Lessons to be learnt from history.
In November 1912 a piece in the Socialist Standard dealt with conflict in the Balkans.
‘To arms! To arms! Thus once again is the “Eastern Question” answered. Turk and Bulgarian, Mohammedan and Christian, are at one another’s throats in a frenzy of blood-lust. The clash of arms and the roar of guns once more shake the hills and mountains of the near East, and the cries of wounded and dying men fill fair valleys with horror. Montenegro was the first with its declaration of war—a country with under 250,000 inhabitants—not, in that respect, the equal of the London suburb, West Ham—and as poor as the oft-quoted church mouse. Where did she get her armaments? Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, every one of them poor—who backed them and why?
Why did Russia take up the Montenegrin war loan? Why did “The Powers” take up the Bulgarian loan? Were they moved to do so by the promptings of humanity? Read the cynical answer in the story of past wars.
Japan fought Russia for the forests of Manchuria. Korea helped Japan—now Korea belongs to Japan. The United States fought Spain ostensibly on the ground of the Cuban “horrors”, and the Yankee Eagle has his beak in the hearts of the Cubans and the Phillipinos.
The English Government “sought neither gold nor territory” in South Africa, but the Transvaal and the Orange Free State went the way of Zululand and the Basutos’ country—and it was the wrongs of the Uitlanders, who hadn’t got the vote, that justified the war!
Every brutal and bloody gang of rulers, sitting armed on the backs of their groaning, bleeding and starving multitudes, have sobbed and slobbered and shed crocodile’s tears over the suffering subjects of the Sultan. Austria was so shocked by the miseries of the poor people of Bosnia and Herzegovina that she had to soothe her feelings by “annexing” both these countries. Britain also has been sorely troubled over the horrors perpetrated in the Ottoman Empire, so the Cross relieved the Crescent of Egypt and Cyprus. Russia wrung her hands in agony, and then laid them on Bessarabia. That monument to Garibaldi’s genius, A United Italy, itched to stop the villainies of the Porte, so she seized Tripoli at the admitted cost of 9,000 Italian workers’ lives, and goodness knows what cost to “the enemy”, if we are to believe the Italian boasts of slaughter.
Have we answered the question of why this war? It is the old story of Grab! The monopolists of the means of life are out for plunder…
The world’s financiers, the world’s brigands, are seeking wider fields for exploitation. The owners of the New World are grasping at the old. Bulgarian peasants, Servian toilers, Grecian slaves, are to sacrifice their lives to provide plunder for the moneyed tyrannies of Europe. Women of our class are to be widowed, children to be orphaned, homes to be desolated, to make a masters’ holiday. Hence the war fever is aroused, religious rivalries stirred up, racial hatreds and jealousies fanned to fury by judicious but unscrupulous lying—and all that Macedonia may go the way of Persia...The lesson of it all for the workers is that nothing in the world is sacred that stands in the way of capitalist aggrandisement—which is spelt: “Profits”. In pursuit of profits no crime is too stupendous to be undertaken.'
As the French have it, ‘plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose’, the more things change the more they stay the same.
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