Part 1

Chapter 13,806 wordsPublic domain

THE MYTH OF A GUILTY NATION

ALBERT JAY NOCK

("HISTORICUS")

NEW YORK B.W. HUEBSCH, INC. MCMXXII

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

PREFACE

This book is made up of a series of articles originally published in the _Freeman_. It was compiled to establish one point and only one, namely: that the German Government was not solely guilty of bringing on the war. I have not been at all concerned with measuring the German Government's share of guilt, with trying to show that it was either great or small, or that it was either less or more than that of any other Government or association of Governments. All this is beside the point. I do not by any means wish to escape the responsibility of saying that I think the German Government's share of guilt in the matter is extremely small; so small by comparison with that of the major Powers allied against Germany, as to be inconsiderable. That is my belief, demonstrable as I think by such evidence as has now become available to any candid person. But this has nothing whatever to do with the subject-matter of this volume. If the guilt of the German Government could be proved to be ten times greater than it was represented to be by the publicity-bureaux of the Allied Powers, the conclusion established in the following chapters would still remain. Guilty as the German Government may have been; multiply by ten any estimate that any person, interested or disinterested, informed or uninformed, may put upon its guilt; the fact remains that it was far, very far indeed, from being the only guilty party concerned.

If there were no practical end to be gained by establishing this conclusion, if one's purpose were only to give the German Government the dubious vindication of a _tu quoque_, the effort would be hardly worth making. But as I say at the outset, there is at stake an extremely important matter, one that will unfavourably affect the peace of the world for at least a generation--the treaty of Versailles. If the German Government may not be assumed to be solely responsible for the war, this treaty is indefensible; for it is constructed wholly upon that assumption. It becomes, not a treaty, but a verdict pronounced after the manner of Brennus, by a superior power which, without regard to justice, arrogates to itself the functions of prosecutor, jury and judge.

It is probably superfluous to point out that this treaty, conceived in the pure spirit of the victorious Apache, has, in practice, utterly broken down. It has not worked and it will not work, because it sets at defiance certain economic laws which are as inexorable as the law of gravitation. The incidence of these laws was well understood and clearly foretold, at the time of the peace-conference, by an informed minority in Europe, notably by Mr. Maynard Keynes in his volume entitled "The Economic Consequences of the Peace." In this country also, a minority, sufficiently informed to know its right hand from its left in economic affairs, stood aghast in contemplation of the ruinous consequences which it perceived as inevitable under any serious attempt to put this vicious instrument into operation. But both here and in Europe, this minority was very small and uninfluential, and could accomplish nothing against the ignorant and unreasoning bad temper which the politicians kept aflame.

The treaty had therefore to go to the test of experiment; and of the results of this, one need surely say nothing, for they are obvious. The harder Germany tried to fulfill the conditions of the treaty, and the nearer she came to doing so, the worse things went in all the countries that were presumably to benefit by her sacrifice. The Central Empires are, as the informed minority in all countries has been from the beginning anxiously aware, the key-group in the whole of European industry and commerce. If they must work and trade under unfavourable conditions, they also thereby automatically impose correspondingly unfavourable conditions upon the whole of Europe; and, correspondingly unfavourable conditions are thereby in turn automatically set up wherever the trade of Europe reaches--for example, in the United States. There is now no possible doubt about this, for one has but to glance at the enormous dislocations of international commerce, and the universal and profound stagnation of industry, in order to prove it to one's complete satisfaction. Germany wisely and far-sightedly made a sincere and vigourous effort to comply with the conditions of the treaty; and by so doing she has carried the rest of the world to the verge of economic collapse. The damage wrought by the war was in general of a spectacular and impressive type, and was indeed very great--no one would minimize it--but the damage, present and prospective, wrought by the treaty of peace is much greater and more far-reaching.

The political inheritors of those who made the peace are now extremely uneasy about it. Their predecessors (including Mr. Lloyd George, who still remains in office) had flogged up popular hatred against the Central Empires at such a rate that when they took office they still had, or thought they had, to court and indulge this hatred. Thus we found Mr. Secretary Hughes, for example, in his first communication to the German Government, laying it down that the basis of the Versailles treaty was sound--that Germany was solely responsible for the war. He spoke of it quite in the vein of Mr. Lloyd George, as a _chose jugée_. After having promulgated the treaty with such immense ceremony, and raised such preposterous and extravagant popular expectations on the strength of it, the architects of the treaty bequeathed an exceedingly difficult task to their successors; the task of letting the public down, diverting their attention with this or that gesture, taking their mind off their disappointments and scaling down their expectations, so that in time it might be safe to let the Versailles treaty begin to sink out of sight.

The task is being undertaken; the curious piece of mountebankery recently staged in Washington, for example, was an ambitious effort to keep the peoples, particularly those of Europe, hopeful, confiding and diverted; and if economic conditions permit, if times do not become too hard, it may succeed. The politicians can not say outright that the theory of the Versailles treaty is dishonest and outrageous, and that the only chance of peace and well-being is by tearing up the treaty and starting anew on another basis entirely. They can not say this on account of the exigencies of their detestable trade. The best that they can do is what they are doing. They must wait until the state of public feeling permits them to ease down from their uncompromising stand upon the treaty. Gradually, they expect, the public will accustom itself to the idea of relaxations and accommodations, as it sees, from day to day, the patent impracticability of any other course; feelings will weaken, asperities soften, hatreds die out, contacts and approaches of one kind or another will take place; and finally, these public men or their political inheritors will think themselves able to effect in an unobtrusive way, such substantial modifications of the treaty of Versailles as will amount to its annulment.

The process is worth accelerating by every means possible; and what I have here done is meant to assist it. There are many persons in the country who are not politicians, and who are capable and desirous of approaching a matter of this kind with intellectual honesty. Quite possibly they are not aware, many of them, that the Versailles treaty postulates the sole responsibility of the German Government for bringing on the war; undoubtedly they are not acquainted with such evidence as I have here compiled to show that this assumption is unjust and erroneous. Having read this evidence, they will be in a position to review the terms of the Versailles treaty and reassess the justice of those terms. They will also be able to understand the unwillingness, the inability, of the German people to acquiesce in those terms; and they can comprehend the slowness and difficulty wherewith peace and good feeling are being re-established in Europe, and the extreme precariousness and uncertainty of Europe's situation--and our own, in consequence--throughout a future that seems longer than one cares to contemplate.

The reader will perceive at once that this book is a mere compilation and transcription of fact, containing not a shred of opinion or of any original matter. On this account it was published anonymously in its serial form, because it seemed to me that such work should be judged strictly as it stands, without regard to the authority, or lack of authority, which the compiler might happen to possess. Almost all of it is lifted straight from the works of my friends Mr. Francis Neilson and Mr. E. D. Morel. I earnestly hope--indeed, it is my chief motive in publishing this book--that it may serve as an introduction to these words. I can not place too high an estimate upon their importance to a student of British and Continental diplomacy. They are, as far as I know, alone in their field; nothing else can take their place. They are so thorough, so exhaustive and so authoritative that I wonder at their being so little known in the United States. Mr. Morel's works,[1] "Ten Years of Secret Diplomacy," "Truth and the War," and "Diplomacy Revealed," are simply indispensable. Mr. Neilson's book "How Diplomats Make War,"[2] is not an easy book to read; no more are Mr. Morel's; but without having read it no serious student can possibly do justice to the subject.

ALBERT JAY NOCK

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "Ten Years of Secret Diplomacy." $1.25. "Truth and the War." $1.25. E. D. Morel. New York: B. W. Huebsch.

"Diplomacy Revealed." E. D. Morel. London, 8 & 9 Johnson's Court: National Labour Press.

[2] "How Diplomats Make War." Francis Neilson. New York: B. W. Huebsch. $2.00

THE MYTH OF A GUILTY NATION

The present course of events in Europe is impressing on us once more the truth that military victory, if it is to stand, must also be demonstrably a victory for justice. In the long run, victory must appeal to the sense of justice in the conquered no less than in the conquerors, if it is to be effective. There is no way of getting around this. Mr. Gilbert K. Chesterton is right when he says that if the South had not finally accepted the outcome of the Civil War as being on the whole just, Lincoln would have been wrong in trying to preserve the Union; which is only another way of expressing Lincoln's own homely saying that nothing is ever really settled until it is settled right. The present condition of Europe is largely due to the fact that the official peacemakers have not taken into their reckoning the German people's sense of justice. Their mistake--it was also Mr. Wilson's great mistake--was in their disregard of what Bismarck called the imponderabilia. The terms of the peace treaty plainly reflect this mistake. That is largely the reason why the treaty is to-day inoperative and worthless. That is largely why the Governments of Europe are confronted with the inescapable alternative: they can either tear up the treaty and replace it by an understanding based on justice, or they can stick to the treaty and by so doing protract indefinitely the dismal succession of wars, revolutions, bankruptcies and commercial dislocations that the treaty inaugurated.

That is the situation; and it is a situation in which the people of the United States have an interest to preserve--the primary interest of a creditor, and also the interest of a trader who needs a large and stable market. It is idle to suppose that American business can prosper so long as Europe remains in a condition of instability and insolvency. Our business is adjusted to the scale of a solvent Europe, and it can not be readjusted without irreparable damage. Until certain matters connected with the war are resolutely put under review, Europe can not be reconstructed, and the United States can not be prosperous. The only thing that can better our own situation is the resumption of normal economic life in Europe; and this can be done only through a thorough reconsideration of the injustices that have been put upon the German people by the conditions of the armistice and the peace treaty.

Of these injustices, the greatest, because it is the foundation for all the rest, is the imputation of Germany's sole responsibility for the war. The German people will never endure that imputation; they should never be expected to endure it. Nothing can really be settled until the question of responsibility is openly and candidly re-examined, and an understanding established that is based on facts instead of on official misrepresentation. This question is by no means one of abstract justice alone, or of chivalry and fair play towards a defeated enemy. It is a question of self-interest, immediate and urgent. However it may be regarded by the American sense of justice and fair play, it remains, to the eye of American industry and commerce, a straight question of dollars and cents. The prosperity of the United States, as we are beginning to see, hangs upon the economic re-establishment of Europe. Europe can not possibly be settled upon the present terms of peace; and these terms can not be changed without first vacating the theory of Germany's sole responsibility, because it is upon this theory that the treaty of Versailles was built. This theory, therefore, must be re-examined in the light of evidence that the Allied and Associated Governments have done their best either to ignore or to suppress. Hence, for the American people, the way to prosperity lies through a searching and honest examination of this theory that has been so deeply implanted in their mind--the theory of a brigand-nation, plotting in solitude to achieve the mastery of the world by fire and sword.

Americans, however, come reluctantly to the task of this examination, for two reasons. First, we are all tired of the war, we hate to think of it or of anything connected with it, and as far as possible, we keep it out of our minds. Second, nearly every reputation of any consequence in this country, political, clerical, academic and journalistic, is already committed, head over ears, to the validity of this theory. How many of our politicians are there whose reputations are not bound up inextricably with this legend of a German plot? How many of our newspaper-editors managed to preserve detachment enough under the pressure of war-propaganda to be able to come forward to-day and say that the question of responsibility for the war should be re-opened? How can the pro-war liberals and ex-pacifists ask for such an inquest when they were all swept off their feet by the specious plea that _this_ war was a different war from all other wars in the history of mankind? What can our ministers of religion say after the unreserved endorsement that they put upon the sanctity of the Allied cause? What can our educators say, after having served so zealously the ends of the official propagandists? From our journalists and men of letters what can we expect--after all his rodomontade about Potsdam and the Potsdam gang, how could we expect Dr. Henry Van Dyke, for instance, to face the fact that the portentous Potsdam meeting of the Crown Council on 5 July, 1914, _never took place at all_? There is no use in trying to put a breaking-strain upon human nature, or, on the other hand, in assuming a pharisaic attitude towards its simplest and commonest frailties. It is best, under the circumstances, merely to understand that on this question every institutional voice in the United States is tongue-tied. Press, pulpit, schools and universities, charities and foundations, forums, all are silent; and to expect them to break their silence is to expect more than should be expected from the pride of opinion in average human nature.

In examining the evidence let us first take Mr. Lloyd George's own statement of the theory. Except in one particular, it presents the case against Germany quite as it has been rehearsed by nearly every institutional voice in the United States. On 4 August, 1917--after America's entry into the war--the British Premier said:

What are we fighting for? To defeat the most dangerous conspiracy ever plotted against the liberty of nations; carefully, skilfully, insidiously, clandestinely planned in every detail, with ruthless, cynical determination.

Except for one point, this statement sums up what we have all heard to be the essential doctrine of the war. The one missing point in Mr. Lloyd George's indictment is that the great German conspiracy was launched upon an _unprepared_ Europe. In Europe itself, the official propagandists did not make much of this particular point, for far too many people knew better; but in the United States it was promulgated widely. Indeed, this romance of Allied unpreparedness was an essential part of the whole story of German responsibility. Germany, so the official story ran, not only plotted in secret, but she sprung her plot upon a Europe that was wholly unprepared and unsuspecting. Her action was like that of a highwayman leaping from ambush upon a defenceless wayfarer. Belgium was unprepared, France unprepared, Russia unprepared, England unprepared; and in face of an unprovoked attack, these nations hurriedly drew together in an extemporized union, and held the "mad dog" at bay with an extemporized defence until they could devise a plan of common action and a pooling of military and naval resources.

Such, then, is a fair statement of the doctrine of the war as America was taught it. Next, in order to show how fundamental this doctrine is to the terms of the peace treaty, let us consider another statement of Mr. Lloyd George made 3 March, 1921:

For the allies, German responsibility for the war is fundamental. It is the basis upon which the structure of the treaty of Versailles has been erected, and if that acknowledgment is repudiated or abandoned, the treaty is destroyed.... We wish, therefore, once and for all, to make it quite clear that German responsibility for the war must be treated by the Allies as a _chose jugée_.

Thus the British Premier explicitly declares that the treaty of Versailles is based upon the theory of Germany's sole responsibility.

Now, as against this theory, the main facts may be summarized as follows: (1) The British and French General Staffs had been in active collaboration for war with Germany ever since January 1906. (2) The British and French Admiralty had been in similar collaboration. (3) The late Lord Fisher [First Sea Lord of the British Admiralty], twice in the course of these preparations, proposed an attack upon the German fleet and a landing upon the coast of Pomerania, _without a declaration of war_. (4) Russia had been preparing for war ever since 1909, and the Russian and French General Staffs had come to a formal understanding that Russian mobilization should be held equivalent to a declaration of war. (5) Russian mobilization was begun in the spring of 1914, under the guise of "tests," and these tests were carried on continuously to the outbreak of the war. (6) In April, 1914, four months before the war, the Russian and French naval authorities initiated joint plans for maritime operations against Germany. (7) Up to the outbreak of the war, Germany was selling grain in considerable quantities to both France and Russia. (8) It can not be shown that the German Government ever in a single instance, throughout all its dealings with foreign Governments, demanded or intimated for Germany anything more than a position of economic equality with other nations.

These facts, among others to which reference will hereafter be made, have come to light only since the outbreak of the war. They effectively dispose of the theory of an unprepared and unsuspecting Europe; and a historical survey of them excludes absolutely, and stamps as utterly untenable and preposterous, the theory of a deliberate German plot against the peace of the world.

III

Let us now consider the idea so generally held in America, though not in Europe, that in 1914, England and the Continental nations were not expecting war and not prepared for war. The fact is that Europe was as thoroughly organized for war as it could possibly be. The point to which that organization was carried by England, France and Russia, as compared with Germany and Austria, may to some extent be indicated by statistics. In 1913, Russia carried a military establishment (on a peace footing) of 1,284,000 men; France, by an addition of 183,000 men, proposed to raise her peace-establishment to a total of 741,572. Germany, by an addition of 174,373 men, proposed to raise her total to 821,964; and Austria, by additions of 58,505 already made, brought her total up to 473,643. These are the figures of the British War Office, as furnished to the House of Commons in 1913.

Here is a set of figures that is even more interesting and significant. From 1909 to 1914, the amount spent on new naval construction by England, France and Russia, as compared with Germany, was as follows:

ENGLAND FRANCE RUSSIA GERMANY

1909 £11,076,551 £ 4,517,766 £ 1,758,487 £10,177,062

1910 £14,755,289 £ 4,977,682 £ 1,424,013 £11,392,856

1911 £15,148,171 £ 5,876,659 £ 3,216,396 £11,710,859

1912 £16,132,558 £ 7,114,876 £ 6,897,580 £11,491,187

1913 £16,883,875 £ 8,893,064 £12,082,516 £11,010,883

1914 £18,676,080 £11,772,862 £13,098,613 £10,316,264

These figures can not be too carefully studied by those who have been led to think that Germany pounced upon a defenceless and unsuspecting Europe like a cat upon a mouse. If it be thought worth while to consider also the period of a few years preceding 1909, one finds that England's superiority in battleships alone was 112 per cent in 1901, and her superiority rose to nearly 200 per cent in 1904; in which year England spent £42,431,000 on her navy, and Germany £11,659,000. Taking the comparative statistics of naval expenditure from 1900, in which year England spent £32,055,000 on her navy, and Germany spent £7,472,000, down to 1914 it is absolutely impossible to make the figures show that Germany enforced upon the other nations of Europe an unwilling competition in naval armament.