The war to end all wars?
Rashed Rahman
November 11, 2018 marked the centenary of the end of World
War I (WWI). The Armistice signed on that date by the German and French
protagonists came amidst a vow on all sides that the industrial scale massacre
witnessed in European trenches and battlefields elsewhere should mark WWI as
the ‘war to end all wars’. To illustrate the sentiment, it only needs reminding
that 10 million soldiers and six million civilians were killed during 1914-18. From
the British-occupied colonial Subcontinent came 1.3 million soldiers, many of
them from Punjab. The deaths amongst them totalled almost 75,000 in the major
battles at the Somme, Ypres and other battlefields throughout Europe and
elsewhere. Their courage and valour being known to their British commanders,
they were often the first to be thrown at the enemy in frontal assaults through
barbed wire-infested, muddy fields to be mowed down by the relatively new
weapon of mass destruction – the machine gun. This role and the cost in Indian
lives gave birth to the phrase ‘cannon fodder’.
The war was the outcome of the rivalry between older
colonial-imperialist powers such as France and Britain, and the new rising
power Germany over the latter’s ambition for a redivision of the world, benefiting
it with expansion into new colonies taken away from the older imperialist
powers. The Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman Empires aligned in this ambition
with Germany, with most of Europe being on the other side.
In the event, the defeat of Germany and its allies in 1918
came at a huge human and material cost for both sides. The humiliating terms
and crippling reparations imposed on Germany led to the resentment against the
victors that fed into the rise of Nazism in Germany (preceded by the emergence
of fascism in Italy). During the war, the Russian Revolution, first democratic,
then socialist, in 1917 changed history. The Great Depression of the late 1920s
and 30s produced the kind of economic and political crisis that fed directly
into Hitler’s revanchism.
The Treaty of Versailles that sealed the end of hostilities
dictated such humiliating terms to Germany that it could be regarded as one of
the main causes of World War II (WWII) breaking out a bare 21 years later in
1939. During that interregnum, the tendency of the capitalist system towards
periodic crises played out with a vengeance, condemning millions in the
developed and developing world to penury and starvation. While the capitalist
powers were unable to undo the Soviet Union despite 22 imperialist powers
intervening militarily to tilt the scales in favour of a restoration of the
overthrown Czarist monarchy in a bloody civil war that lasted till 1922, they
now saw the rise of communism as the biggest threat to their global hegemony.
Even before full scale world war broke out in 1939 with
Hitler’s march into Poland (or at least that half ceded to it by the
Ribbentrop-Molotov no-war pact between Germany and the Soviet Union), the
Spanish civil war that raged 1936-39 proved the dress rehearsal for the mass
slaughter to come in 1939-45. The brunt of that fascist slaughter was visited
on the Soviet Union, which lost over 26 million soldiers and civilians at the
hands of Hitler’s hordes, a toll greater than all the rest of the Allies in the
field against the Axis powers (Germany, Italy and Japan). To argue that it was
the Soviet Union that gave the greatest sacrifice and defeated Hitler would be
no exaggeration. Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the surprise invasion of the
Soviet Union in mid-1941 despite having signed a no-war pact with the sole
socialist state at that time, which saw the war as another inter-imperialist
one and manouevred to stay out of the conflict, extracted a human and material
toll accompanied by huge forces arrayed on either side across the length and
breadth of European Russia that even today beggars belief. Between 1941 and
1945, the Soviet Union fought against the Nazi hordes virtually alone, Europe
having been overrun and occupied by Germany, Britain retreating from the Continent
to wage an air war of attrition, and the US only reluctantly entering the war
after the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The
western allies concentrated for many years on nibbling away at the periphery of
the territory occupied by the Axis powers before the 1944 D-Day invasion of
continental Europe. Until then, the brunt of the war against Hitler fell to the
lot of the Soviet Union.
The Allies’ 1945 victory reshaped the post-war world. Soviet
forces not only rolled back the Nazi tide from Soviet territory, they liberated
Germany (at least its eastern half, including Berlin) and many Eastern European
countries. What followed were tacit and declared agreements between the western
Allies and the Soviet Union for a division of Europe between the socialist east
and the capitalist west. Actual war was replaced by a Cold War in which both
sides jostled for their own space. This new world 'disorder' finally came to an
end in 1989-91 when a rolling trend demolished Eastern European socialism and led
to the implosion of the Soviet Union.
It seemed in 1991 that the victory of capitalism over
socialism was so complete that theses and slogans to the effect that ‘There is
no alternative (to neo-liberal capitalism and bourgeois parliamentary democracy)’
and ‘The end of history’ became received wisdom. However, the crowing pundits
of capitalism’s triumph overlooked the tendency of periodic crises inherent in
the structure and functioning of the capitalist system. Unregulated, expanding
globally, capitalism’s juggernaut seemed unstoppable in the 1990s and early 21st
century. However, the system upended all the pundits by the 2007-08 crisis
emanating from the financialisation of the global economy, a development that
saw the final dominance of finance capital over industrial and other forms, and
whose fragility became evident when the sub-prime default crisis in the US
incrementally rocked the world capitalist system. The costs of the crisis were largely
borne by the poor and working people, while the rich, powerful and dominant
capitalists were rescued through bailouts with taxpayers’ money.
The post-Cold War world also saw the global dominance of
capitalism accompanied by new wars, largely in what was once called the Third
World. The inaptly named War on Terror after 9/11, declared by George Bush, has
translated into endless military interventions in Third world countries such as
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria by the US-led west to engender regime change
in countries having governments or leaderships considered inimical to the west
and Israel’s interests. These interventions, despite the halt of the western
military juggernaut in Syria with the help of Russia and Iran, have led to a virtual
state of permanent war in South Asia, the Middle East and the wider region. Its
effects have spilt over into the heartland of capitalism in the form of
terrorism.
Capitalist imperialism has delivered us into perpetual war,
which feeds the war machine and armaments industry that is the engine driving
western economies. Perhaps the time has come for the countries that have been
the victims of this perpetual war as well as those affected by its fallout to
come together under the banner of seeking permanent peace instead of the
Armageddon threatened by warring or near-warring states, some of whom are armed
with nuclear weapons.
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