⧠29 The imperialist war of 1914 to 1918

It was inevitable that the imperialist policy of the 'Great Powers' should sooner or later bring them into collison. Indisputably, the game of grab played by all the 'Great Powers' was the real cause of the war. Only an idiot can continue to believe that the war took place because the Serbs killed the Austrian crown prince or because the Germans invaded Belgium. At the outset, there was much dispute as to who was responsible for the catastrophe. The German capitalists maintained that Russia was the aggressor, whereas the Russians proclaimed everywhere that Germany began it. In Britain the word went round that the British had entered the struggle on behalf of 'gallant little Belgium'. In France, everyone was writing, screaming, and singing to prove how gloriously France was behaving in defence of the heroic Belgian nation. Simultaneously in Austria and Germany it was being trumpeted that these two countries were repelling a Cossack invasion and were waging a purely defensive war.

From first to last, this was all nonsense; it was a fraud upon the workers. The fraud was necessary to enable the bourgeoisie to force their soldiers into battle. It was not the first time that the bourgeoisie had used such methods. We have previously seen that the trust magnates introduced high tariffs in order that, while plundering their fellowcountrymen, they could more readily conquer the foreign market. For them, therefore, the customs duties were a means of attack. But the bourgeoisie insisted that the duties were imposed in order to protect home industry. The same thing happened in the case of the war. The essence of the imperialist war which was to subject the world to the yoke of financial capital lay in this, that in it all were aggressors. Today this is as clear as clear can be. The lackeys of tsardom declared that they were defending themselves. But when the November revolution opened the ministerial archives and when the secret treaties were published, documentary evidence was furnished that both the tsar and Kerensky, in concert with the British and the French, were carrying on the war for the sake of the spoils, that they wanted to seize Constantinople, to plunder Turkey and Persia, and to steal Galicia from Austria. These things are now as plain as that two and two make four.

The German imperialists were also in the end unmasked. Think of the Brest-Litovsk treaty; think of the plunderings in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Finland. The German revolution has likewise led to many disclosures. We have learned from documentary evidence that Germany was ready to attack for the sake of loot, and that she had designed to seize vast quantities of foreign territories and colonies. What about the 'noble' Allies? They, too, have been fully unmasked. No one can believe in their nobility after the Versailles treaty. They have stripped Germany bare; they have demanded a war indemnity of twelve and a half milliards; they have taken the whole German fleet and all the German colonies; they have seized most of the locomotives and the milch cows as earnest for the indemnity. They have ravaged Russia in the north and in the south. They, too, have been fighting for plunder.

The communist bolsheviks said all this at the very outset of the war. But at that time few believed them. Today, everyone outside a lunatic asylum can see that it is true. Financial capital is a greedy and bloodthirsty robber, no matter what the nationality of the capitalists may be. It is all the same whether they are Russians, Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Japanese, or Americans.

We see, then, that when we are talking of the imperialist war it is absurd to say that one imperialist is guilty and that another is blameless, to say that some imperialists were the aggressors and that others were on the defensive. All such assertions are made only in order to fool the workers. In actual fact, the Powers had all begun with aggressions upon the lesser peoples in whose lands they established their colonies; they all entertained designs of world-wide plunder; in every land alike the capitalists hoped to subject the whole world to the financial capital of their own country.

Once it had started, the war could not fail to be a world war. The reason is plain. Almost all the world had been partitioned among the 'Great Powers', and the Powers were intimately connected by the ties of a world-wide economic system. It is not surprising, therefore, that the war should involve all countries, should affect both hemispheres.

Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Russia, Germany, AustriaHungary, Serbia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Montenegro, Japan, the United States, China, and a dozen petty States, were drawn into the bloody vortex. The total population of the world is somewhere near fifteen hundred millions. The whole of this vast population suffered directly or indirectly from the miseries of the war, which was imposed upon them by a small group of capitalist criminals. Never before had the world seen such immense armies as were now marshalled, never before has it known such monstrous instruments of death and destruction. Nor had the world ever witnessed such an irresistible mass of capital. Britain and France forced into the service of their money-bags, not only those who were British and French by birth, but to addition the thousands upon thousands of blackskinned and yellow-skinned colonial slaves. The civilized robbers did not hesitate to enrol cannibals among their soldiery, when cannibals were forthcoming. All this was done in the name of the most exalted ideals.

The war of 1914 had its prototypes in the colonial wars. Of this character were the following: the campaigns of the 'civilized' Powers against China; the Spanish-American war; the RussoJapanese war in the year 1904 (on account of Korea, Port Arthur, Manchuria, etc.); the Tripolitan campaign of Italy in 1912; the Boer war at the turn of the century, when 'democratic' England brutally crushed the two South African republics. There were several occasions when a gigantic international conflagration threatened. The partition of Africa nearly led to war between Britain and France (the Fashoda incident). Germany and France were embroiled over Morocco. Tsarist Russia at one time almost went to war with Britain in connexion with the partition of Central Asia.

At the beginning of the world war, the conflict of interests between England and Germany concerning territorial predominance in Africa, Asia Minor, and the Balkans, came to the front. Events worked out in this way, that the allies of Britain were, first of all France, which hoped to wrest Alsace-Lorraine from Germany, and secondly Russia, in search of profiteering opportunities in the Balkans and Galicia. The robber imperialism of Germany secured its chief ally in Austria-Hungary. American imperialism entered the conflict comparatively late, after watching for a time how the European Powers were exhausting themselves by their struggles.

In addition to militarism, one of the most abominable methods employed in the rivalry between the imperialist Powers is secret diplomacy, which avails itself of secret treaties and plots, and which does not shrink from the use of the assassin's knife and the dynamiter's bomb. The real aims of the imperialist war were embodied in the secret treaties between Britain, France, and Russia, on the one hand, and between Germany, AustriaHungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria, on the other. It is manifest that secret agents of the Entente were privy to the assassination of the Austrian crown prince, which occurred five weeks before the war. On the other hand, German diplomacy was by no means disconcerted by the murder. For example, Rohrbach, the German imperialist, wrote: 'We may deem ourselves fortunate that the great anti-German conspiracy declared itself before the appointed time through the assassination of the archduke Franz Ferdinand. Two years later, the war would have been far more difficult.' The German provocative agents would have been perfectly willing to murder the German crown prince in order to bring about the war; nor would British, French, or Russian secret agents have shrunk from the assassination of this same prince.