Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History Part 19

The world-wide revolution resulted from a long-continued related series of affirmations, punctuated and interrupted by contradictions and conflicts.

Trends inherent in the world-wide revolution of 1750-1970 suggest a cycle that reached its high point at the turn of the century and began its downward course around 1900. The chief European empires were jointly and severally involved in the bitter struggle for survival and supremacy from 1870 onward. Until the outbreak of war in 1914, events followed an irregular course marked by the shifting relationships of Italy and the increased pressure from Germany for a showdown. The showdown was the war of 1914-18, continued in a second phase from 1936 to 1945.

Immediate political results of the showdown were victory for one side and defeat for the other side. Economic, sociological and ideological consequences were profound and far reaching. We noted some of them in the previous chapter.

UNESCO's _History of Mankind_ devotes its final volume six to the twentieth century. The authors note that the chief European powers emerged from the general war of 1914-18 "weakened in every way: in men and wealth, in the balance of their economies and the stability of their political structure and above all in their relation to other powers rising or beginning to rise in other parts of the world". (Vol. VI p.

10.)

Aside from the victory-defeat relationship which led to political realignments during the post-war years, the essence of the experience is to be found in the UNESCO phrase "weakened in every way". Another way of describing the experience is to state that the partic.i.p.ants in this four year blood bath were "bled white."

It is easy to be specific. In the course of the war sixty million people were mobilized. Most of these people stopped what they had been doing until mid-summer of 1914 and began an entirely new line of activity. Up to that point most of them had been living with their families, in their neighborhoods, going through a daily routine that included household cares, production or service work, the conduct of neighborhood affairs, the maintenance of normal livelihood activities, the upbringing of the new generation and perhaps most important of all, adaptation to a rapidly changing social situation.

The changes that took place in the summer of 1914 involved an almost complete reversal of purpose and direction. Up to that point Europeans were devoting a considerable proportion of their time to production and the maintenance of the normal life routine. At that point they left their homes, exchanged ordinary clothes for uniforms, laid down the implements of peace, picked up the weapons of war and prepared, under very expert leadership and direction, a series of ma.s.s movements designed to disrupt the ordinary life routine of other human beings on the other side of lines drawn on a map, but having little relation to customary life activity and even less to geography.

Execution of this purpose involved a ma.s.s movement from the home territory into that occupied by the "enemy". If the enemy resisted he must be forced to do the will of the invaders. Instead of cooperating in a joint effort to maintain and improve the general welfare, uniformed, armed, expertly-led ma.s.ses began beating up each other, until one side gave in and cried "enough."

Plans for war had been drawn and redrawn for years, for decades.

Elaborate preparations had been made. Destructive weapons had been designed and built. Transport had been provided, food stored. Defensive preparations had also been made in the form of fortifications so placed as to obstruct or prevent "the enemy" from crossing the "frontier".

When sport-lovers go from home for a day to play a compet.i.tion in another city or province, they go, play the game and then go back home to continue the ordinary life routine. In the case of the project we are now considering they left home in July, 1914 and returned months or years later. Many never got back home because they were killed in battle or died of wounds; many were "missing"; they disappeared.

If casualties in the 1914-18 war had been numbered in dozens, or scores or even in hundreds, the communities from which they came could have gone on without them--handicapped perhaps but not seriously disrupted.

But when they were numbered in thousands and tens of thousands it was a quite different story. Actually, they were numbered in millions.

Mobilized to carry on the war were 42.2 million on the Allied side. On the side of the Central Powers, 22.8 millions. The total: 65 million. 12 million of those mobilized were Russian, 11 million were Germans, 8.4 million were French, 8 million were from the British Empire. From Austro-Hungary came 7.8 million, from Italy, 5.6 million. Turkey furnished 2.9 million, Bulgaria 1.2 million; 4.4 million came from the United States; 0.8 million from j.a.pan. Lesser numbers came from other countries.

Except for Spain, the largest contributions of war conscripts came from the countries with the largest populations. With the exception of Spain, all of the great powers of Europe provided the "cannon fodder"; the human beings which Europe's "great powers" a.s.sembled to take part in this profligate orgy of ma.s.s murder which went on for more than four years, from July 1914 until November 1918.

Body count reports and "estimates" give the total number of human beings murdered in the four year period as 8,538,315. (The legal definition of "murder" is killing, not accidentally but with the intention of taking life.)

This figure of 8.5 million murdered human adults, most of them in the prime of life, refers to the murdered bodies that were recovered and disposed of. In addition there were "prisoners" and "missing."

As the 1914-18 war proceeded it became less a series of combats between human beings; more and more it was a war of machines such as battleships, tanks, big guns and by war's end, of airplanes. Human beings drew up the plans, made the blueprints, shifted the gears, pushed the b.u.t.tons. Their efforts were supplemented and multiplied by the killing power of physics, chemistry and mechanics brought to the task of wholesale murder, which produced 8.5 million dead human bodies.

"Prisoners and missing" accounted for 7,750,000 additional human beings.

Many of them were torn to shreds and smithereens by the gigantic concentration of mechanical and explosive power, designed, constructed and transported to the European battlefields for the express purpose of carrying on this month-long and year-long collective endeavor to take as much life as possible and destroy as much property as possible while war declarations authorized and legalized ma.s.s murder and wholesale destruction.

Not all victims of the hideous 1914-18 blood bath were killed. "Wound casualties" numbered 12.8 million among the Allies; 8.4 million among the boys, young men and adults mobilized by the Central Powers. Some of the wounded were crippled for life. Some were less severely injured, but all 22.2 million were more or less severely handicapped when they stood up to face the rigors of civilian life at war's end. All were denied the possibility of living normal, productive, creative, satisfying lives.

Wars are fought on battlefields. In the war of 1914-18 many of the battlefields included villages, towns, cities. These complex inst.i.tutions, occupied by men, women and children were smashed and burned wholesale.

The figures which I have used in listing the 1914-18 war losses were compiled by the United States War Department. They are more or less accurate, but they underline the fact that for years on end the centers of western civilization concentrated their energies and devoted every means at their disposal to cripple or destroy fellow human beings and their habitations.

When we read of the destruction of the Roman Empire we console and perhaps try to fool ourselves by saying that the immense network of civilization which the Romans and their Greek a.s.sociates spread across Eurasia and Africa during the historical period that began about 700 B.C. was destroyed by hordes of migrating "barbarians." When we turn to our own civilization, however, there are no barbarian hordes to take the blame. The wholesale destruction which took place in Europe from 1914 to 1918 and which was repeated and multiplied during the wars of 1936-1945 was carried on officially by spokesmen for the most advanced, most highly developed, most civilized countries of the western world.

We have been using the word "murder" to describe the wholesale slaughter of Europeans by Europeans that took place from 1914 to 1918 and from 1936 to 1945. The word "murder" is inaccurate. The Europeans who carried on the wholesale destruction and ma.s.s murder during the two most general wars of modern times were committing murder in one sense. In quite another sense they were engaged in collective suicide. Europeans were blotting out the life and well-being of fellow Europeans. When the process came to a temporary halt in 1945 every European partic.i.p.ant in the struggle was weaker in human potential and poorer in economic means than they were when the war began.

Arnold Toynbee describes the entire episode as the "down grading" of Europe. He might have added two words and reported "the down grading of Europe by Europeans", as a glaring example of large scale, long continued, deliberate self-destruction.

Fundamental social changes were bound to follow the revolutionary technical transformations that took place during the world-wide revolution of 1750-1970. Changes may be made in various ways. Some are slow and relatively painless, particularly when they extend over generations; other changes are so rapid that they are agonizingly painful. Involuntary changes, made under outside pressure are almost always painful. World-wide revolution, under the best of conditions, promises to be painful. When it comes from alien sources, and is under forced pressure, the costs are almost sure to be excessively high.

This brings us face to face with one of the most important problems facing mankind at the present moment. Given the worldwide revolution of the past two centuries, what changes--political, economic, sociological and ideological--must be made to prepare the way for the new society and shift the family from the old homestead to the new apartment with a minimum of pain and a maximum of satisfaction?

CHAPTER TWELVE

TALKING PEACE AND WAGING WAR

Blatant contradictions disorganized human life after war's end in 1945.

In the crucial area of war and peace three groups were bidding for attention: dedicated peace partisans (peacenicks); nationalist enthusiasts waging wars of liberation; and ma.s.sive semi-official and official nationalistic groups busily preparing for the next big war.

Occasionally these groups joined hands on "hot" issues. Generally they were far apart. Often they were in active opposition.

Dedicated peace advocates were an important factor in this post-war period. They had been vocal and influential in July, 1914 immediately before the outbreak of the first general war. They had continued to play an active role between the first and second general wars. In the autumn of 1972 the World Peace Council called together a peace a.s.sembly in Moscow representing significant elements from 143 countries. The largest single element in the World Peace Council was the Socialist bloc, headed by the Soviet Union.

Peace advocates mobilized wide public support for the "no more war"

movement that developed during the closing months of the 1914-18 war; for the Briand-Kellogg Treaty of 1928 which renounced war as an instrument of policy; for the effort to secure general disarmament that resulted in the General Disarmament Conference of 1933 and for the United Nations Charter of 1945.

Official declarations in favor of disarmament and peace had been paralleled by the organization of unofficial peace committees and societies in western Europe, in the Americas and in the socialist countries.

Peace efforts had been strengthened by the outbreak of local wars--between India and Pakistan, between Israel and the Arab League; by wars of independence and liberation in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, North Africa.

Much of the public backing for the peacenicks came from student groups in official and private high schools, colleges and universities.

Nationalist liberation movements were active in settled communities such as Ireland and Canada's Province of Quebec. There were less established movements in newly liberated restless ex-colonies and remaining colonies of the chief European empires, of j.a.pan and of the United States. The widely advertised World Peace Council turned more and more from general advocacy of peace, such as the Stockholm Peace Pet.i.tion, to the support of liberation movements among colonials and supressed minor nationalities.

Preparations for another general war were expanded and intensified as the compet.i.tive struggle for oil and other natural resources mounted. By the end of the 1960's total arms expenditures of the chief powers were running at $200 billion per year. In 1973 the total reached $225 billion.

There was much general talk about peace, but the most insistent note sounded for a high level of spending on armaments. Britain's Prime Minister Heath voiced a sentiment vigorously promulgated by every representative of national security "British interests come first".

Confusion was heightened by the presence of men who faced all three ways: talking peace, waging small wars and preparing for the next big one. In February, 1974 in his State of the Union message to the U.S.

Congress, President Nixon spoke of "our goal of building a structure of lasting peace in the world." At the same moment the Washington administration was feeding the fires of war in South East Asia and asking the United States Congress to increase 1975 U.S.A. defense appropriations from $80 billion to $90 billion per year.

When war ended in 1945 there was a planet-wide sigh of relief and a devout hope that after so many years of local and general wars, the time had come for western man to take a long decisive step in the direction of peace. The United Nations Charter expressed this hope to end the use of war as an instrument of policy.

Since the period of general social relaxation usually known as the Dark Ages was superceded by the multiple innovations of the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the scientific-technical developments of the 1750-1970 Revolution, man the dreamer, inventor, designer, planner, architect and engineer has modified many aspects of nature and transformed the social environment.

Until the Reformation and the Renaissance, European ruling oligarchies in territories along the Mediterranean and throughout western Europe were able to perpetuate their privileges and preserve the life styles of an agricultural-feudal society. Improvements in navigation and the growth of trade, commerce and industry opened the way for the bourgeois revolution with its rapid growth of cities and the parallel increase of wealth, income, and living standards among the newly-enriched businessmen and their a.s.sociates and dependents.

Social changes in feudal Europe had been gradual. The dynamism implicit in the bourgeois revolution escalated the rate of social change with corresponding modifications in the pattern of European political, economic and cultural inst.i.tutions and practices.

In the early stages of the transformation the awareness of change was limited to a minority of city dwellers. To the rural illiterate majority, change was a closed book. A great social gulf separated the feudal countryside from the growing centers of trade, commerce and industry. Bourgeois life processes narrowed and gradually bridged the gulf. Differences between city and country living persisted, but the stark contrast between city abundance of goods and services and their virtual absence from the common life of the countryside grew less and less marked as the proportion of the total population living in the countryside declined with the trek to cities and their suburbs.

Europeans living for the most part in a pre-civilized rural environment pa.s.sed through generations of illiterate unawareness of the social process through which European life was expanding. The rapid extension of industry and commerce after 1750 (the bourgeois revolution) completed the transformation of a rural, semi-feudal west and central Europe into a continent of town and city dwellers devoting their lives to pursuits unknown to their immediate forebears. In this new Europe the countryside played a decreasing role, as food supplies and raw materials came increasingly from less developed parts of eastern Europe or from the colonies which were opened up by the planet-wide trade and commerce promoted by the aggressive expansion of the European empires.

Most Europeans, satisfied with the axiom "old fashions please me best"