Eugene Debs Was Jailed for Speaking Out Against WWI, 100 Years Ago This Week
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
“The working class have never yet had a voice in declaring
war,” Debs declared. “If war is right, let it be declared
by the people – you, who have your lives to lose.”
Those were dangerous words in June 1918.
As long as war remains wildly profitable, war will continue - and war always has been profitable, and likely always will be - right up until the point that there’s nothing left, and the profiteers realise they can’t eat a number in a ledger.
No, this is a relatively new phenomenon that arose after WWI, when warfare became highly industrialized and too costly to fight personally for the rich.
During WWI, the aristocracy led from the front, as was their traditional calling, and they were mowed down in droves just like the most common soldier.
For the British, an entire generation of their sons were killed at Marne, Verdun, the Somme, Ypres, and other large battles, and the effect was stark:
At the outset of the 1870's, the British aristocracy could rightly consider themselves the most fortunate people on earth: they held the lion's share of land, wealth, and power in the world's greatest empire. By the end of the 1930's they had lost not only a generation of sons in the First World War, but also much of their prosperity, prestige and political significance. [1]
This largely held true for the Austro-Hungarian elite (they were decimated and the empire was torn apart), the Germans, and every other participant in the fight.
Note that historically, European aristocrats were military elites and were descended from the knightly class. The whole reason they were a cut above the population was because they would fight and take the danger first. The realization after WWI that war was simply a number's game doomed the legitimacy of their leadership in all countries.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/750411.The_Decline_and_F...
Yes, the early 20th century was a turning point, but it only changed who was profiting.
Even at the turn of the century, the foundation of the wealth of the British aristocracy rested on ownership of land, agriculture, and control of the Empire. The Great War disrupted all three greatly.
It was mainly the merchant and upper middle class that owned stocks, ran businesses, and profited from the war, with a tiny fraction of aristocrats benefiting.
Most of the rest saw the value of their land go towards zero, their manors used for wartime purposes while their servants were conscripted away, their sons killed on the field of battle, and confiscatory tax rates imposed to help fund the war effort.
This pattern was repeated again in WW2.
There's a reason Downton Abbey is set on the eve of WW1 and goes into the interwar period — that's when the British aristocracy was systematically taken apart piece by piece.
Common people largely supported monarchical, aristocratic governments before WW1. One reason was because their elites that actually put their money (and their lives) on the line for their nation... although sometimes with disastrous consequences.
Note that historically, the world wars were when wealth inequality dropped the most quickly. The US raised marginal tax rates to 90% during WW2, and most wealth was real assets, which obviously suffered greatly all throughout Europe. In a total war, everyone can give up their lives, but the wealthy can also lose their wealth.
You wrote that wars being a profitable enterprise is a relatively new phenomenon that arose after WW1. What I'm saying is that pre-WW1 wars were already a profitable enterprise (for that aristocracy - exactly in terms of extra land, etc), and that WW1 only changed who profited from them.
And for example, U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last 15 years is ~4,424. Being in the army in the U.S., UK, or nearly any advanced nation today isn't quite the meat grinder that WWI was.
I mean one of the big ones is that WWI was atrocious for infantry because the tactics were 19th century, but the weapons were 20th century. IE generals were fighting the war like there weren't machines guns, chemical weapons and a laundry list of revolutionary developments that made outdated tactics just devastating.
A lot of wars have been fought since then and our tactics have adjusted quite a bit. Which means we're generally not sending wave after wave of men into entrenched enemy fortifications and railing about their cowardice when those assaults fail or saluting their "heroism" when those units are wiped out to the man.
We've got better protection and better medical care leading to higher survivability. We're not in a state of total war, and we're not anywhere near close to talking about lost generations from current conflicts.
Probably most of the posh people you know came back whole. Well that didn't always happen and amount of risk certainly tempers many peoples decisions about whether to serve in the military if they have options.
And frankly given a choice between serving in the darkest days of WW1 and a current conflict wouldn't be a tough choice for many soldiers.
Incidentally, in the Civil War and all previous Anglo-American wars, you could literally buy your way out of a draft.
War is popular. I mean, look at how much of our modern entertainment glorifies war. The military is generally and genuinely the most popular public institution. The problem is, when a war loses its momentum, people lose their enthusiasm really quickly. People forget that the Iraq War, for example, actually had majority support when it broke out.
War profiteers certainly exist, but they are a tiny minority, even of the military-industrial complex. There is a much larger segment of industry that is hurt by war: war means a loss of external markets, disruption of supply chains, increased cost of resources, higher taxes, lower internal demand, and massive destruction of property (should the war be fought on your soil).
War is not profitable. The one thing that war is most closely connected with is higher taxes. The inability to pay for wars is probably the single largest contributor to the downfall of governments in recorded history.
Saddam Hussein had been playing a game of pretending that he had WMDs throughout most of the 1990s up to the Iraq War. The US intelligence community took those claims too much at face value, and when the UN inspectors went in to evaluate the evidence, they didn't say that Iraq had no WMDs, they said they couldn't find evidence of WMDs but the Iraqis were being too shifty to draw a firm conclusion. Unfortunately for Saddam, the Bush administration took this only reinforcing earlier beliefs that Iraq was fundamentally untrustworthy and hell-bent on WMDs, and was willing to go to war even without rock-solid evidence (unlike the EU, which saw the lack of evidence as a good reason to do nothing).
And calling modern volunteer soldiers poor is an insult. Underpaid would be fair.
And yes, I want citations. I want you to cite these disruptive events. I want you to actually prove your point.
And your specious and slanderous statement that my arguments are similar to those made against the civil rights movement can go to hell. There's a world of difference between walking into a restaurant and waiting to be served versus walking into a speech and coordinating to shout and heckle the speaker so that they can't be heard. And if you can't grasp the difference, what could possibly be the point of discussing this further with you?
The Espionage Act that they were convicted under is, of course, still on the books, and now primarily used against whistleblowers and leakers.
[1]: https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...
Which is why a libertarian had a really odd choice to make last election: go with someone who has hollowed out the constitution in her time in office as much as possible, or go with someone who promises to hollow out different parts of it. Or not vote.
Could you provide a source for that?
Or even this one: https://www.longislandpress.com/2017/01/14/obamas-legacy-his...
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/jan/10/...
(That's if you live in a swing state; in a solidly red or blue state, "whatever the rest of the country decides" is really your only option.)
Relevant Christopher Hitchens: https://youtu.be/4Z2uzEM0ugY
It's primarily used against leakers. Throwing "whistleblowers" in there makes the statement misleading, since none of the leakers the Obama administration prosecuted under that act were whistleblowers.
The controversy was that some of the leakers prosecuted were journalists, not whistleblowers.
His version of "good" was that he was a massive racist. Among other things, he resegregated the federal government, ending the careers of many who were not white.
He also did not like freedom of speech or the press. He prevented magazines and newspapers he disagreed with from going through the mail. Nice piece of work.
So it's not about one man at all. It's about ends-vs.-means and the importance of respecting inconvenient rights.
Most people consider him a progressive.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-best-way-to-tell-...
Donald Trump bears little resemblance to Reagan or Lincoln, but he is still a Republican. Wilson, likewise, was a progressive - even if he did other things we might consider anti-progressive.
The definition of progressivism, like Republicanism (and conservatism, and liberalism), has also changed significantly in the last century. Prohibition of alcohol, for example, was a central plank of most progressives of Woodrow's era, but it is not considered such now. Likewise, opposition to racial inequality is often associated with modern progressivism, but it was not so explicitly supported by many early progressives.
as opposed to conservatives? this is a disingenuous and useless distinction
Protip: If it's really that "good" you won't need to make an end run around the constitution to get it done.
I worry about my own teenage son getting drafted for a pointless war. It seems we couldn't be trying harder to repeat the actions that lead up to the depression and 1930s pre-war any better. Replace Japan with China, maybe Germany with Russia and you can start arguing that we don't need trade with these countries. Destructive tariffs, breaking trade connections that should have been reducing the appeal for conflict.
It makes we worry that we have no real leverage against the modern-day imperialists that are increasingly sounding their trumpets of war.
Uh, false? One of the major factors in the breakout of WWI was that all of the major European powers had massive, divisive conflicts (largely related to class), and their leaders felt that a war would be a good way to help bring unity to their own country while looking over at their competitors and feeling that a war would push the other countries over the edge.
I'm not saying there's any perfect formula for only using warfare for protection. Who counts as deserving protection? What exactly are the circumstances in which war is justified? How aggressively should war be used even for protection in any particular circumstance? these are difficult and contentious issues.
However there absolutely are people out there who don't care a fig for any of that, will gleefully use war to further their aims and will pursue it to their maximum advantage if free to do so. Those people have to be stopped somehow.
If I may rephrase my previous comment, war is a like a tsunami, it's absurd to stand up to it, find voids and wait until it's over.
Was it that clear? I think the difference between sides was on the sense of scale. Before the war, eugenics was in vogue, Jewish people were hated everywhere, the idea of lesser races wasn't even questioned, and a lot of ideas that Nazi German executed on were inspired from across the Atlantic. What the 3rd Reich did was package all these ideas into a formal ideology and industrialized death for the 'undesirables'. IMO it was less of 'good vs. evil' and more 'not-good vs. evil'.
But it is critical to understand/remember that those (racial motivations) were Not the underlying cause of the war. Had Hitler not started off with the lebensraum gag, nobody would have given a damn about it - in practical terms, barring a few strongly worded speeches and possible protests lodged with various German ambassadors.
Claiming to fight hatred might have flown well in the media, and that’s one of the reasons the whole antisemitism and eugenics business started to be disliked - because of its association with the 3rd Reich. But no government at the time, a time when all were busy recovering from WWI, would have bothered to send troops to fight the gassing of a few million Jews.
Even in recent years/decades, far too many near-genocides (of some African tribes by other African tribes), and currently, the case of the Rohingya moslems in the Burma - all it garners is sharp criticism, occasional sanctions, and a lot tall talking by the UN. And the current level of awareness and popular dislike of these issues is far greater than in the time of WWII.
> “I know of no reason why the workers should fight for what the capitalists own,” ... “I will never go to war for a capitalist government,”
It is ironic how later “socialist” country manage to kill their own civilians.