iron Curtain” was put in place by Churchill’s Fulton Missouri speech of 5th March, 1946 and there were “reds under the bed”. Forrestal’s two Atomic tests in July 1946, supposedly to test how battleships stood up to nuclear bombing, showed the USSR that the US was backing arms and the Cold War was on.
Of course, Stalin is supposed to be the bete noir of these events, trying to dominate Eastern Europe. He had carried out evil mass purges in the 30s, the horrific Gulag, and he was a paranoid dictator. But this too had a background, though not a justification. The Tsarist regimes were autocratic and often violent. The Great War led to Germany’s brutal defeat of Russia and chaos with the Revolution. When the Great War ended Churchill as Minister for War led a personal attack on Red Russia which together with a war with Poland until 1921 led to a devastating war in which Bolsheviks were inured to fighting. Lenin was indeed violent. The challenge of holding the USSR together was vast. Stalin came to power without trust and knew as soon as Hitler came to power that Russia would be attacked. He armed for the inevitable fight against the Nazis and the USSR’s defence against the Nazis was magnificent and the most costly in history. At the end of the War he had a massive war machine, which he, too, set about downsizing. He was scavenging for anything that could improve the lot of his hungry, war-weary, devasted people. The USSR armed forces fell from 13-2.8 million while the US forces fell from 12.2-1.6 million.
The militarists had to destroy
the possibility of peace. They also had to develop a collective amnesia where
the fifteen years struggle against the merchants of death to prevent the
preconditions of the Second World War was forgotten under the mantra – “Of
course we had to fight Hitler”. Meanwhile, those in Britain, France and the
United States, who had backed Fascism and the Nazis – the militarists, arms
companies, financiers and members of the aristocracies – washed themselves down
and redressed themselves as Fighting for Democracy. The military-industrial
complex was able to perpetuate their position and succeeded in making a continual
arming world in which the munitions business would flourish and grow. The
western propaganda machine fostered by the military-industrial complex was the
main architect of the Cold War for the next half century. Its dishonesty has
never been owned. Here we look at the construction of that fully armed world
system, against the good will of many. Those who wanted an end to war and
create a world of peace were sidelined and defeated again.
The militarists had to destroy the possibility of peace. They also had to develop a collective amnesia where the fifteen years struggle against the merchants of death to prevent the preconditions of the Second World War was forgotten under the mantra – “Of course we had to fight Hitler”. Meanwhile, those in Britain, France and the United States, who had backed Fascism and the Nazis – the militarists, arms companies, financiers and members of the aristocracies – washed themselves down and redressed themselves as Fighting for Democracy. The military-industrial complex was able to perpetuate their position and succeeded in making a continual arming world in which the munitions business would flourish and grow. The western propaganda machine fostered by the military-industrial complex was the main architect of the Cold War for the next half century. Its dishonesty has never been owned. Here we look at the construction of that fully armed world system, against the good will of many. Those who wanted an end to war and create a world of peace were sidelined and defeated again.
