You are at http://mailstar.net/wells-lenin-league.html.
H. G. Wells saw the end of World War I as an opportunity to create a new world. He supported both Lenin, and the attempt to create a World Government at the Treaty of Versailles. He also advocated the creation of a Jewish state. His ideas for a united world drew on Jewish thought, in discussions with David Lubin and Israel Zangwill; he also worked closely with Walter Lippman and was a friend of Leo Amery.
Lubin and Zangwill were leading Jewish Zionists; Amery was a secret Jew who authored the Balfour Declaration. Lippmann, also a Jew, helped draft the Treaty of Versailles, and was later a member of the CFR and the Trilateral Commission.
I was puzzled why Lenin opposed the Treaty of Versailles powers, when I thought Wells and his friends had supported that Treaty. It was supposed to be an attempt at World Government, with a World Army and a World Court.
David C. Smith explains in his biography H. G. Wells: Desperately Mortal (pp. 240-2), that Wells and his associates felt that the Treaty of Versailles was a failure, because the World Government forces had not had their way sufficiently. Their opponents were the 'Tory' faction of the British Empire (e.g. Lord Northcliffe), plus American nativism and French stubbornness.
Added April 25, 2009: Alexander Parvus channeled Germany money to the Bolsheviks (through Yakov Ganetsky, both being Jewish), and facilitated the passage of Lenin through Germany on his way to Russia, but the Bolsheviks disparaged him to hide the tie (see item 8). They similarly disparaged Wells, but it should be viewed in the same light. After his visit to Russia in 1920, he was the Soviet Government's main apologist in Britain.
(1) David C. Smith, H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal (2) David Lubin, Israel Zangwill and Walter Lippmann - all close Jewish colleagues of Wells (3) David Lubin & H. G. Wells on One World (4) Wells against Zionism (5) Wells was a Communist of the Trotskyist-Fabian kind (6) Lenin's Opposition to the Treaty of Versailles (7) H. G. Wells, Henry Wickham Steed, and Viscount Grey put the case for World Government, in The Atlantic Monthly, January & February 1919 (8) Bolsheviks disparaged Parvus to hide their ties; Wells likewise
(1) David C. Smith, H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal, Yale University Press, New Haven 1986.
{p. 91} Wells was a socialist long before the Fabian Society attracted him.
{p. 106} As the Webbs had a number of friends who fitted this category of thinking persons, it was soon logical for Sidney to approach Wells with the idea of setting up a dining club, to meet once a month to discuss some major question of the day, debate the meaning of these questions, and enlighten each other. ... Wells joined the group with pleasure, as did others. Over the next three years or so, the group, calling themselves The Coefficients (the name indicates their style in solving problems), met and discussed their questions. Exactly how many of their meetings Wells attended is now not known, but he did speak several times, and afterwards theother members of the group, Leopold Amery, H. W. Massingham, Bertrand Russell, Pember Reeves, R. B. Haldane, Henry Newbolt, Sir Edward Grey, Halford Mackinder, Leo Masse, James L. Garvin, and Lord Milner, all looked upon those meetings from 1902 to 1907 as being significant in their own development, as well as for the friendships which were created.
{p. 107} The names alone suggest that Wells was not only playing a game for high stakes, but that his views were getting a good airing.
{Lord Milner was the head of the secret society set up by Cecil Rhodes to shape the future of the Empire, known as Milner's Kindergarten, as the Round Table Group, as the Rhodes crowd, as The Times crowd, as the All Souls group, and as the Cliveden set. See Carroll Quigley's book The Anglo-American Establishment}
{p. 127} Leo Amery, among Wells' friends of the period, stirred himself the most, writing a sixteen-page letter, much of which was gentle criticism, especially of Wells' discussion of loyalties, to region and to country.
{The Jerusalem Post of Tuesday, January 12, 1999, reported in an article entitled "Balfour Declaration's author was a secret Jew":
"by DOUGLAS DAVIS: LONDON (January 12) - Leopold Amery, the author of the Balfour Declaration - the 1917 document from British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild which laid the groundwork for the establishment of the State of Israel - was a secret Jew. This has been disclosed in just-published research by William Rubinstein, professor of modern history at the University of Wales, who says Amery hid his Jewish background."
The report is at http://www.jewishsf.com/bk990115/ibalfour.htm}
{p. 147} Wells soon began publishing some of his material in the New Republic, then being edited in part by Lippman.
{p. 230} The war had a tremendous impact on Wellsian thought. Eventually that thought led him to explore the possibility of an end to individual governments, and the possible emergence of a world state ... in his own search for a meaning in the war's causes and cost, he spent a brief time refurbishing the Christianity he had been taught at home. And, although he later specifically repudiated these books ... they are worth a brief mention as an indication the depth of his search. One source of his change of view was apparendy an exchange of letters and talks with David Lubin about elements in Jewish thought similar to Wells's notion of religion as revealed faith; the main emphasis was on a sort of deistic God who set things in motion and then watched them work themselves out. This God (Wells referred to his deity as 'the Veiled Being' and 'the Invisible King') provided the intellectual possibility of survival for mankind, but did not guarantee it, and certainly not through any kind of personal redemption or salvation from the interference of others. When Wells finished his work, he and Israel Zangwill exchanged several visits and letters about his ideas and Zangwill sent copies to the Chief Rabbi in England for discussion.
In God the Invisible King (1917), Wells's philosophical tract (much of this material also appears in the 1917 revision of First and Last Things, but waa excised in later printings), he mentioned discussions he had had with William James. He found that the problem in modern Christian stemmed from the ill-directed Council of Nicaea which had adopted the idea of the Trinity.
{p. 232} Essentially, though, Wells had tried Christianity again, albeit in a version much altered from tha normally taught, and had found it wanting. Other matters were more important now. Russia had left the war. Who knew whether the Allies could win? What sort of peace might emerge? Could he and his supporters return to the days and ideals of 'the war to end war', to create a peace in which the thought of further war was simply not possible? {because there was a World Army} For him, it came down to the question of how we can achieve those goals - and how H. G. Wells could help in the effort. The last two years of the Great War were for Wells, as for many others, an opportunity to change the world once and for all.
{p. 233} The Allies had failed in their attempt to keep the Russians active, and the threat of a stepped-up German campaign in the west made them angry at the Bolsheviks. Invasion of Russian territory, recriminations against the new government, and its eventual exclusion from the peace settlement at Versailles resulted. As Woodrow Wilson said, in the sixth of his Fourteen Points, how the world treated Russia after the war would determine much of the future status of European and world diplomatic affairs. The Russians took this at face value, but Wilson was thinking of pre-war Russia, not of the Bolsheviks.
{Yet the Fourteen Points were issued on January 8, 1918, whereas the Bolshevik Revolution occurred on November 7, 1917 - both dates in the Western Calendar. The point is, surely, that Wells' wanted the World Confederation, and the Treaty of Versailles whose job it was to draft that Confederation, to include the Bolshevik government.}
{p. 234} When the Russian Revolution blew up in the spring of 1917, the Britisb press began to scrabble about for information. Wells's pre-war article was
{p. 235} reprinted as a recent source and he was asked to lead a special mission to a to observe the events. He did not go (in part bccause he was immersed in his work on war aims), but he did issue several statements welcoming the new free Russia. These pieces were circulated widely in the United States, and published in England only two or three days later. Others - Shaw ... for example - issued similar statements. As Wells said, 'We had not dared to hope it ...' but now that it (the Revolution) had come, 'it is the precursor of the world confederation of republics that will ensure the enduring peace of the world.' Although Wells knew that the diplomatic corps would not be happy, 'in the hearts of the four British nations the Russian Revolution burns like a fire.' As time went on his feelings and support intensified and his statements on the Revolution and its promise remained strong. They were widely printed and commented upon through the summer of 1917.
After the Russians left the war and signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, a great storm of rancour arose in England. Wells did not swerve from his position, however, and outlined his views again in a long article for the Daily Mail, urging others to rethink their opposition to the Bolsheviks. He told his readers that Kerensky had proved to be a weak person. He had been overthrown because of that weakness and the growing strength of a counter-revolutionary force in Russia. Wells felt that the aims of most liberals in the world continued to coincide with Russian aims; that is, an end to German militarism, for, as he told his readers, 'Peace without a German revolution can't be a peace.' A League of Nations was needed and persons who wished this should guard against a revival of the old diplomacy, with its aristocratic ways. Opposition to the Russian Revolution had shown up the diplomats for what they really were. In fact, said Wells, on the issue of war and peace aims, '... it seems to me the Bolsheviks are altogether wiser and plainer than our own rulers.'
These were the issues for Wells. What sort of a peace would occur? By the time he wrote this article defending the Russian Revolution, the war was well on the way to ending. The Americans were in and their armies had begun to make their presence felt in France. The old diplomacy and the pre-war diplomats had allowed the war to occur through their stupidity, thought Wells. He felt that what was now needed for the prospective victors was a clear statement of peace aims, coupled with a method of ensuring that those aims would be fulfilled. Only then could another war be prevented. He was engaged fulltime in this effort, writing out sets of aims,proposing a world government, and propagandizing for his ideas. By the spring of 1918, Wells knew that if the war was to be the war to end war, it would take strong action, planning and idealism. That was why he welcomed the Russian Revolution and continued to endorse it no matter what form it took. The issues were simply too large for the old ways to continue. A world revolution, at least in ideas, had become imperative.
{p. 236} A few days later he urged the United States to enter the war, at least symbolically, so that she could be part of the peace-making effort, and within the same week offered a more detailed account of what the Balkans might look like after the war. By 1916 Wells's experiences with the Russian language and his sons led him to urge the adoption of some sort of lingua franca to overcome misunderstandings 'in this vitally important effort promote international understanding'. He also called for restoration of Palestine to the Jews, creating a real Judaea.
{p. 237} Wells went to work in the Cabinet propaganda office (as part of the Advisory Comittee to the Director of Propaganda, Lord Northcliffe), then located in Crewe House, where he very quickly found himself working on the general issue of what should comprise Britain's as well as the Allies' war aims. How should they be worded, and how, eventually, could they be carried out once the war was over? Both Masterman and Northcliffe had been badgered by Wells since early in 1915 to speed up their efforts, and to set out the record clearly in the press. To some extent Wells was co-opted because he did have so many ideas. Northcliffe even recommended, apparently, that he be made a member of the War Cabinet(!).
{p. 238} But what is known is that he continued to maintain strong ties with Walter Lippman and with Bainbridge Colby (who served during the war in the American Embassy in London). When Colonel House came to Brital as President Wilson's emissary, he was entertained at Laston by the Countess of Warwick, with Wells at the table. The similarity between some of Wells's ideas and the Fourteen Points address, along with some remarks in Lady Warwick's memoirs, and several letters from Lippman, suggest that Wells may have had a hand in the material on which the address was based. In his autobiography he claimed to know very little about the matter. However, he did reprint a very long letter to Colby, which Philip Guedalla had carried to him after a discussion with them both at the Reform Club in November 1917. Wilson saw the letter, according to Colby, and so even though Wells discounted his own efforts, one should point out that that he did so after he had repudiated the League, and the Fourteen Points, as not being sufficient to bring about world peace. {i.e. not establishing a real World Government}
The intense violence of the war created a demand in many parts of the world for a massive effort to prevent further outbreaks. This led eventually to an insistence that a world-wide conference be held to set up a peaceful world, to be monitored jointly by all the nations. This arrangement, usually called a League of Nations or a League of Free Nations (the names tbe British proponents used), began to be discussed early in the war. By 1918,
{p. 239} there were few observers who did not use some variant of these terms, and to call for an implementation of the idea. A few questions were raised: whether the League would have a military force of its own, whether or not me bits of national sovereignty would have to be discarded, and whether the League would have punitive power over those who violated its rules. ...
Wells addressed these issues within the context of the proposed League, calling for a voluntary sharing of Sovereignty. ... Wells's view ... was that the League should be representative, should include all countries, and ought to be organized to work towards a form of world government.
The book, In the Fourth Year, was widely read, in lieu of the articles, and many newspapers urged their readers to read and think about the views presented by Wells. Walter Lippman, who edited the pieces for the New Republic, thought they were excellent, and when he came to England in August, one of his first acts was to seek out Wells for 'a crucial meeting on this work similar to yours'. It was now widely believed that Wilson's Fourteen Points address would be the basis for the peace conference once the war was over. Lippman had several meetings with Wells and others, and the result was a State Department document, interpreting the Fourteen Points address, released in mid-September. At about the same time Wells published three significant articles on the League and its future. He chose as his medium for these articles the Morning Post, a Tory newspaper, but one which was widely read by the people likely to go to the peace conference.
In the Post articles Wells traced the idea of a League, and the fact that the war had extended itself to civilians, thus making everyone a potential victim; he discussed the different ideas already presented, and himselfproposed a central body with power to take control of armaments, shipping, distribution of staples, to provide what he described as 'a pooling of Empires'. ...
{p. 240} He specifically refuted the claim that the British Empire could go it alone, as it was already a world-wide organization.
{This was the the Tory view, much as Republican Party leaders today oppose subjecting the United States to a UN or World Court with "Universal Jurisdiction". To defeat the Tories in the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles, Wells had some nifty footwork ahead of him. He had drafted the phrase "the war to end war", proposing that the British Empire develop into a World State. Anglo-American Establishment leaders like Lionel Curtis endorsed this idea, but now Wells was trying to shift power and sovereignty from that Empire to a World body not in its control.}
... the war had taken a rapid turn in favour of the Allies. Time was running out. Lippman, Wells, Bainbridge Colby, and dozens of others preparing for the peace conference found themselves only partially ready. In the last week of the war, in the midst of the false armistice and the stage-posturing of the generals, Wells found time to issue a few more comments on the possible peace, but how widely they were read is another matter. On 5 November ... he discussed British nationalism, then on the 6th he analysed the Foreign Office and the League of Nations. 'We are up against an idea which saturates our histories, saturates the minds of statesmen~ saturates the press, saturates European thought and the thought of manyl spirited states outside Europe; and that is what I call the Great Power idea in human affairs. This Great Power idea and the organ and methods that embody it is the real enemy.' He continued his assault the next day, calling for an end to secret treaties and secret diplomacy; and finally on the 8th, Friday, at the beginning of the last weekend of the war, he ended his comments: 'It is up to the people to see that mankind does not, in a mood of weariness and reaction and resentment, slip into the old grooves of thought and action, and lose the harvests of peace.'
{p. 241} The two groups of supporters of the League had not been able to agree on ends, but the success of the Wellsian group led for a time to a rapprochement in late July. Apparently Wells had a good deal to do with a brief agreement, having urged his friends in both groups to bury the hatchet and work together. Eventually the Wells group was the sole survivor. ... Time ran out here as well, and the proofs of the first pamphlet did not get to Wells until mid-December. The peace conference was already under way.
The work had simply been too slow, and it did not accomplish much. Too manv people had to read the drafts, make comments, and generally flatter their own egos. ...
{p. 242} The meetings at Versailles did not deal with the realities behind the war, and although they created a League of Nations it was a toothless and insignificant body, perhaps even more so (although that is debatable) once the US decided that it would remain outside the League. Walter Lippman left the conference in Paris, and sailed for New York. After stopping briefly to see Wells, he wrote to him from the S.S. Calia.
Lippman described the peace conference as 'not unhopeful', but said the last two months had been lost. He told Wells that he thought the British delegation had been more in earnest than others, and that the Empire might still play a crucial role, by bringing together the white and coloured nations of the world. 'There's no way out for the world if vou don't', was his judgement. He proposed to Wells that an international organization or conference of unattached liberals of the world might be formed, which could lay out a body of doctrine for the nations to follow, 'to act', as it were, 'as the intellectual foundation of the League of Nations'. By mid-May, at home in New York, Lippman was much less sanguine. He asked Wells, 'Do you see any hope of stability in the present treaty and covenant? I confess I don't.'
For Wells the disillusionment was as bad or worse. However, althougb he, like Lippman, looked to history for answers, he knew by this time that if changes were to be made, a new history had to be written, one which would focus on the emergence of ideas, and one which would deal with the hopes and aspirations of all people, not just the ruling classes.
{p. 270} Wells had a very strong interest in Russia. He had visited St. Petersburg and Moscow in January of 1914. Among his friends in London was Ivy Low, daughter of his former comrade, Walter Low, who had recently married Maxim Litvinov, who was to be the first ambassador to Britain of the Bolshevik state. wells stayed with them in Petrograd (once St Petersburg, it had not yet been renamed Leningrad) on his 1920 tour. Ivy's Low's sister was married to Helen Guest, a Wells acquaintance from the Fabian days (In fact, as we have seen, she may have been the elusive Fabian wife supposedly seduced by Wells.) Haden Guest had recently travelled in Russia, as had Bertrand Russell. Both had written articles critical of the Bolsheviks on their return to England. Wells had met Maxim Gorky as early as 1906, and although they had not yet become close friends, Wells had stayed with Gorky in Moscow in 1914. It was logical for the Bolsheviks, unhappy about British comments ... to invite Wells to visit his acquaintances, in order to redress the balance.
Lev Kamenev and Leonid Krassin, trade ministers to Britain, approached Wells and asked him to come to Russia. Gorky sent him a letter as well. ...
Wells received £1,000 from the Sunday Express for articles on his Russian trip ... While in Russia they met Chaliapin, Zinoviev, and Chicherin, to name three who gave Wells interviews.
{Kamanev & Zinoviev led the triumvirate which took power when Lenin died: soviet-union-early.html}
{p. 273} The Russians knew (or at least the Russian intelligensia) knew they had in Wells, if not a friend, at least a well-disposed onlooker.
{p. 284} Wells' next novel, The World of William Clissold (1926) ... is a traditional volume, leading to Meanwhile and The Open Conspiracy.
{p. 285} Clissold (now speaking as Wells) discovers and discards Marx ... In Book V ... Wells reveals the 'Open Conspiracy', based on the ideas of David Lubin and F. W. Sanderson, both of whom are mentioned by name. In the conspiracy, as Wells was beginning to outline it, self-educated persons everywhere will simply, in good time, take over the world and remake it to suit the needs of the many. {"Marxism for the middle class", it has been dubbed}
{p. 291} The Open Conspiracy (1928) also sold well. Wells ... reissued it three times, once under its original title, somewhat revised, and eventually under the title What Are We To Do With Our Lives? (1931), also in two editions. ...
{The Open Conspiracy is the movement to replace National Sovereignty with World Government; but since the public is alarmed about World Government, euphemisms are often used, such as "World Peace", "Abolishing War", "One World Or None", "World Unity", "The Borderless World", "A World Without Want", "A World Without Racism, Sexism or Militarism", and the like}
The book was well received by Wells' friends. Bertrand Russell read it 'with the most complete sympathy', and said he agreed with it entirely. He went on to discuss who would join the Conspiracy, saying Einstein was a prime candidate ...
{p. 308} Wells thought that a joint air patrol ... could be instituted in the world by Britain and the United States, to be followed by a joint fleet, joint police efforts, and so on, to lead the world into peace.
{p. 357} When the peace came, conservation of the world's resources, an economic control similar to that proposed so long ago by David Lubin, control of the air, and the elimination of Toryism would be the main priorities.
{p. 445} Among others to whom Wells addressed social pleas for help were Chaim Weizmann, to whom he apologized for his general tactlessness on the matter of Jewish desire for a homeland, saying, 'In these urgent days there is a need for fundamental solidarity in creative work that should rule out these minor resentments'; Alexandra Kollontai, whose aid was sought in getting the Declaration {of the Rights of Man} into the Soviet Union ...
{end of quotes}
(2) David Lubin, Israel Zangwill and Walter Lippmann - all close Jewish colleagues of Wells
2.1 David Lubin
On February 19, 2002, at http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:9A0Of1JQKtIC:www.nettime.org/nettime.w3archive/200109/msg00358.html+%22david+lubin%22+%22louis+brandeis%22&hl=en&lr=lang_en
I found the following material on David Lubin:
'Other influential proponents of an international, "anti-military" system of Atlantic democracies during this period included the great American historian Henry Adams, the famous British writer H.G. Wells, and the California merchant and League of Nations pioneer David Lubin. ... Lubin, who in 1905 founded Rome's Institute of World Agriculture that is today part of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, was even blunter.
'In a remarkable letter dated 20 March 1918 to US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, he stated: "But the nations, in their assumption of the right of absolute sovereignty rule, are still under the sway of paganism. Such an assumption of absolute sovereignty is pagan. ... Our earnest prayers go up to the Almighty for the success of General Allenby and of the British and Allied arms in Palestine, and the world over, now battling, in this great struggle of Democracy against Autocracy for Jehovah, the Power of Righteousness, against Odin, the power of brute force."'
2.2 Israel Zangwill, apart from being an important member of the Fabian Society and mentor of Wells, was a leading Zionist. PalestineRemembered.com says of him, at
http://www.palestineremembered.com/Acre/Famous-Zionist-Quotes/Story646.html:
'Israel Zangwill was a prominent Anglo-Jewish writer often quoted in the British press as a spokesman for Zionism and one of the earliest organizers of the Zionist movement in Britain who visited Palestine as early as 1897.
'Israel Zangwill, who had visited Palestine in 1897 and came face-to-face with the demographic reality, he stated in 1905 in a speech to a Zionist group in Manchester that:
"[Palestine is] ALREADY TWICE AS THICKLY POPULATED AS THE UNITED
STATES" (Expulsion Of The Palestinians, p. 10)
'And he also added :
"Palestine proper has already its inhabitants. The pashalik of
Jerusalem is already twice as thickly populated as the United
States, having fifty-two souls to the square mile, and not 25% of
them Jews ..... [We] must be prepared either to drive out by the
sword the [Arab] tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to
grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly
Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us." (Expulsion
Of The Palestinians, p. 7- 10, and Righteous Victims, p. 140)'
So much for Wells' & the Fabians' "Internationalism".
2.3 Walter Lippmann
2.3.1 The Spartacist history site says of Walter Lippman: "Walter Lippmann, the son of second-generation German-Jewish parents ... In 1917 Lippmann was appointed as assistant to Newton Baker, Wilson's secretary of war. Lippman worked closely with Woodrow Wilson and Edward House in drafting the Fourteen Points Peace Programme. He was a member of the USA's delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and helped draw up the covenant of the League of Nations.": http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAlippmann.htm. Strangely, it omits to mention that he was also a member of the Council On Foreign Relations (CFR), and later the Trilateral Commission: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=lang_en&q=%22walter+lippman%22+%22Council+On+Foreign+Relations%22&btnG=Google+Search.
Although I know of no direct connection between Wells and Jacob H. Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb & Co, Schiff, a Jewish banker of Wall Street, was at the forefront of attempts to create a World Government at Versailles.
2.3.2 Cyrus Adler writes in Jacob H. Schiff: His Life and Letters, volume 2, Doubleday, Doran & Co, NY 1928:
"He was also one of the first to recognize that thinking men must put their minds to work to devise some means to avoid future wars. In spite of his unwillingness to appear publicly in the matter, he was disposed, because of his strong convictions, to take an earnest part in the League to Enforce Peace, and, on October 27, 1916, he addressed a letter to President Wilson, referring to a conversation of a month previous, and urging the President to give the principal address at a dinner which was being arranged by the League for November 24. He likewise urged Wilson to join with Lord Bryce and other leaders of world opinion to take active steps for the avoidance of future wars." (p. 193). More at house-schiff.html.
2.3.3 The following information on Lippman is from the Spartacus site http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAlippmann.htm
{quote} Walter Lippmann, the son of second-generation German-Jewish parents, was born in New York City on 23rd September, 1889. While studying at Harvard University he became a socialist and was co-founder of the Harvard Socialist Club and edited the Harvard Monthly.
In 1911 Lincoln Steffens, the campaigning journalist, took Lippmann on as his secretary. Like Steffens, Lippmann supported Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party in the 1912 presidential elections. Lippman's book, A Preface to Politics (1913) was well-received and the following year he joined Herbert Croly in establishing the political weekly, the New Republic.
Lippmann rejected his earlier socialism in Drift and Mastery (1914) and in 1916 became a staunch supporter of Woodrow Wilson and the Democratic Party. In 1917 Lippmann was appointed as assistant to Newton Baker, Wilson's secretary of war. Lippman worked closely with Woodrow Wilson and Edward House in drafting the Fourteen Points Peace Programme. He was a member of the USA's delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and helped draw up the covenant of the League of Nations.
In 1920 Lippmann left the New Republic to work for the New York World. His controversial books, Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925), raised doubts about the possibility of developing a true democracy in a modern, complex society.
Lippmann became editor of the New York World in 1929, but after it closed in 1931, he moved to the Herald Tribune. For the next 30 years Lippmann wrote the nationally syndicated column, Today and Tomorrow. Lippmann developed a very pragmatic approach to politics and during this period supported six Republican and seven Democratic presidential candidates.
After the Second World War, Lippmann returned to the liberal views of his youth. He upset leaders of both the Democratic and Republican parties when he opposed the Korean War, McCarthyism and the Vietnam War. Walter Lippmann died on 14th December, 1974.
{endquote}
2.3.4 Walter Lippmann on how Colonel House, liasing with Lord (Sir Edward) Grey, persuaded Wilson to join World War I. These articles by Lippmann show how hard he worked to get the US Congress to accept the World Court and World Army: lippmann.html.
2.3.5 Carroll Quigley on Walter Lippmann:
Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time, Macmillan New York 1966:
{p. 938} More than fifty years ago the Morgan firm decided to infiltrate the Left-wing political movements in the United States. This was relatively easy to do, since these groups were starved for funds and eager for a voice to reach the people. Wall Street supplied both. The purpose was not to destroy, dominate, or take over but was really threefold: (1) to keep informed about the thinking of Left-wing or liberal groups; (2) to provide them with a mouthpiece so that they could "blow off steam," and (3) to have a final veto on their publicity and possibly on their actions, if they ever went "radical." There was nothing really new about this decision, since other financiers had talked about it and even attempted it earlier. What made it decisively important this time was the combination of its adoption by the dominant Wall Street financier, at a time when tax policy was driving all financiers to seek tax-exempt refuges for their fortunes, and at a time when the ultimate in Left-wing radicalism was about to appear under the banner of the Third International.
The best example of this alliance of Wall Street and Left-wing publication was The New Republic, a magazine founded by Willard Straight, using Payne Whitney money, in 1914. Straight ... became a Morgan partner ... He married Dorothy Payne Whitney ... the sister and co-heiress of Oliver
{p. 939} Payne, of the Standard Oil "trust." ...
The New Republic was founded by Willard and Dorothy Straight, using her money, in 1914, and continued to be supported by her financial contributions until March 23, 1953. The original purpose for establishing the paper was to provide an outlet for the progressive Left and to guide it quietly in an Anglophile direction. This latter task was entrusted to a young man, only four years out of Harvard, but already a member of the mysterious Round Table group, which has played a major role in directing England's foreign policy since its formal establishment in 1909. This new recruit, Walter Lippmann, has been, from 1914 to the present, the authentic spokesman in American journalism for the Establishments on both sides of the Atlantic in international affairs. His biweekly columns, which appear in hundreds of American papers, are copyrighted by the New York Herald Tribune which is now owned by J. H. Whitney. It was these connections, as a link between Wall Street and the Round Table Group, which gave Lippmann the opportunity in 1918, while still in his twenties, to be the official interpreter of the meaning of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points to the British government.
{endquote} More at tragedy.html.
(3) David Lubin & H. G. Wells on One World
David Lubin: A Study in Practical Idealism
By Olivia Rossetti Agresti
University of California Press, Berkeley Ca 1941.
{p. 10} Had David Lubin grown up within the pale of settlement in Russian Poland, where he was born, he might have been a dreamer, more probably a revolutionist, but he would have been foredoomed to failure. The environment would have stified him.
{p. 11} As it was, the "conserved energy", as he used to phrase it, vhich had come down to him as a racial inheritance through the centuries of oppression to which his people had been subjected found on American soil, and under the stimulating care of American institutions, the opportunity to expand and develop to its full. ...
Writing in the last months of his life to Mr. Israel Zangwill with reference to a proposed biographical essay, Lubin says:
"It should deal (a) with the genesis of the central theme, a 'call to service', starting from an incident which occurred when I was four days old, and its development under maternal and Jewish influences in the New York environment; (b) its further development under Christian influences in New England until I was sixteen years of age; (c) the next stage, three years in the wilds and deserts of Arizona until nineteen years of age; (d) then the Californian experience, the entrance into commercial life, its shaping, and the influences of this central theme; a journey to the Holy Land and its influences and the purpose for which I took up the occupation of agriculture (horticulture and cereals) all actuated by this central theme, this 'call to service.' Next comes the entry into the actual field of service, first in the state, second in the nation, third in the international field, culminating in the upbuilding of the International Institute of Agriculture, to which fifty-seven nations now adhere under treaty."
{p. 13} David Lubin was born in a Jewish community in a little town in Russian Poland.
{p. 66} Contact with the homeland of his race made him dream dreams, but these dreams were shaped by his American upbringing and experience. The following quotation, taken from a letter written many years later to Justice Louis Brandeis, clearly shows this:
{quote} In response to your request let me say, first of all, that in 1884 I visited Palestine and became impressed with the idea of Zionism to the extent of subsequently writing an article on the subject which was printed either in the London Jewish World or in the Jewish Chronicle, I do not remember which. In this article I favored starting the development of Palestine on industrial rather than on agricultural lines. I favored the opening of factories, to be operated by up-to-date machinery, for the manufacture of such staple goods as would find a market in the Mediterranean countries and in the interior of Asia and Africa. In fact, I was in favor of converting Palestine into a new New England, when com-
{p. 67} merce and industry on American lines would be sure to sweep the field.
This, however, was to be but the beginning. Successful commerce and industry were soon to open the way for safe financial ventures, when capital would come forward for the construclion of aqueducts to afford an ample water supply for irrigating and manufacturing purposes. The agricultural restoration of Palestine could then be taken systematically in hand; when reafforestation could be undertaken; when the ancient vineyard terraces could again be supplied with earth; when hill and dale, when mountainside and plain could again be made to blossom as the rose; when a new Palestine would arise, perhaps surpassing in grandeur the Palestine of the days of old.
But presently I bethought me of the Turk, and I was driven to the conclusion that if the Turk excels in anything he excels in the art of converting something into nothing; that in matters of progress he is uniformly inert and reactionary. And my dream faded into nothingness. {endquote}
{p. 68} He began to perceive the esoteric meaning of the long familiar tales. The religious theme instilled into him by his mother in the impressionable years of early childhood stirred within him. He realized as never beforethe tragedy of his race and the responsibility of belonging, as he believed, to a Messianic people sent forth to be a blessing to all the nations of the earth. While on the one hand, as we have seen the vision of the ruins of what had once been a smiling land turned his thoughts to the possibility of restoring material prosperity on modern industrial lines, and of thus procuring an economic basis on which to build up a homeland for the oppressed ghetto dwellers of Eastern Europe, on the other hand he conceived of a far nobler mission for his people than that of fulfilling the dreams of nationalistic Zionism.
{p. 69} While he aimed at achieving reform along the strictly practical lines for which his American training and experience had fitted him, yet in his eyes the important thing was not the reform considered in itself and by itself, but the reform considered as a link in the chain of progress, starting from the Primal Cause, the one Righteousness, to attain the ultimate eflect, the realization of the Kingdom on Earth, through the instrumentality of that choice band of Fighters for God designated in the Hebrew language by the name "Israel." ... he did not use the designation "Israel" in a tribal sense. In a note dated from Washington, November, 1911, addressed to Commissioner Charles P. Neil of the Bureau of Labor, Lubin explains his position on this point:
{quote} ... Israel ... really means all that
{p. 70} band of faithful workers of all times and of all nations who have striven foer development and civilization. {endquote}
{p. 333} On his return from America in the autumn of 1916, Lubin had made a brief stay in London, mainly to talk over his views on ocean freight rates with leading English shipping authorities, Sir Owen Philips, Sir Norman Hill, the Rt. Hon. Walter Runciman and others. On this occasion he also met Mr. H. G. Wells. "I have been interested in the International Institute of Agriculture for some years," Mr. Wells had written to me in the summer of 1916, "and it
{p. 334} was that which made me give Italy a kind of central part in the world pacification in my 'World set Free.'" The meeting between the writer and the man of action was graphically described in an article by Wells on whom Lubin's personality and work made a deep impression. They met only this once, but that they kept in touch the following letters show:
Easton Glebe, Dunmow,
Oct. 1916.
My dear Mr. Lubin,
{quote} I have read your Let There be Light with great care and interest. I am now returning it to you with the two typed papers you asked me to return. I find in myself a very complete understanding of your line of thought and a very warm sympathy. You will see that in my God the Invisible King I take up a more Christian attitude than yours. I am agnostic in regard to your God and I use the word "God" to express the divine in man. You will have to allow for this proper difference in terminology when you read what I have to say. We are at one in looking to a world in which mankind is unified under God as King.
I should be very interested to know more of the history of your thought and the particulars of your life. I do not think they would be satisfactory material for a novel but I have in mind a book The Kingdom of God which might possibly be written round your work and the personalities of yourself and your mother.
I wish by the bye you could get me a copy of Let There Be Light to keep. I would like it by me.
Very sincerely yours, H. G. Wells.
Rome, Nov. 4th, 1916. {endquote}
{quote} Dear Mr. Wells:
I have received your welcome letter and intended to a swer it right then and there, but it is only by a mere scratch that I am writing now, some weeks after the time of its receipt.
{p. 335} I have been at work on my merchant marine report almost constantly from the time that I arrived; have put in I fourteen days and have only some seven poor little pages brought out. And so, for the time being, all correspondence of whatever nature is in abeyance until my report is out, when among the first few copies will be one for yourself, and let me say for Mrs. Wells.
I have disappointments and regrets every day; this old town will persist in striking out, in clanging aloud, 12 o'clock when it ought not to be more than 10.15, and then the six o'clock proposition is about the same. So much to be done, and so precious little done, and the family so large (about one billion eight hundred million). But, hullo, I am using up time now, so I mrust quit, but not before I tell you that I thank you for the pleasure I have had from your valuable books. Will tell you more about them when I get my report off the table. Last night it was after twelve when I got through with you and Teddy and Derick, and Britling. Bully for you. But say throw your finite God overboard, please. If he were rubbed on the stone and the acid poured on, he would turn green.
Did it ever strike you that the "under-dog" may have something to say, and perhaps in the near future, that may set a thing or two straight ? Oh, no; how could you think of any such thing, for in common with all the sons of Esau you have a big stick for the "under-dog", and this Esau crowd have been so busy spitting and cursing and burning and despising and hooting and tooting that they have got to believe it all. But never mind, some day they will be treated to a surprise party, and they will know better. ...
And now, good-bye for the present.
Yours sincerely,
David Lubin
P.S. "Let There Be Light" has come back, and I will take pleasure in sending it back to you again "for keeps." {endquote}
{p. 336} {quote} International Institute of Agriculture,
Rome, May 21st, 1917.
Dear Mr. Wells:
I thank you very much for the copy of your illuminating book "God, the Invisible King", which I have already gone over hastily during some of my spare moments. I hope some time to go over it in greater detail.
You say that you send it "in the hope of a speedy conversion." Conversion to what? Evidently to the ideas set forth. First of all there are quite a few of these to which there is no need of my conversion, for, in common with you, I hold to them. Such are the oneness of God and the exalted duty of service. But when it comes to your "Finite God", and to the deductions which one may draw from your hook as to the part played and to be played by Israel in the field of service, it is quite clear to me that I cannot be with you, that I cannot be converted to such views.
As to the Finite God, it seems to me that such a god would be a stranger in the universe, more of a stranger than you or I. He could only come as a creature of the infinite. The infinite, then, would be God, and the finite god would be no god at all. If I were tempted to give a definition of God I would rather say that Infinite Space is God, the great Noumenon, and that all things in space are phenomena, things acted upon by the Infinite Noumenon.
"But," says the grocery-man, "empty space is just nothing. You can 't lift it nor weigh it, so how can empty space be God?"
But is the grocer-man's opinion final? By no means; for he is so chock-full of his experience of lifting and weighing that he fails to realize that his analysis is empirical.
He fails to see that his reasoning process is limited by the laws of phenomena as they appear to him; he fails to see that beyond his range of vision there are the higher laws, higher and still higher, until they approach the Absolute, the Infinite. He seems to know one pound, ten pounds, sugar, candles, soap, as a reality, and as the end of reality. He fails to see that from the point of view of the absolute his knowledge is limited to a set of symbols, and judging by
{p. 337} these symbols he jumps to a conclusion that spce is just nothing at all, that God is only real if he can be lifted, "hefted" as it were.
But let the scholar bring this grocery-man to the laborator and show him the particles constituting his sugar, candles, soap, and the laws governing their properties, and the relations of these laws stretching out far beyond his vision until they pass from our knowable world of phenomena into the vast universe of the Noumenon, and it would then be reasonable to expect that his opinions would shift, would undergo a marked change, bringing his mind closer and closer to a truer apprehension of the relations of things, of his relation to the universal Noumenon, of his relation to God.
But the reverence engendered by this larger view of relations bids us be modest and stop short in postulating definitions or personifications of that God. This, as Maimonides tells us, was the teaching of the sages of Israel. These sages taught that it was more rational and more reverent to apprehend God through negations rather than through affirmations. {What then of the Biblical God?} They taught that we approach closer to the truth by affirming that God cannot be unjust, that he cannot be unmerciful, that he cannot be limited in knowledge or power, and that we reach a truer conception of God through such negations than through their opposites, through affirmations. So far for the God idea.
And now, my dear Mr. Wells, let me say in conclusion that my contention is not with the substance of your teaching on the subject of service; on the contrary, I heartily agree with you. My contention is with your postulates and definitions of God. Just how you can come to the conclusion of service on your postulate is beyond my comprehension, for as the true marksman must have a given point at which to aim, so the effective teacher must have a logical postulate from which to draw his deductions. Do you not think so ? With high esteem, I am
Yours very sincerely,
David Lubin {endquote}
{p. 338} {quote} Easton Glebe,
Dunmow, (May 918)
My dear Lubin
A Noumenon cannot "act upon" Phenomena. Phenomena are the aspects of Noumena in the time-space system of conscious life: This rather affects your general argument. And as for the mission of the Jewish race, that is manifestly an affair for that race which is not mine. Except for your race restriction you speak of "Israel" very much as I speak of God. What's in a name? Your God of negatives, the God of Maimonides and Spinoza I define not by negatives but by polite doubts and call the Veiled Being. My "God" is the Israel of all mankind. Unless you translate these terms you will keep at loggerheads with my work. Really there is a close parallelism between "God" as I understand Him, your "Israel" and (except for the association with the man Jesus) the "Spirit-Christ" of Pauline Christianity.
Yours ever,
H. G. Wells. {endquote}
{p. 346} Whereas the International Institute of Agriculture founded by the far-seeing initiative of H. M. the King of Italy has, during the whole period of the war been the center of world-wide information and data needed for the solution of the agricultural problems which the governments had to deal with, and has been established to ensure economic benefits to all the adhering countries, and is empowered under letter (f), article 9, of the Treaty to take up measures for the protection of the interests of farmers and for the improvement of their conditions; therefore be it
Resolved: that the International Institute of Agriculture draw the attention of the adhering Governments to the fact that in addition to the services it now renders them, the Institute could be availed of by the League of Nations as one of the organs of the aforesaid federated activities; and it respectfully suggests to the adhering governments to bring this to the attention of the Conference for the form tion of the League of Nations.
{end of quotes}
(4) Wells against Zionism
H. G. Wells, Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water, Penguin, Harmondsworth, England 1939.
{p. 53} CHAPTER V
THE FUTURE OF THE JEWS
I MET a Jewish friend of mine the other day and he asked me, "What is going to happen to the Jews?" I told him I had rather he had asked me a different question, "What is going to happen - to mankind ?"
"But my people----" he began.
"That," said I, "is exactly what is the matter with them."
When I was a schoolboy in a London suburb I never heard of the "Jewish Question". I realised later that I had Jewish and semi-Jewish school-fellows, but not at the time. They were all one to me. The Jews, I thought, were people in the Bible, and that was that. I think it was my friend Walter Low who first suggested that I was behaving badly to a persecuted race. Walter, like myself, was a University crammer and a journalist competing on precisely equal terms with myself. One elder brother of his was editor of the St. James's Gazette and another was The Times correspondent in Washington and both were subsequently knighted. Later a daughter of
{p. 54} Walter's was to marry Litvinov, who became the Russian Foreign Minister. I could not see that they were at any disadvantage whatever in England. Nevertheless Walter held on to the idea that he was treated as an outcast, and presently along came Zangwill in a state of racial championship, exacerbating this idea that I was responsible for the Egyptian and Babylonian captivities, the destruction of Jerusalem, the ghettos, auto-da-fes - and generally what was I going to do about it?
My disposition was all for letting bygones be bygones.
When the war came in 1914 some of us were trying to impose upon it the idea that it was a War to End War, that if we could make ourselves heard sufficiently we might emerge from that convulsion with some sort of World Pax, a clean-up of the old order, and a fresh start for the economic life of mankind as a whole. No doubt we were very ridiculous to hope for anything of the sort, and through the twenty years of fatuity that have folowed the Armistice, the gifted young have kept up a chorus of happy derision, 'War to End war Ya ha!" In the last year or so that chorus has died down - almost as if the gifted young had noticed something. But throughout thosetragic and almost fruitless four years of war, Zangwill and the Jewish spokesmen elaborately and energetically demonstrating that they cared not a rap for the troubles and
{p. 55} dangers of English, French, Germans, Russians, Americans or of any other people but their own. They kept their eyes steadfastly upon the restoration of the Jews - and what was worse in the long run, they kept the Gentiles acutely aware of this.
The Zionist movement was a resounding advertisement to all the world of the inassimilable spirit of the more audible Jews. In England, where there has been no social, political or economic discrimination against the Jews for several generations, there is a growing irritation at the killing and wounding of British soldiers and Arabs in pitched battles fought because of this Zionist idea. It seems to our common people an irrelevance, before the formidable issues they have to face on their own account. They are beginning to feel that if they are to be history-ridden to the extent of restoring a Jewish state that was extinguished early two thousand years ago, they might just as well go back another thousand years and sacrifice their sons to restore the Canaanites and Philistines who possessed the land before the original Jewish conquest.
It is very unwillingly that I make this mild recognition of a certain national egotism the Jews as a people display ... they do remain a peculiar people in
{p. 56} the French- and English-speaking communities largely by their own free choice, because they are history-ridden and because they are haunted by a persuasion that they are a chosen people with disinctive privileges over their Gentile fellow-creatures.
{p. 57} The wisdom of our species was not enough to make the Great War of 1914-18 a "war to end war" or to achieve any solution ot the economic difficulties that were pressing upon us. For two decades the Foreign Offices, the morc they have changed the more they have remained the same thing. After 1918-19, they resumed the dear old game of conflicting sovereign powers, with gusto. The financial and business worlds could think of nothing better than to snatch back economic life from the modified public control under which it had fallen. There was a certain cant of reconstruction and rationalisalion, which as presently dropped.
{p. 58} Many of us had counted on the active Jewish mentality and the network of Jewish understanding about the world for a substantial contribution to that immense mental task. Such grealy imaginative Jews as (greatest of all in my opinion) David Lubin, Disraeli, Marx and so forth, had given an earnest of the possibility of a self-forgetful race, "sprinkling among nations", and giving itself -
{p. 59} not altogether without recompense - to the service of mankind_ We have been disappointed.
No people in the world have caught the fever of irrational nationalism that has been epidemic in the world since 1918, so badly as the Jews. They have intruded into an Arab country in a mood of intense racial exhibitionism. Instead of learning the language of their adopted country they have vamped up Hebrew. They have treated the inhabitants of Palestine practically as non-existent people, and yet these same Arabs are a people more purely Semitic than themselves. Nationalism, like a disease germ, begets itself, and they have blown up Lawrence's invention of Arab nationalism into a flame. They have addcd a new and increasing embarrassment to the troubles of the strained and possibly disintegrating British Empire.
... The Jews are not the only people who have been elucated to believe themseles peculiar and chosen. The Germans, for example, have produced a very good parallel to Zionism in the Nordic theory. they, too, it seems, are a chosen people. They too must keep themselves heroically pure. I believe that the current Nazi
{p. 60} gospel is actually and traceably the Old Testament turned inside out. It is one step from the Lutheran Church to the Brown House. When I was a boy I got a lot of the same sort of poison out o f J. R. Green's Hisory of the English People in ihe form of "Anglo-Saxonism". I know only too well the poisonous charm of such a phrase 2S Milton's "God's Englishman".
{p. 61} The accepted tradition of the Jews is largely nonsense. The are no more a "pur " race than the English or the Germans or the hundred per cent. Americans. There never was a "Promise"; they were never "Chosen"; their distinctive observances, their Sabbaqth, their Passover, their queer calendar, are mere traditional oddities of no present significance whatever. ...
The only way out from the prcscnt human catastrophe for Jew and Gentile alike, is a world-wide, conscious educational emancipation. In books, universities, colleges, schools, newspapers, plays, assemblies, we want incessant, ruthless truth-telling about these old legends that divide and antagonise and waste us.
{end of quotes}
H. G. Wells, The Anatomy of Frustration: a Modern Synthesis, Cresset Press, London 1936.
{p. 174} In this spirit Steele {an alter ego for Wells} proposed to pass in review not only the great "historical" persecutions, but the Fascist system of outrage, the activities of the Ogpu, Nazi intolerance, the suppression of labour protests in America, the coercive side of British rule in Egypt and India. He proposed to pass them in review with a balancing impartiality that would have infuriated every indignation monger in the world. From his peculiar angle, he was disposed to regard punishments, imprisonment, personal hardship and killing as far less heinous offences against humanity than the refusal of publicity and the distortion of facts. The Crucifixion, he remarks, and the trial of Joan of Arc, "seem anyhow to have been fairly reported." If the reports had not been made both martyrs would have lived in vain. His gravest charge against the Russian, German and Italian tyrannies, is that men disappear in silence, and against labour suppression in America, that the evidence is distorted and the charges are oblique. The frame-up horrifies him; it is "black iniquity." But in an open conflict with an irrecon-
{p. 175} cilable violent antagonist whom one believes to be wrong and mischievously active, where non-resistance would be tacit submission and practical participation, the cool-headed use of force to the pitch of killing and open warfare is not simply allowable but a necessary duty. There will certainly be battlefields, prisons, shootings and gallows for armed opponents on the way to Steele's socialist world-state.
That will offend many gentle-spirited readers, and still more will they be offended by his resolve to put the under-dog as well as the upper-dog on trial. The Nazi movement began in fear and exasperation. How far, he asks, was there justification for that fear and exasperation? The manifest resolve of the victors of the Great War to impose a hopeless, debt-paying servitude upon the vanquished, accounts for the blaze of desperate and defiant patriotism in which Hitlerism was born_ It may even account for the self-protective racialism of the movement. But it does not account for teh bitter animosity to the Jews. And it is for the treatment of the Jews that we are most frequend urged to condemn Hitlerism. So Steele sets himself
{p. 176} to investigate the vexatiousness of the Jew in Germany- and throughout the ages.
{Wells seems not to have comprehended the role of the Balfour Declaration in giving Britain victory over Germany: freedman.html. Even Lloyd George acknowledged it: l-george.html}
He does not believe that Jews are inherently different from Gentiles. They are a people of mixed origins, mainly Levantine; their racial purity is as much a falsehood as the racial purity of the "Nordics." What holds them together is a tradition, Biblical, Talmudic and economic. Solidarity has been forced upon them by the hostility their tradition invoked. It is a tradition that stresses acquisitiveness. They are more alert about property, money and the power of money than the run of mankind; they are brighter and cleverer with money. They get, they permeate, they control. The non-Jewish populations amidst which they live do not admit any inferiority to them; they feel that this successful Jewish concentration is made at the expense of broader and finer interests, of leisure, brooding contemplation and experiment. But if they are to hold their own againstthe biological pressure of the Jew they must drop these alleged broader and finer interests, whatever they are, and concentrate on the struggle for possession. The Jew makes the biological pace for
{p. 177} them at a lower level, unless they impose a handicap on him or resort periodically to some form of pogrom. He grips the property, he secures the appointment. The Gentile feels he is robbed of opportunity by all this alertness. He is baffled and he gives way to anger.
Steele weighs this indictment. It is the very core of the Jewish trouble. Are the Jews more pushful than non-Jews? Does their energy in the attainment of opportunity block the way to slower but sounder and deeper accomplishment? He embarks upon a study of Jevish music, Jewish painting, Jewish science, the Jewish influence on drama, on the films. He disentangles instances and comes to the incidental conclusion that there are a number of Gentiles who are "Jewish" in their quality, and a number of Jews who are not. It is a matter of method and spirit. But on the whole he thinks we are dealing here with a distinctive tradition of behaviour that taints, hampers, and frustrates much human effort. The Jew is not a good citizen in this sense, that he does not gve a whole-hearted allegiance to the institutions, conventions and collective interests and movements
{p. 178} of the community in which he finds himself. Neither is he creative in the common interest. He is an alien with an alien mentality, and the achievement of "spoiling the Egyptians" lurks at the fountain-head of his ideology. His acquisitive keenness, his concentration upon attainment, his disregard of sentimental and ultimate standards, is in a large part due to the way in which his alien tradition releases him from "playing the game" of the community life simply and completely.
You may repudiate and fight against the clumsy revengefulness, the plunderings, outrages and fantastic intimidations of the Nazi method, but that does not close the Jewish problem for you. It merely brings you back to the fundamental age-long problem of this nation among the nations, this in-and-out mentality, the essential parasitism of the Jewish mycelium upon the social and cultural organisms in which it lives.
This is a problem for Jews to consider and solve for themselves. So far they have not faced up to it however urgently it has been thrust upon them. These are hard sayings for a consciously, an almost
{p. 178} professionally persecuted people, but they have to be said.
The Jewish world suffers very gravely from what one may call its Professional Champions, men who live by exacerbating the stresses between Jew and Gentile, and promoting unjust and unwise boycotts and vindictive discriminations. They are a natural and very unfortunate by-product of the conflict of ancient loyalties with modern generosities. They trade on the conservative influence of dear and picturesque associations. Every criticism of Jewish tradition is magnified by these mischief-makers into an attack on the race, and everyone who opposes an intense isolationism is denounced as the malignant enemy of a sacred and eternal tradition. They bring social pressure to bear upon every Jew who falters in his racial solidarity and cultural orthodoxy. Their clamour will not allow Jew and Gentile to adjust to any broader synthesis. All ease of intercourse between Jew and Gentile is destroyed by their activities. The Jewish racial consciousness is over-sensitized, and the Gentile writer who wishes to escape from the systematic hostility and detraction of a large and influential
{p. 180} section in the literary world, is urged to exaggerated and exasperating suppressions - until he loses patience and explodes. His explosion is good business for the Professional Champion, who can then boast he has "unmasked" another "enemy" of the race. It is good business for the Professional Champion, but it is very bad business indeed for the Jewish community. We see quite typically this process at work in the case of Steele. We can watch his irritation grow at the Jewish reception of his universalism. "Am I a Gibeonite," he says in one note. "Why is every liberal thinker expected to be subservient to Jewish reaction?" At last we find him writing of Zionism in a tone of frank exasperation.
"We shall never have peace between nations, races and individuals, nor in our public nor our private lives, until we throw over these Champions who insist on 'standing up' for us," he wrote in another place. "'Championship' is a real and powerful factor in the frustration of human unity. The Jewish case is only one instance of a world-wide nuisance."
"The universalism of Jewry," he says in another
{p. 181} memorandurn, "must come from within, can only come from within, and all external persecution, violence and counter-boycotting of the Jews as a race or a religion is barbaric, foredoomed to futility and bound to decivilize the persecutor, but this must not bar Gentile writers from the frankest and most searching criticism of the many narrowing and reactionary elements still disagreeably active in the Jewish tradition. Jews write Gentile history and criticize Gentile institutions, and they have no right whatever to object to the converse process. A man may have the filllest apprehension of the great history and exceptional quality of the Jews, he may have the utmost liking and admiration for individual Jews and for Jewish types and traits, he may want to get together with Jews in every possible way, and still regard Zionism and cultural particularism as a blunder and misfortune for them and for mankind."
In one surprising passage Steele argues that the German National Socialist movement is essentially Jewish in spirit and origin, it is Bible-born, an imitation of Old Testament nationalism. The Jews have been taxed with most sins but never before
{p. 182} with begetting the Nazi. But Steele writes of it as if it were self-evident. National Socialism, he declares, is inverted Judaism, which has retained the form of the Old Testament and turned it inside out. Hitler never made a speech yet that could not be rephrased in Bible language. Only a Bible-saturated people in these days, a people ignorant in the mass of modern biology and general history, could take so easily to national egotism, to systematic xenophobia, to self-righteous ideas of conquest and extermination. The German mind, never a very subtle or critical one, the copious abounding German mind, was poisoned in the Lutheran schools. The preservation of the Bible as a book sacred beyond criticism has kept alive a tradition of barbaric cunning and barbaric racialism, generation after generation, to the infinite injury of economic and political life.
In another passage Steele makes something between an appeal to and a lamentation upon "grievance stricken peoples." He dwells upon the dash and brilliance of so many young Irishmen, the alert nimbleness of the young Indian, the immense power and penetration of so many young Jews.
{p. 183} "Why will they never forget the blunders and injustice done them by people as often as not duller than themselves? Why do they narrow themselves down to be vindictive? Why do these ancient defeats bar them from modern creativeness? Why do they refuse to be men among men? Why specialize in Erin or Mother India or Palestine, when the whole world is our common inheritance? Come out of Israel!"
With perfect candour Steele admits that the genuine man of science and every advocate of the socialist world state, are in a dissentient parallel position to the Jew's. The difference is that while the latter harks back to an extremely antiquated divinity and history and is saturated with an unjustifiable racial conceit, the modern liberal gives his allegiance to a universal order still to be attained. He works for the future of all mankind and not for an inassimilable tribal survival. The Catholic church, again, Islam and the Communist Party are also, in varying scope and measure, imperative cults antagonizing the loyalty of their adherents to the legal states in which they live. ...
{end of quotes}
H.G. Wells' denunciations of Zionism sound like Trotsky's. This is Wells' weakness ... because Trotsky was complicit in imposing a Jewish dictatorship in the guise of universalism.
Wells' anti-Zionism was combined with an admiration for Trotsky. He gives no indication of having comprehended that Bolshevism had secretly been run by non-theistic Jews, even though Bertrand Russell witnessed it:russell.html.
Well's weakness, then, is the susceptibility of his movement to being hijacked or secretly steered, by "entryism", to directions he may not have approved of. In effect, he was not in charge of his own movement.
Stalin saw what was going on: he perceived the secret Jewish conspiracy within Bolshevism, but at first he was powerless to counter it. Later, he moved the conspirators aside and took over himself, only to be murdered by the same forces in 1953. Beria's accession represented a return to control by the Jewish faction, but his overthrow by Khruschev marked its end: beria.html.
Stalin was not anti-Jewish per se; he simply opposed Jews putting their own perceived interests above those of everyone else in the USSR. The Jewish faction tended to coalesce around Trotsky, and pursue distinctive policies.
(5) Wells was a Communist of the Trotskyist-Fabian kind
Trotskyists support Free Trade, because their first objective is getting rid of the independence of countries: xTrots.html.
H. G. Wells was a Communist; Bertrand Russell was also sympathetic to Communism. What both rejected was the Stalinist variety. Here is some evidence:
(5.1) Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, The Life of H. G. Wells: The Time Traveller, The Hogarth Press, London 1987.
{p. 434 FOOTNOTE} Though Wells openly attacked the Communist Party for years, ridiculed Marx, and thought the Soviet regime had betrayed the revolution, he gave money to Communist causes and had many associates who were party members. Just before the 1945 general election he wrote a letter to the Daily Worker to say that "I am an active supporter of the reconstituted Communist Party. I want to vote to that effect", and complaining that there was no Communist candidate in his constituency... {endquote}
(5.2) J. Percy Smith, ed., Bernard Shaw and H . G. Wells, University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1995.
Afterword
Shaw outlived Wells by four years. He died on 2 November 1950, and his body was cremated at Golders Green four days later. His ashes were mingled with those of Charlotte and scattered in the grounds of the house at Ayot St Lawrence.
What Wells might have written in an obituary notice had he outlived Shaw is for any reader of the correspondence to imagine, as he or she may wish. In 1945 the London Daily Express, in a moment of journalistic foresight, invited the two to write obituary articles about each other. Shaw refused, but Wells agreed, and his article entitled 'G.B.S. - A Memoir by H.G. Wells,' appeared on the day after Shaw's death. Its tone is more personal and unrestrained than that of the usual obituary notice. Yet since Shaw had written a comparable piece entitled 'The Testament of Wells,' published in the Tribune on 27 March 1942 (see Letter 14), it may interest readers of their letters to read what the two old men had to say about each other after half a century of sparring. ...
The Testament of Wells {by Shaw, about Wells}
The last sixty years have seen the rise of two new sects, the Wellsians and the Shavians, with a large overlap. The overlap may suggest that as our doctrine must be the same, our mental machinery must be the same also. But in fact no tvo machines for doing the same work could be more different than our respective brains. Ecologically (H. G.'s favourite word) and intellectually I am a seventeenth-century Protestant Irishman usinlg the mental processes and technical craft of Swift and Voltaire, whilst Wells is an intensely English nineteenth-century suburban cockney, thinking anyhow, writing anyhow, and always doing both uncommonly well. The doctrine in my hands is a structure on a basis of dispassionate economic and biological theory: in his it is a furi ous revolt against unlbealable facts and exasperting follies visible as such to his immense vision and intelligence where the ordinary Briton sees nothing wrong but a few cases that are dealt with by the police. He has neither time nor patiellce for theorising, and probably agrees with that bishop whose diocese I forget, but who said very acutely that I would never reach the Celestial City because I would not venture beyond the limits of a logical map. These differences between us are vely fortunate; for our sermons complement instead of repeating one another; you must read us both to become a complete Wellshavian.
When Wells burst on England there were no Wellshavians; but there were Wellshavians, alias Fabians, who had the start of him by ten years, and had the advantage of having been caught by the literature of Socialism in their mid-twenties, when he was in his teens, too young to take it in to its full depth. ...
{p. 217} Now it happens most unfortunately and quite unaccountably that his pet aversion is Karl Marx. Marx's first
{p. 218} beloved children died of slow starvation, which wrecked his health and shortened his own life. His two youngest daughters committed suicide. His own wife was driven crazy by domestic worry. And yet he managed to write a book which changed the mind of the world in favour of Wells and nerved Lenin and Stalin to establish a new civilisation, largely Wellsian, in Russia. Yet Wells ... will belittle the Russian revolution and declare that the vital issue between experimenting with Socialism in a single country and waiting for an impossible world revolution was only a wretched personal squabbie between Stalin and Trotsky. Happily, after raving like this for pages and pages, he comes out at last on the perfectly sound ground that it is England's business not only to make the same inevitable revolution in its own way in its own country (Stalinism) but to make an equally successful job of it without any of the mistakes and violences ...
{p. 219} 27th March 1942 {end}
(5.3) Wells and the Webbs supported Trotsky (against Stalin) at the time of his Expulsion from the USSR:
Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, tr. & ed. Harold Shukman, HarperCollinsPublishers, London 1996.
{p. 320} ... the Ilyich manoeuvred slowly alongside the quay ... in Constantinople ... {p. 321} Trotsky went on writing, meeting journalists and seeking channels of contact with his supporters in oher countries. Messages of support and offers of help came from Rosmer and Paz in Paris, the critic Edmund Wilson in the USA, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, H.G. Wells and Herbert Samuel in England, among others. He felt much encouraged. {end quote}
(5.4) H. G . Wells, After Democracy, London, Watts & Co., 1932.
{p. 330; pbk p. 375} But the rulers of the new World-State, as their enlargements of the Air and Sea Police made manifest ... Nowhere at first was there any armed insurrectionary movement. We realize from this how complete had been the collapse of the organized patriotic states of the World War period. {end}
{What was the British Empire, if not a kind of organized patriotism?}
(5.5) Bertrand Russell, Roads to Freedom, published in 1918 before he had visited Bolshevik Russia:
"If the Russian Revolution had been accompanied by a revolution in Germany, the dramatic suddenness of the change might have shaken Europe, for the moment, out of its habits of thought: the idea of fraternity might have seemed, in the twinkling of an eye, to have entered the world of practical politics; and no idea is so practical as the idea of the brotherhood of man, if only people can be startled into believing in it. If once the idea of fraternity between nations were inaugurated with the faith and vigour belonging to a new revolution, all the difficulties surrounding it would melt away, for all of them are due to suspicion and the tyranny of ancient prejudice. Those who (as is common in the English-speaking world) reject revolution as a method, and praise the gradual piecemeal development which (we are told) constitutes solid progress, overlook the effect of dramatic events in changing the mood and the beliefs of whole populations. A simultaneous revolution in Germany and Russia would no doubt have had such an effect, and would have made the creation of a new world possible here and now." (Roads to Freedom, Unwin paperback, London 1977, p. 120).
(5.6) H. G. Wells, The Open Conspiracy, in H. G. Wells, The Open Conspiracy and Other Writings, London, 1933 {the 1933 edition bears no publisher's name}.
{p. 14} The idea of reorganizing the affairs of the world on quite a big scale ... has broken out all over the place, thanks largely to the Russian Five Year Plan. ...
{p. 21} IV THE REVOLUTION IN EDUCATION .... The old-world teachers and schools have to be reformed or replaced. ...
{p. 22} V RELIGION IN THE NEW WORLD
{p. 24} The word "God" is in most minds so associated with the concept of religion that it is abandoned only with the greatest reluctance.
{p. 25} .... Man's soul is no longer his own. It is, he discovers, part of a greater being which lived before he was born and will survive him. The idea of a survival of the definite individual with all the accidents and idiosyncrasies of his temporal nature upon him dissolves to nothing in this new view of immortality. {editor's note: this is a Jewish view}
{p. 28} But it is possible now to imagine an order in human affairs from which these evils have been largely or entirely eliminated. More and more people are coming to realize that such an order is a material possibility .... Other-worldliness become unnecessary. {not a Christian idea; more like that of the USSR}
{p. 30} Let us make clear what sort of government we are trying to substitute for the patchwork of to-day. It will be a new sort of direction with a new psychology. The method of direction of such a world commonweal is not likely to imitate the methods of existing sovereign states. It will be something new and altogether different. ...
The Open Conspiracy, the world movement for the supercession or enlargement or fusion of existing political, economic, and social institutions ... A lucid, dispassionate, and immanent criticism is the primary necessity, the living spirit of a world civilization. The Open Conspiracy is essentially such a criticism ... Their directive force will be (I) an effective criticism having the quality of science {rule by scientific "experts"} ...
{end}
Pitirim Sorokin wrote of the visits of Wells and Bertrand Russell to Russia in 1920, in his book Leaves From A Russian Diary (E. P. Dutton & Co, New York 1924):
{p. 243} The English Labor Delegation, H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, like other foreigners, saw principally what the Communists wanted to show them; they came in touch with few non-Communists, nor would they have been able to speak with many such had they so desired. They simply swallowed what ever bait the Soviet leaders offered them and went home impressed with the dictatorship of the proletariat, "endless Communist enthusiasm," and the devotion of the people to the Soviet Government. I did not meet Bertrand Russell, but friends of mine did meet him and made what efforts they could to enlighten him as to the true condition of affairs.
I was present at the meeting in the Palace of Labor, from which most real laborers were excluded, and I saw something of H. G. Wells who, from his arrival, was placed under the constant guardianship of Gorky. Wells visited the Academy of Science, but he could not talk with J. Pavlov or other dis-
{p. 244} tinguished academicians. Gorky did not take him through the University, but showed him only its one decently equipped building, the physical laboratory. A dinner was given Wells in the House of Arts, with clean table cloths, clean dishes, and better food than any of the intellectuals had seen in years. There was even meat on that table. But to give it a proletarian appearance, the spoons were of wood. To create a truly liberal atmosphere, a number of University professors and literary men were invited, although most of the guests were Communists, and two Chekhists were on hand to watch the counter- revolutionaries. Indignant at the betrayal of truth by these men, I decided to make a speech, although I could not then use the English language. Addressing Wells, but really speaking to the Communists, I explained the real situation and the appalling campaign of murder which was being carried on in the name of liberty. I spoke moderately, for one does with the hangman in the room, but I must have spoken to the point, for Gorky suddenly interrupted, saying that such speeches were inadmissable.
"Then why are we here?" I asked. "Are we invited only to assist in deceiving this great English writer?" At this several celebrated Russian writers, to show their indignation, rose and left the room, crying: "We refuse to be classed with liars." Amphitheatroff, an eminent novelist, remained, saying to me: "I am going to try to finish your speech." He did manage to speak briefly, but Gorky made him take his seat, declaring that what he was saying was "improper." Gorky's own
{p. 245} speech was a sweeping defense of the Communist Government, and made him very popular with them. But it cost him the respeet of the intellectuals, many of whom after that evening would never take his hand. As for me, even before the dinner to Wells was over, I left the hall and once more, for my "health's sake," disappeared.
{endquote} More at kronstadt.html.
This is important, for it shows who was in charge of the "Open Conspiracy". Wells was being deceived by those running the regime; so they, not he, were running it.
(5.7)
Wells, a closet Trotskyist in the British Establishment, advocate of One World, wrote
"Socialism, if it is anything more than a petty tinkering with economic relationships is a renucleation of society. The family can remain only as a biological fact. Its economic and educational autonomy are inevitably doomed. The modern state is bound to be the ultimate guardian of all children and it must assist, place, or subordinate the parent as supporter, guardian and educator; it must release all human beings from the obligation of mutual proprietorship, and it must refuse absolutely to recognize or enforce any kind of sexual ownership. It cannot therefore remain neutral when such claims come before it. It must disallow them."
(Experiment in Autobiography, Gollancz, London, 1934, vol. ii, p. 481).
(6) Lenin's Opposition to the Treaty of Versailles
Lenin sent the Red Army to invade Poland in 1920. This is comparable to Hitler's invasion of Poland. For Hitler, Poland was only a stepping-stone to the East; but for Lenin, Poland was only a stepping-stone to Germany.
Lenin candidly wrote about Poland, as follows:
Richard Pipes, ed., The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1996):
{p. 100}.This sounds incomprehensible, but the history of the Council of Action in England has proved with absolute precision that somewhere in the proximity of Warsaw lies not the center of the Polish bourgeois government and the republic of capital, but that somewhere in the proximity of Warsaw lies the center of the entire system of international imperialism, and that we are now at a point when we are beginning to sway this system and making politics not in Poland, but in Germany and England. Thus in Germany and England we have created a completely new zone of the proletareian revolution against worldwide imperialism, becausePoland, as a buffer between Russia and Germany, Poland, as the last state, will remain entirely in the hands of international imperialism against Russia. She is the
{p. 101} linchpin of the whole Treaty of Versailles. The modern imperialist world rests on the Treaty of Versailles. Having defeated Germany and settled the question of which of the two powerful international groups - the English or the German - will determine the fate of the world in the coming years, imperialism ended up with the Versailles peace. They have no other means of solidifying international relations, political as well as economic, than the Versailles peace. Poland is such a powerful element in this Versailles Peace that by extracting this element we break up the entire Versailes peace. We had tasked ourselves with occupying Warsaw; the task changed and it turned out that what was being decided was not the fate of Warsaw but the fate of the Treaty of Versailles.
{endquote}
(7) H. G. Wells, Henry Wickham Steed, and Viscount Grey put the case for World Government, in The Atlantic Monthly, January & February 1919
To win European audiences, they claim that they are promoting a new Hellenism, and a Roman Empire which expands to cover the whole world.
But, giving the lie to this,Wells insisted that the Bolsheviks be included in the World Government.
Henry Wickham Steed, editor of The Times, changed tack when they were invited to help form it. He wrote in his book Through Thirty Years 1892-1922: A Personal Narrative Volume II (London, William Heinemann Ltd, 1924):
"The first bad blunder was made on January 22nd when Mr. Lloyd George sudden]y proposed that Bolshevist delegates should be invited to Paris. A similar suggestion had been made by a Jewish writer ten days before in the Manchester Guardian. The notion was that the Bolshevists and the Russian border peoples whom they were striving to destroy should cease fighting and meet in Paris alongside of the Peace Conference; but its practical effect would have been to accredit Bolshevism and to stimulate its growth in Central Europe." (p. 270).
He then single-handedly blocked the secret push for World Government at the Peace Conference of Versailles in 1919: toolkit3.html.
7.1 Part One The Atlantic Monthly, JANARY 1919
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/19jan/leag119.htm
A small group of qualified Englishmen have long been working toward Universal Peace from an angle of their own. Forming the League of Free Nations Association they have divided the principal problems among experts, for extended study, appraisal and suggestions for solution. These inquiries, eventually to be published in book form, will, in the Atlantic's belief, form a highly important treatise on World Peace; but, in the meantime, the group has united in the compilation of the following article, which may well serve as an introduction to all attempts at a League of Nations. The composite authorship of the paper is especially interesting, the names of the collaborators being,--
H. G. WELLS, Chairman
H. WICKHAM STEED, VISCOUNT GREY, GILBERT MURRAY, LIONEL CURTIS, J. A. SPENDER, WILLIAM ARCHER, Secretary, A. E. ZIMMERN, VISCOUNT BRYCE
I
UNIFICATION of human affairs, to the extent at least of a cessation of war and a worldwide rule of international law, is no new idea; it can be traced through many centuries of history. It is found as an acceptable commonplace in a fragment, De Republica, of Cicero. It has, indeed, appeared and passed out of the foreground of thought, and reapeared there, again and again.
Hitherto, however, if only on account of the limitations of geographical knowledge, the project has rarely been truly world-wide, though in some instances it has comprehended practically all the known world. Almost always there has been an excluded fringe of barbarians and races esteemed as less than men.
The Roman Empire realized the idea in a limited sphere and in a mechanical, despotic fashion. It was inherent in the propaganda of Islam -- excluding the unbeliever. It may be said that the political unity of Christendom overriding states and nations was the orthodox and typical doctrine of the Middle Ages. The individual states were regarded as being, in the nature of things, members of one great body politic, presided over by the Pope, or the Emperor, or both. It was the idea of the world supremacy of the Empire which inspired Dante's De Monarchia; but, as Lord Bryce has remarked, 'Dante's book was an epilogue instead of a prophecy.'
It cannot be claimed that history shows any continuously progressive movement of human affairs from a dispersed to a unified condition. Rather it tells a story of the oscillating action of separatist and unifying forces. And the process of civilization itself, if we use the word in its narrower and older sense of the elaboration of citizenship in a political and social organization, and exclude mechanical and scientific progress from it, has on the whole been rather on the side of fragmentation. It was, for example, much easier for loosely organized tribes and village communities scattered over wide areas to coalesce into vague and often very
The Renaissance presents a phase in history in which a large vague unification (Christendom) is seen to be breaking up simultaneously with the appearance of a higher grade of national organization. Machiavelli, with his aspiration toward a united Italy, involving a distintegration of the Empire, opened the phase of the national state in Europe, which reached its fullest development in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Before the Renaissance Europe was far more of a unity than it was at the close of the reign of Queen Victoria, when it consisted mainly of a group of nations, with their national edges sharpened and hardened almost to a maximum, each aspiring to empire and each acutely suspicious of and hostile to its neighbors. The idea of international organization for peace seemed far more Utopian to the normal European intelligence in 1900 than it would have done eight hundred years before.
But while those political and social developments which constitute civilization in the narrower sense of the word were tending to make human societies, as they became more elaborately organized, more heterogeneous and mutually unsympathetic, there were also coming into play throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for the first time, upon a quite unprecedented scale, another series of forces diametrically opposed to human separations. They worked, however, mutely, because the world of thought was unprepared for them. Unprecedented advances in technical and scientific knowledge were occurring, and human cooperation and the reaction of man upon man, not only in material but also in mental things, was being made enormously more effective than it had ever been before. But the phrases of international relationship were not altering to correspond. Phrases usually follow after rather than anticipate reality, and so it was that at the outbreak of the Great War in August, 1914, Europe and the world awoke out of a dream of intensified nationality to a new system of realities which were entirely antagonistic to the continuance of national separations.
It is necessary to state very plainly the nature of these new forces. Upon them rests the whole case for the League of Nations as it is here presented. It is a new case. It is argued here that these forces give us powers novel in history and bring mankind face to face with dangers such as it has never confronted before. It is maintained that, on the one hand, they render possible such a reasoned coordination of human affairs as has never hitherto been conceivable, and that, on the other, they so enlarge and intensify the scope and evil of war and of international hostility as to give what was formerly a generous aspiration more and more of the aspect of an imperative necessity. Under the lurid illumination of the world war, the idea of world-unification has passed rapidly from the sphere of the literary idealist into that of the methodical, practical man, and the task of an examination of its problems and possibilities, upon the scale which the near probability of an actual experiment demands, is thrust upon the world.
All political and social institutions, all matters of human relationship, are dependent upon the means by which mind may react upon mind and life upon life, that is to say upon the intensity, rapidity, and reach of mental and physical communication. In the history of mankind, the great phases seem all to be marked by the appearance of some new invention which facilitates trade or intercourse, and may be regarded as the operating cause of the new phase. The invention of writing, of the wheel and the road, of the ship, of money, of printing, of letters of exchange, of joint-stock undertakings and limited liability, mark distinct steps in the enlargement of human intercourse and cooperation from its original limitation within the verbal and traditional range of the family or tribe.
A large part of the expansion of the Roman Empire, apart from its overseas development, may be considered, for example, as a process of road-making and bridge-building. Even its trans-Mediterranean development was a matter of road-making combined with ship-building. The Roman Empire, like the Chinese, expanded on land to an extremity determined by the new method of road-communication; and sought to wall itself in at last at the limits of its range from its centres of strength. The new chapter of the human story again, which began with the entry of America and the Oceanic lands upon the stage of history, was the direct outcome of that bold sailing out upon the oceans which the mariner's compass, and the supersession of the galley by the development of sails and rigging, rendered possible. The art of printing from movable types released new powers of suggestion, documentation, and criticism, which shattered the old religious organization of Christendom, made the systematic investigations and records of modern science possible, and created the vast newspaper-reading democracies of to-day. The whole of history could, indeed, be written as a drama of human nature reacting to invention.
And we live to-day in a time of accelerated inventiveness and innovation, when a decade modifies the material of inter-communication far more extensively than did any century before, in range, swiftness, and intensity alike. Within the present century, since 1900, there have been far more extensive changes in these things than occurred in the ten centuries before Christ. Instead of regarding Around the World in Eighty Days as an amazing feat of hurry, we can now regard a flight about the globe in fifteen or sixteen days as a reasonable and moderate performance. The teaching of history compels us to recognize in these new facilities factors which will necessarily work out into equally revolutionary social and political consequences. It is the most obvious wisdom to set ourselves to anticipate as far as we can, so as to mitigate and control, the inevitable collisions and repercussions of mankind that are coming upon us. Even if we were to suppose that this rush of novel accelerating contrivances would be presently checked, -- and there is little justification for any such supposition, -- it would still behoove us to work out the influence which the things already achieved will have upon our kind.
And it is not simply an increase of range and swiftness that we have to consider here, though these are the aspects that leap immediately to the eye. There has also been, for example, a very great increase in the possible vividness of mental impact. In education and in the agencies of journalism and propaganda, there has been an increase of power at present incalculable, owing to vast strides in the printing of pictures, and to the cinematograph, the gramaphone, and similar means of intense world-wide information and suggestion.
II
While all these things, on the one hand, point plainly now to such possibilities of human unification and world unanimity as no one could have dreamed of a hundred years ago, there has been, on the other hand, a change, an intensification, of the destructive processes of war which opens up a black alternative to this pacific settlement of human affairs. The case as it is commonly stated in the propaganda literature for a League of Nations is a choice between, on the one hand, a general agreement on the part of mankind to organize a permanent peace, and on the other, a progressive development of the preparation for war and the means of conducting war which must ultimately eat up human freedom and all human effort, and, as the phrase goes, destroy civilization. We shall find as we proceed that these simple oppositions do not by any means state all the possibilities of the case; but for a moment or so it will be convenient to confine our attention to this enhancement of the cost, burden, and destructiveness of belligerence which scientific and technical progress has made inevitable.
What has happened is essentially this, that the natural limitations upon warfare which have existed hitherto appear to have broken down. Hitherto there has been a certain proportion between the utmost exertion of a nation at war and the rest of its activities. The art and methods of war have had a measurable relation to the resources of the community as a whole, so that it has been possible for nations to be well armed by the standards of the time and yet to remain vigorous and healthy communities, and to wage successful wars without exhaustion.
To take a primitive example, it was possible for the Zulu people, under King Chaka, to carry warfare as it was then understood in South Africa -- a business of spearmen fighting on foot -- to its utmost perfection, and to remain prosperous and happy themselves, whatever might be the fate they inflicted upon their neighbors. And even the armies of Continental Europe, as they existed before the Great War, were manifestly bearable burdens, because they were borne. But the outbreak of that struggle forced upon the belligerents, in spite of the natural conservatism of all professional soldiers, a rapid and logical utilization of the still largely neglected resources of mechanical and chemical science; they were compelled to take up every device that offered, however costly it might be; they could not resist the drive toward scientific war which they had themselves released. In warfare the law of the utmost immediate exertion rules; the combatant who does not put in all his possible energy is lost. In four brief years, therefore, Europe was compelled to develop a warfare monstrously out of proportion to any conceivable good which the completest victory could possibly achieve for either side.
We may take as a typical instance of this logical and necessary exaggeration which warfare has undergone the case of the 'tank.' The idea of a land ironclad was an old and very obvious one, which had been disliked and resisted by military people for many years. The substantial basis of the European armies of 1914 was still a comparatively inexpensive infantry, assisted by machineguns and field-guns and cavalry. By 1918 the infantry line is sustained by enormous batteries of guns of every calibre, firing away an incredible wealth of ammunition; its structure includes the most complicated system of machine-gun nests and strong posts conceivable, and every important advance is preceded by lines of aeroplanes and sustained by fleets of these new and still developing weapons, the tanks. Every battle sees scores of these latter monsters put out of action. Now, even the primitive tank of 1917 costs, quite apart from the very high running expenses, something between seven and ten thousand pounds. At that stage it was still an expedient on trial and in the rough. But its obvious corollary in movable big-gun forts with ammunition tenders -- forts which will probably be made in parts and built up near to the point of use, however costly they may be -- is practically dictated if war is to continue. So too is a production of light and swift types of tank that will serve many of the purposes of cavalry.
If war is to continue as a human possibility, this elaboration of the tank in scale and species follows inevitably. A mere peace of the old type is likely to accelerate rather than check this elaboration. Only a peace that will abolish the probability of war from human affairs can release the nations from the manifest necessity of cultivating the tank, multiplying the tank, and maintaining a great manufacture and store of tanks, over and above all the other belligerent plants which they had to keep going before 1914. And these tanks will supersede nothing -- unless perhaps, to a certain extent, cavalry. The tank, growing greater and greater and more numerous and various, is manifestly, therefore, one new burden -- one of many new burdens -- which must rest upon the shoulders of mankind henceforth, until the prospect of war can be shut off from international affairs. It is foolish to ignore these grimly budding possibilities of the tank. There they are, and they cannot be avoided if war is to go on.
But the tank is only one of quite a multitude of developments, which are bound to be followed up if the modern war-process continues. There is no help for it. In every direction there is the same story to be told -- if war is still to be contemplated as a possibility -- of an unavoidable elaboration of the means of war beyond the scale of any conceivable war end.
As a second instance, let us take the growth in size, range, and destructiveness of the air war. Few people realize fully what a vast thing the air-service has become. A big aeroplane of the raider type may cost anything up to twenty thousand pounds; the smallest costs not much less than a thousand. The pilot and the observer are of the very flower of the youth of the country; they have probably cost society many thousands of pounds' worth of upbringing and education, and they have made little or no productive contribution to human resources. And these costs units have been multiplied enormously. From a poor hundred or so of aerial planes at the outset of the war, Great Britain alone has expanded her air forces until she has an output of thousands of new machines a month, aerodromes abound throughout the country, and there is scarcely a corner of England where the hum of the passing aeroplane is not to be heard. Now all this vast plant of aeroplane factories and instruction aerodromes must be kept up, once it has been started, war or no war, until war is practically impossible. It may be argued, perhaps, that during a peace-spell some portion of this material may be applied to civil air-transport; but the manufacturers have made it abundantly clear that this project does not strike them as reasonable or desirable; their industry has been created as an armament industry and an armament industry they wish it to remain. And besides this opposition of the interested profiteer, we have to remember that the aeroplane has imported into warfare possibilities of surprise hitherto undreamed of. So long as a sudden declaration of war, or an attack preceding a declaration of war, is possible, it is imperative now, not only that the air force of a country should be kept always in striking condition, but that the whole vast organization of coastal and frontier anti-aircraft defenses should be equally ready. Tens of thousands of men, most of them economically very valuable, must keep watch day and night, prepared at any moment to flash into warfare again.
The same story of a tremendous permanent expansion of war-equipment could be repeated in a score of parallel instances drawn from the land war and sea war. Enormous new organizations of anti-submarine flotillas, of minefield material and its production, of poison-gas manufacture and the like, have been called into existence, and must now remain as going concerns so long as war is likely to be renewed.
But enough examples have been cited here to establish the reality of this present unrestricted, illimitable, disproportionate growth of the war-process in comparison with all other human processes. Mars has become the young cuckoo in the nest of human possibilities, and it is -- to state the extreme alternatives -- a choice before mankind, whether we will drift on toward a catastrophe due to that overgrowth, or so organize the world as effectually to restrain and reduce warfare.
It is not impossible to adumbrate the general nature of the catastrophe which threatens mankind if war-making goes on. Modern warfare is not congenial to the working masses anywhere. No doubt the primitive form of warfare, a murderous bickering with adjacent tribes, is natural enough to uneducated men; but modern warfare, and still more the preparation for it, involves distresses, strains, and a continuity of base and narrow purpose quite beyond the patience and interest of the millions of ordinary men who find no other profit in it but suffering. The natural man is more apt for chaotic local fighting than for large-scale systematic fighting. Hatred campaigns and a sustained propaganda are needed to keep up the combatant spirit in a large modern state, even during actual hostilities; and in the case of Russia we have a striking example of the distaste a whole population may develop for the war-strain, even during the war and with the enemy at its gates.
What is likely to happen, then, when the working masses of Central and Western Europe, being no longer sustained by the immediate excitement of actual war, find themselves still obliged to go on, year after year, producing vast masses of war-material, pledged to carry a heavy burden of war loan rentiers on their backs, and subjected to an exacerbated conscription? Possibly, so far as the rentier burden on the worker goes, a great rise in prices and wages will relieve the worker to some extent, but only at the cost of acute disappointment and distress at another social level. There is a dangerously narrowing limit now to the confidence of the common man in the intelligence and good faith of those who direct his affairs; and the probability of a cruel confused class-war throughout Europe, roughly parallel in its methods to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and released by a similar loss of faith in leaders and government, appears at the end of the vista of waste of directive energy and natural resources, completing that waste of energy and resources into which the belligerent systems of Europe, the German Empire being the chief and foremost, have led mankind. Systematic force, overstrained and exhausted, will then give place to chaotic force, and general disorganization will ensue. Thereafter the world may welter in confusion for many generations, through such ruinous and impoverished centuries as close the Roman imperial story, before it develops the vitality for an effective reorganization.
Such, roughly, is the idea of the phrase 'downfall of civilization' as used in discussions like these. It is a vision of the world as a social system collapsing chaotically, not under the assault of outer barbarians, but beneath the pressure of this inevitable hypertrophy of war.
III
Let us now look a little more closely between the two extremes of possibility we have stated in the preceding section, between a world-unanimity for peace, on the one hand, -- Everyman's World League of Nations, -- and a world-collapse under the overgrowth of war-organization and material, on the other.
The affairs of the world are now in a posture which enables us to dismiss the idea of a world hegemony for Germany, or for any other single power, as a fantastic vanity.
We have to consider, however, the much greater probability of a group of the more powerful states, including perhaps a chastened Germany, agreeing among themselves to organize and enforce peace in the world for ever. This would give us still a third type of league which we may call the League of the Senior States. It is perhaps the most probable of all the possibilities.
And, on the other hand, we have assumed, quite crudely, in the first section that the forces of popular insurrection are altogether destructive of organization, whereas there may be as yet unmeasured constructive and organizing power in the popular mind. There is a middle way between a superstitious belief in unguided democracy and a frantic hatred of it. Concurrently, for example, with the earlier phases of Bolshevik anarchy in Petrograd and Moscow, there seems to have been for a time a considerable development of cooperative production and distribution throughout European and Asiatic Russia. Mingled with much merely destructive and vindictive insurrectionism, there may be a popular will to order, reaching out to cooperate with all the sound and liberal forces of the old system of things. We can only guess as yet at the possibilities of a collective will in these peasant and labor masses of Europe which now read and write and have new-born ideas of class-action and responsibility. They will be ill-informed, they may be emotional, but they may have vast reserves of common sense. Much may depend upon the unforeseeable accident of great leaders. Nearly every socialist and democratic organization in the world, it is to be noted, now demands the League of Nations in some form, and men may arise who will be able to give that stir quite vague demand force and creative definition. A failure to achieve a world guaranty of peace on the part of the diplomatists at a peace conference may lead, indeed, to a type of insurrection and revolution not merely destructive but preparatory. It is conceivable. The deliberate organization of peace, as distinguished from a mere silly clamor for peace, may break out at almost any social level, and in the form either of a constructive, an adaptive, or a revolutionary project.
We have not, therefore, here, a case of a clear cut choice of two ways; there is a multitude of roads which may converge upon the permanent organization of world peace, and an infinitude of thwarting and delaying digressions may occur. Complicating and mitigating circumstances may, and probably will, make this antagonism of war and peace a lengthy and tortuous drama. There may be many halts and setbacks in the inevitable development of war; belligerence may pause and take breath on several occasions before its ultimate death flurry.
Such delays, such backwater phases and secondary aspects, must not confuse the issue and hide from us the essential fact of the disappearance of any real limitation upon the overgrowth of war in human life. That unlimited overgrowth is the probability which is driving more and more men to study and advocate this project of a League of Nations, because they are convinced that only through counter-organization of the peace-will in mankind can the world be saved from a great cycle of disasters, disorder, and retrogression.
And it does not follow, because the origins and motives of the will for such a world-league are various, that they involve a conflict over essentials, as to the character of the final result. It is the declared belief of many of the promoters of the world-league movement that a careful analysis of the main factors of its problems, a scientific examination of what is possible, what is impossible, what is necessary, and what is dangerous, must lead the mass of reasonable men in the world, whatever their class, origins, traditions, and prejudices, to a practical agreement upon the main lines of this scheme for the salvation of mankind. It is believed that the clear, deliberate, and methodical working out of the broad problems and riddles of the world-league idea will beve a sufficient compelling force to bring it within the realm of practical possibility.
IV
But at this point it is advisable to take up and dispose of a group of suggestions which contradict our fundamental thesis, which is, that war is by its nature illimitable. War is, we hold here, a cessation of law, and in war therefore, it is impossible to prevent permanently the use of every possible device for injury, killing, and compulsion which human ingenuity can devise or science produce. Our main argument for a League of Nations rests on that. But there are people who do not accept as a fact the illimitable nature of war. They fall back upon the theory that the horrors of the Great War are due to a sort of accidental relapse into savagery on the part of the German people, and that future wars can and will be conducted under restrictions imposed by humanity and chivalry. They believe that war can become a conventional Ordeal by Battle, in which the nations shall deliberately refrain from putting forth their full strength, and shall agree to abide by the decision of a struggle between limited armies, operating, like the champions in a tournament or a prize-fight, under an accepted code of rules.
This is, we hold, a delusion. Our case is that the nations can agree far more easily to abolish war than to restrict war.
It is true that in the Great War Germany has carried her theories of ruthlessness to self-defeating extremes. She has done many deeds which recoiled upon herself -- deeds inspired by a sort of ferocious pedantry which inflicted very small material damage upon the Allies, but hardened their resolution and brought thousands, nay, millions of recruits to their ranks. None the less must we face the fact that, individual stupidities apart, the German theory of war is the only logical one.
If it be said that, in past times, nations fought with comparatively small armies, and often accepted defeat without having thrown anything like their full strength into the struggle -- the objection is met by a twofold answer. Firstly, the logic of war, the law -- as we have termed it elsewhere -- of the utmost effort, had not yet been thoroughly thought out. Primitive peoples in general -- and the same applies to all but the most civilized and sophisticated of modern states -- are guided in matters of war and peace more by their emotions than by their reason. They are lazy, as peoples, and muddle-headed. They fight because they are angry; they stop because they are tired; they cease pursuing the enemy because they want to attend to the harvest. It is the mark of a highly organized and intellectualized government to subordinate national emotions to the remorseless logic of the case. And the logic of war was reserved for Napoleon to express in practice and Clausewitz to formulate in theory.
But the second answer goes more to the root of the matter: namely, that the strength which a nation can put into the field is limited by many conditions both material and psychological, and that, if we examine into these conditions, we shall often find that what may seem to us, on the face of it, an insignificant effort, was in very truth the greatest of which, at the given moment, the nation was capable. It is a quite new social fact, a creation of the last fifty years, to have a central government supplied with exact information about all its resources in men, money, and material, and with means of organization and control which enable it, at the cost of some delay and friction, to exploit those resources to the last inch. When Babylon was captured by the Medes, we are told, there were parts of the city itself which were unaware of the fact for several days; and there must have been vast islands of population in the country which, so far as their personal experience went, never knew. But that sort of thing has passed.
If we look into the history of warfare, we find that it has completed a cycle and is now returning to its starting-point. A nomadic horde of the barbarous ages was 'a nation in arms' in the full sense of the word. Having no fixed place of abode, it had no civil -- as distinct from military -- population. The whole people -- old men, women, and children included -- took part in the toils and perils of war. There were no places of security in which the weak and the defenseless could take refuge. Everyone's life was forfeit in case of disaster; therefore everyone took part in the common defense. Modern warfare, with its air fleets, its submarines, and its 'big Berthas,' is more and more restricting the area of immunity from military peril and reverting to these primitive conditions.
Agricultural life and city settlements brought with them the distinction between combatants and non-combatants; but still, in the normal state, every able-bodied citizen was a soldier. The citizen took his place as a matter of course in the militia of his country, leaving to old men and women, or to slaves and captives, the guardianship of field and vineyard, flock and herd. Only when wealth and luxury had reached a certain pitch did the habit of employing denationalized mercenaries creep in. Then came the time when the mercenaries encountered nomadic or thoroughly mobilized 'nations in arms,' and civilization went to the wall.
In the Middle Ages, the feudal chief, the dominant, soldierly, often predatory personality, gathered his vassals around him for purposes of offense and defense, while the cultivation of the soil devolved on the villains or serfs. Thus war became the special function of a military caste, and, as in the Wars of the Roses, campaigns were often carried on with comparatively little disturbance to the normal life of the country. When the royal power crushed or absorbed that of the barons, the centralized monarchy everywhere recruited a standing army, often consisting largely of foreign mercenaries, as the bulwark of its security and the instrument of its will. It was quite natural that dynastic wars, and wars in which the common people of the contending nations had little or no interest, should be fought out on a restricted scale by these specialized military machines. Frederick the Great employed a mercenary army as the nucleus for a national militia; and so lately as the beginning of the last century, this system was celebrated as ideal by the noted military authority who was the immediate predecessor of Clausewitz.
With Napoleon came the Nation in Arms; and the military history of the intervening years has consisted of the ever completer concentration upon warlike purposes of the whole powers and resources of the great European peoples.
If it be asked why this logical evolution of the idea of war has taken so many centuries to work itself out, the main reason -- among many others -- may be stated in two words: munitions and transport. Before the age of machines, it was impossible to arm and clothe immense multitudes of men; before the days of McAdam and Stephenson, it was impossible to move such multitudes and, still more, to keep them supplied with food and munitions. Again we find ourselves insisting upon the vital importance of transit methods in this, as in nearly all questions of human interaction. The size of armies has steadily grown with the growth of means of communication. The German wars of 1863-70 were the first in which railways played any considerable part, and the scale of operations in 1870-71 was quite unprecedented.
What is the chief new factor since the days of St. Privat and Sedan? The aeroplane, most people would reply; possibly it may become so, but thus far a less picturesque invention has been of even greater influence -- the motor-lorry. No one can go anywhere near the Western Front without realizing that the gigantic scale of this struggle is almost wholly dependent upon motor-traction. Had not the internal-combustion engine been invented, the war would probably have been over long ago; and at all events millions of men would still be alive and well who now lie dead or crawl mutilated over the face of the earth.
Seen in this light, the invention of the motor may appear to have been due to a special interference of Satan in human affairs. But that is an unphilosophical view to take. Our race must perfect its power over matter before it can wisely select the ends to which it will apply that power. The idea of war had to work itself out to the full and demonstrate its own immpossibility, before man could find the insight and the energy to put it behind him and have done with it. Thanks to Prussian ambition and Prussian philosophy, the demonstration has now been completed. The idea of war has revealed itself in its full hideousness. All the world has come to look upon it as a sort of mythological monster which, if left to itself, will periodically reemerge from hell, to devour the whole youth and the whole wealth of civilized mankind. It is useless to dream of clipping the wings or paring the claws of the dragon. It must be slain outright if it is not to plan unthinkable havoc with civilization; and to that end the intelligence and the moral enthusiasm of the world are now, as we see, addressing themselves.
Copyright © The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; January, 1919; The Idea of a League of Nations; Volume 123, No. 1; pages 106-115.
7.2 Part Two The Atlantic Monthly, FEBRUARY 1919
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/19feb/leag219.htm
A small group of qualified Englishmen have long been working toward Universal Peace from an angle of their own. Forming the League of Free Nations Association, they have divided the principal problems among experts, for extended study, appraisal, and suggestions for solution. These inquiries, eventually to be published in book form, will, in the Atlantic's belief, form a highly important treatise on World Peace; but in the meantime, the group has united in the compilation of the following article, which may well serve as an introducion to all attempts at a League of Nations. The composite authorship of the paper is especially interesting, the names of the collaborators being, --
H.G. Wells, Chairman Viscount Grey, H. Wickham Steed, Gilbert Murray, Lionel Curtis, J. A. Spender, William Archer, Secretary, A. E. Zimmern, Viscount Bryce, consultant
I
ANY people have said to themselves like Jeannette in the touching old ballad, --
If I were King of France, or, still better, Pope of Rome. I'd have no fighting men abroad, no weeping maids at home; All the world should be at peace, or, if kings must show their might, Then let those who make the quarrels be the only men to fight.
But even Jeannette evidently realized that the idea of making the fate of a tribe or a nation depend upon the fortunes of one or two selected champions was but a pious aspiration, which not even the King of France or the Pope of Rome could translate into practical politics.
There is one theory, indeed, which, if we accept its initial postulate, would make limited warfare logical. If battle be regarded as the trial of a cause before the judgment-seat of God, there is no sound reason for pouring huge armies into it. It is manifest that God can deliver his verdict in the result of a duel of one against one, quite as well as in the result of a war between whole nations in arms. On this theory, war would be an extension to politics of the 'wager of battle' between individuals -- a method of obtaining a supernatural ruling, indistinguishable in principle from the drawing of lots or tossing of a coin. But although men have always talked, and still talk, of 'appealing to the God of Battles,' they have never shown any disposition to accept, save at the last gasp, a judgment which ran counter to their passions or their cupidities. Whatever may have been their professions, their practical belief has always been that 'God is on the side of the big battalions,' or, in other words, that war is a part of the natural order of things, the immeasurable network of cause and effect, and no more subject to special interventions of Providenec than commerce, or navigation, or any other form of human activity. Nor is there any reason to suppose that they will ever believe otherwise. If it be difficult to conceive them, in their disputes, abiding by the awards of impartial reason, it is a hundred times more difficult to conceive them accepting the wholly unreasonable awards of artificially and arbitrarily restricted violence.
These truths are so obvious that it may seem idle to insist upon them. Nobody, it may be said, proposes that Paris and Berlin should in future settle their disputes, like Rome and Alba Longa, by selecting three champions apiece and setting them to cut each others' throats. In this crude and elementary form, indeed, the proposal does not appear; but disguised applications of the same principle are constantly commended in the writings of those who, holding war to be eternally inevitable, seeks refuge from sheer despair in the belief that it is possible to subject it to rule and limit, and say to it, 'Thus far shalt thou go and no further.' They cannot or will not see that any conventional limitation is foreign to its very essence. It is perfectly possible, and consonant with human nature that nations should agree not to appeal to force, and should hold to that agreement even when one or the other believes itself to have suffered injustice. But it is utterly impossible and inconsistent with human nature that, having appealed to force, they should agree to exercise it only within limits, and accept impoverishment, humiliation, servitude, -- in a word, defeat, -- rather than transgress the stipulated boundaries.
It may be objected that codes of law have in fact been devised for the partial humanization of war, and that not until the present time has any civilized belligerent made a practice of disregarding them. But these so-called laws of war have always been conventions of mutual advantage -- rules which all parties held it to be, on the whole, to their own interest to observe. The German WarBook quite frankly places the chief sanction of such trammels upon military action not in humanity, but in the fear of reprisals. We do not deny that man is an emotional being, and even in the midst of his fiercest fighting there are horrors from which the decent man, and even the decent multitude, instinctively recoils. Decent men do not, as a rule want to hurt their wounded prisoners, they rather like to pet them; and they regard people who do otherwise as blackguards. And no doubt it is largely these emotional mercies and generosities which have brought about those rules of chivalry or scruples of religion which form the supposed 'redeeming features' of war. But the necessities of war completely override all such weaknesses as soon as these begin to endanger actual military interests. And the logic of war tolerates them only as cheap concessions to a foolish popular psychology. It must be remembered that undisguised atrocities on a stupendous scale -- such, for instance as the massacre in cold blood of whole regiments of helpless prisoners would be too strong for the stomach of even the most brutalized people, and would tend to bring war into discredit with all but its monomaniac votaries. If we look closely enough, we shall find that all Geneva Conventions and such palliative ordinances, though excellent in intention and good in their immediate effects, make ultimately for the persistence of war as an institution. They are sops to humanity, devices for rendering war barely tolerable to civilized mankind, and so staving off the inevitable rebellion against its abominations.
II
Criticisms of thc project of a League of Nations have consisted hitherto largely of the statement of difficulties and impediments, rather than of reasons for rejection of the project. All such criticisms are helpful in so far as they enable us to map out the task before us, but none are adequate as conclusive objections. Few of the advocates of an organized world-peace fail to recognize the magnitude of the task to which they invite men to set themselves. But their main contention is that there is really no alternative to the attempt but resignation to long years of human suffering and disaster, and therefore that, however difficult the enterprise may be, it has to be faced. The recital of the difficulties is, they say, a stimulus to thought and exertion rather than a deterrent.
And there are certain objections to the undertaking as such that must be taken up and dealt with in a preliminary discussion.
There is, first, an objection which it will be convenient to speak of as the 'Biological Objection.' It is stated in various forms, and it peeps out and manifests itself in the expressed thoughts and activities of quite a number of people who do not seem to have formulated it completely. But what many of these objectors think and what still more feel may be expressed in some such phraseology as this: --
Life is conflict and is begotten of conflict. All the good qualities of life are the result of the tragic necessities of survival. Life, stripped down to its fundamental fact, is the vehement urgency of individuals or groups of individuals to survive, and to reproduce and multiply their kind. The pressure of individual upon individual and of species upon species sharpens the face of life and is the continuing impetus and interest in life. The conception of life without war is a collection, therefore, not simply utopian but millennial. It is a proposal that every kind and sort and type of humanity should expand and increase without limit in a small world of restricted resources. It is, in fact, absurd. It is an impossible attempt to arrest and stereotype a transient phase of human life. It is inviting paralysis as a cure for epilepsy. It is a dream of fatigued minds. Terrible as the scope and nature of human warfare have become, it has to be faced. The more destructive it is, the more rapid the hardening and evolution of the species life and history move cyclically from phase to phase, and perhaps such an apparent retrogression as we mean when we talk of the breakdown of civilization, may be only part of a great rhythm in the development of the species. Let us gather together with our own kind, and discipline and harden ourselves, in a heroic resolve to survive in the unavoidable centuries of harsh conflict ahead of us.
Now, here is a system of objection not lightly to be brushed aside. True, the element of mutual conflict in life is often grossly overstated and the element of mutual help suppressed. But, although overstated, there are valid criticisms here of any merely negative league of nations project, any mere proposal to end war without replacing it by some other collective process. There do seem to be some advocates of the league whose advocacy is little more than a cry of terror at the disappearance of established wealth, the loss of wasted leisure, and the crumbling of accepted dignities. Those who have faith in the possibility of a world league are bound -- just as the Socialist is bound -- to produce some assurances of a control over the blind pressure of population, that may otherwise swamp the world with prolific low grade races. They are bound to show that their schemes are compatible with a series of progressive readjustments, and not an attempt to restore and stereotype the boundaries, the futile institutions, and the manifest injustices of the world of 1914, with only armaments abolished. They are bound to show that exceptional ability and energy will have, not merely scope, but fuller scope for expression, achievement, and perpetuation, in the new world to which they point us, than in the old. In the years to come, as in the whole past history of life, individual must compete against individual, type against type.
But having made these admissions, we may then go on to point out two fundamental misconceptions which entirely vitiate the biological argument as an argument for the continuation of war as a method of human selection. It is falsely assumed, first, that modern war is a discriminatory process, selecting certain types as against certain other types; whereas it is largely a catastrophic and indiscriminate process and secondly, that belligerent states are in the nature of biological units super-individuals, which either triumph or are destroyed; whereas they are systems of political entanglement of the most fluid, confused, and transitory description. They neither reproduce their kind nor die; they change indefinitely: the children of the defeated state of to-day may become the dominant citizens of its victorious competitor in a generation or so. They do not even embody traditions or ideas: France, which went into the Revolutionary wars at the end of the eighteenth century to establish the Republican idea throughout Europe, emerged as an empire; and the defeat of the Russian by the German imperialism led to Lenin's 'dictatorship of the proletariat.'
The essence of success in the biological struggle for existence is preferential reproduction; whereas the modern war process takes all the sturdier males to kill and be killed haphazard, while it sends all the more intelligent and energetic girls into munition factories, substitute work, and suchlike sterilizing occupations. If it prefers any type for prosperity and multiplication, it is the alert shirker, the able tax-dodger, and the war profiteer; if it breeds anything it breeds parasites. The vital statistics of Germany, which is certainly the most perfect as a belligerent of all the belligerent states engaged, show already tremendous biological injuries. Germany in the first four years of the war had lost by the fall in her birth-rate alone nearly 2,600,000 lives, approximately 40,000 per million of the population; Hungary, in the same period, lost 1,500,000 (about 70,000 per million), the United Kingdom 500,000 (or about 10,000 per million). Add to this loss of lives the under-nutrition of the millions that were born and their impoverished upbringing. These things strike at the victors as well as at the vanquished. They are entirely indiscriminate as among good types and bad, while on the whole the battlefield destroys rather the good than the 'unfit for service,' who remain at home to breed.
The whole process which, on a vaster scale, has brought Europe to its present plight may be seen in miniature among the tribes of the Indian frontier. Go up the Khyber Pass and stand on the ridge above Ali Masjid. In front lies a desolate valley, flanked by barren mountains under a blistering sun. On the slopes to right and left, at intervals of about a thousand yards, are oblong inclosures each with brown walls and a little loop-holed tower at one corner. These inclosures are the villages of the Pathan tribes which inhabit the valley, and in the towers are men with rifles, waiting their chance to shoot man or boy who may rashly expose himself outside a neighboring village. For all or nearly all of them are at feud with each other, and though the causes of their warfare are forgotten, it is a point of honor and pride with them never to become reconciled. There have been, roughly, three stages in the history of these feuds. In the first, men fought with knives, daggers, and other primitive weapons, and the result may have been, as a German would argue, 'biologically good.' The fittest survived, the population was kept from increasing beyond the number which an inhospitable soil would support, the arts of peace, such as they were, could be pursued without serious interruption.
The second stage was reached when the flint-lock rifle came on the scene and took the place of knife and dagger. With this the vendetta necessarily became more of a national industry; but the weapon was short of range and irregular in its killing power, and there was still a fair chance of survival, and a certain presumption that the better or more skillful man would escape. But before the end of the nineteenth century the village marksmen had possessed themselves of the Martini-Henry and other long range, high-velocity rifles, brought from Europe by the gunrunners of the Persian Gulf. At this, the third stage, the biological merits of village warfare manifestly began to disappear. The village marksman in his mud-tower now makes the whole valley his zone of fire. Cultivation becomes impossible in the no-man's land between village and village: only behind the cover of the village wall can men sow or plough or reap, tether their cattle, or graze their sheep. Every village must be provided with a communication-trench, so that its inhabitants may pass under cover to the sanctuary -- guaranteed twice in the week -- of the government-protected road which runs down the centre of the valley. The question now is, not whether the vendetta is biologically good, but whether the tribes can at all survive under it; and weary officials, at a loss to solve the vexed problem which they offer to the government of India, have been heard to suggest that if a few machine guns could be conveyed to the village marksmen and installed in the mudtowers, there would soon be no frontier problem at all.
The question which the cilivized world has how to consider is, whether it can survive, or its life be more tolerable than that of these tribesmen under a vendetta of high explosives.
So that when the biological critics says, 'Life is conflict,' we reply, without traversing his premises, that war has ceased to be conflict and has become indiscriminate catastrophe, and that the selective processes that enlarge and enrich life can go on far more freely and effectively in a world from which this blundering, disastrous, non-selective, and even possibly dysgenic form of wastage is banished. But we have to bear in mind that this reply puts upon those who are preparing schemes for a League of Nations the onus of providing for progress, competition, and liberty under the restraints of such a scheme.
III
It may be worth while to take up and consider here a group of facts that are sometimes appealed to as a justification of war. It is alleged that there has been an extraordinarily rapid development of mechanical, chemical, and medical science since 1914, and a vast and valuable accumulation of experience in social and industrial organization. There has been great mental stimulation everywhere; people have been forced out of grooves and idle and dull ways of living into energetic exertion; there has been, in particular, a great release and invigoration of feminine spirit and effort. The barriers set up by the monopolization of land and material by private owners for selfish ends have been broken down in many cases.
There can be no denying the substantial truth in these allegations. Indisputably there has been such a release and stimulation. But this is a question of proportion between benefits and losses. And all this stir, we argue, has been bought at too great a cost. It is like accelerating the speed of a ship by burning its cargo and timbers as fuel. At best, it is the feverish and wasteful reaping of a long accumulated harvest.
We must remember that a process may be evil as a whole, while in part it is beneficial. It would be stupid to deny that for countless minds the Great War has provided an enlightening excitcment that could have been provided in no other way. To deny that, would be to assert the absolute aimlessness and incoherence of being. But while this harvest of beneficial by-products of the war is undeniable, there is no evidence of any fresh sowing, or, if the process of belligerence and warlike preparation is to continue, of any possibility of an adequate fresh sowing of further achievements. The root from which all the shining triumphs of technical and social science spring, we must remember, is the quiet and steadfast pursuit of pure science and philosophy and literature by those best endowed for these employments. And if the greedy expansion of the war-process is to continue, -- and we have shown that without an organized world-peace it must continue, -- there is nothing to reassure us of the cotinuance of that supply of free and vigorous educated intelligence, in which alone that root can flourish. On the contrary, it is one of the most obvious and most alarming aspects of the war-process that university education has practically ceased in Europe; Europe is now producing only schoolboys, and the very schools are understaffed and depleted. The laboratories of the English public schools are no longer making the scientific men of the future, they are making munitions. It is all very well for the scientific man of fifty to say that at last he has got his opportunity; but that is only a momentary triumph for science. Where now is the great scientific man for the year 1930? Smashed to pieces in an aeroplane, acting as a stretcher-bearer, or digging a trench. And what, unless we can secure the peace of the world, will become of the potential scientific men of 1950? Suppose it to be possible to carry on this a present top-heavy militarist system for so long a period as that, what will have happened then to our potential Faradays, Newtons, and Darwins? They will be, at best, half educated; they will be highly trained soldiers, robbed of their intellectual inheritance and incapable of rendering their gifts to the world. The progress of knowledge will be slowing down toward stagnation.
IV
A considerable amount of opposition to the League of Nations movement may be classified under the heading of Objections from precedent and prepossession. The mind is already occupied by the idea of attachment to some political sytem which stands in the way of a world-league. These objections vary very much in intellectual quality. Nevertheless, even the most unintelligent demand some attention, because numerically these antatgonists form considerable masses. Collectively, in their unorganized way, they produce a general discouragement and hostility far more formidable than any soundly reasoned case against an organized world-peace.
The objection from prepossession is necessarily protean; it takes various forms because men's prepossessions are various: but 'There never has been a League of Nations, and there never will be,' may be regarded as the underlying idea of most of these forms. And the objector relapses upon his pre-possession as the only possible thing. A few years ago people were saying 'Men have never succeeded in flying, and they never will.' And we are told, particularly by people who have obviously never given human nature ten minutes thought in their lives, that world-unity is 'against human nature.' To substantiate these sweeping negatives, the objector will adduce a heterogeneous collection of instances to show the confusions and contradictions of the human will, and a thousand cases of successful mass-cooperations will be ignored: we are moved to doubt at last whether human beings did ever suppress piracy, develop a railway system, or teach a whole population to read and write. If the individual objector is carefully examined, it will be found at times that he is under the sway of some narrow and intense mental inhibition, based on personal habits or experiences. Some of these inhibitions, if they are traced to their source, will be found to be even absurdly narrow. The objector dislikes the idea of a World-League of Nations because it is 'international,' or, worse, 'cosmopolitan,' and he has got into the habit of associating these words with shady finance or anarchist outrages or the white-slave traffic. Or he has had uncomfortable experiences in hotels abroad, or he has suffered in his business from foreign competition. Many of the objections that phrase themselves in some such formulas as 'People will never stand it,' or 'You do not understand the intensity of feeling,' are indeed rather cases for Jung and Freud than for serious dialectics. But from such levels of unreasoned hostility we can ascend to much more reasoned and acceptable forms of prepossessions which must be met with a greater respect.
Most human beings are 'patriotic.' They have a pride, quite passionate in quality, in the race or nation to which they belong: an affection identical in nature with, and sometimes as intense as, that which they feel for family and home, for a certain atmosphere of thought and behavior, for a certain familiar landscape and atmosphere, for certain qualities none the less real because they are often exquisitely indefinable. And they are jealous for this 'national' quality of theirs -- at times almost as men are jealous for their wives. Now, how far does this group of feelings stand in the way of a League of Nations project? A number of vigorous speakers and writers do certainly play upon this jealousy. They point out that the League of Nations project, as it develops, involves controls, not merely of military, but of economic concerns -- controls by councils or committees upon which every country will see a majority of 'foreigners,' and they exaggerate and intensify to the utmost the suggestion of unlimited interference on the part of these same 'foreigners,' with the most intimate and sacred things.
One eloquent writer, for example (Mr. Belloc), declares that the League of Nations would place us all 'at the mercy of a world-police'; and another (Mr. I. D. Colvin) declares that the council of a League of Nations would own all our property as the British now 'own' the empire; an unfortunate parallel, if we consider the amount of ownership exercised by the British Government over the life and affairs of a New Zealander or a Hindu.
Perhaps the most effective answer to this sort of thing is to be found in current instances. One might imagine from these critics that at present every government in the world was a national government; but in spite of such instances as Sweden and France, national governments are the exception rather than the rule. There are very few nationalities in the world now which are embodied in a sovereign government. There is no sovereign state of England, for example. The English, the Scotch, and the Welsh, all strongly marked and contrasted nationalities, live in an atmosphere of mutual criticism and cordial cooperation. (Consider again the numerous nations in the British Empire, which act in unison through the Imperial Government, imperfect and unrepresentative as it is; consider the dissolving nationalities in the American melting-pot; consider the Prussians and Saxons in the German Empire. What is there in common between an Australian native, a London freethinker, a Bengali villager, a Uganda gentleman, a Rand negro, an Egyptian merchant, and a Singapore Chinaman, that they should all be capable of living as they do under one rule and one peace, and with a common collective policy, and yet be incapable of a slightly larger cooperation with a Frenchman, a New Englander, or a Russian? The Welshman is perhaps the best instance of all, to show how completely participation in a great political synthesis is compatible with intense national peculiarity and self-respect.
But if one looks closely into the objections of these 'anti-foreign' alarmists, it will usually become clear that the real prejudice is not a genuine patriotism at all: the objection is not to interference with the realities of national life, but to interference with national aggression and competition, which is quite a different thing. The 'British' ultra-patriot, who begins by warning us against the impossibilitv of having 'foreigners' interfering in our national life, is presently warning us against the interference of 'foreigners' with 'our ' empire or 'our' predominant over-seas trade.
It is curious to see in how many instances certain conventional ideas never properly analyzed, dominate the minds of the critics of the League of Nations project. Many publicists, it becomes evident, think of international relations in terms of 'Powers,' mysterious entities of a value entirely romantic and diplomatic. International politics are for them only thinkable as a competition of those powers; they see the lives of states as primarily systems of conflict. A 'power' to them means the sort of thing which was brought to perfection in Europe in the eighteenth century, in the courts of Versailles, Potsdam, St. Petersburg, and at St. James's, and it means nothing else in the world to them. It is, in fact, a conspiracy against other and competing powers, centering round an aggressive Foreign Office and availing itself of nationalist prejudice rather than of national self-respect. Patriotism is, indeed, not something that the power represents: it is something upon which the power trades. To this power idea the political life of the last two centuries has schooled many otherwise highly intelligent men and by it their minds are now invincibly circumscribed and fixed. They can disregard the fact that the great majority of men in the world live out of relation to any such government with astonishing ease. The United States, Canada, China, India, Australia, South America, for example, show us masses of mankind whose affairs are not incorporated in any 'power,' as the word is understood in diplomatic jargon; and quite recently the people of Russia have violently broken away from such an idea of the state, and show small disposition to revert to it. These objectors are in fact thinking still in terms of the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Europe -- a very special phase in history. But the fixity of their minds upon this old and almost entirely European idea of international politics as an affair of competitive foreign offices has its value for those who are convinced of the need of a new order of human relationships, because it opens up so clearly the incompatibility with the pressing needs of the present time of the European conceptions of a foreign office and of diplomacy as a secretive chaffering for advantages.
Upon this point we cannot be too clear: it is not nationality that is threatened by the League of Nations, it is this 'power' obsession, which used national feeling in an entirely Machiavellian spirit. And this power idea carries with it much more mischief than the threat of sudden war and the attendant necessities of armament. It is about the nuclei of these European power systems that the current conceptions of economic warfare and territorial exploitation have grown. It is to them that we owe the conception of peace as a phase of military preparation during which there is a systematic attempt to put rivals at an economic disadvantage. And it will be clear that an abandonment of the idea of the world as a conflict of powers involves not merely the abandonment of ideas essentially militarist, but also the abandonment of the idea of the world as a conflict of economic systems.
So, as we penetrate these common prepossessions of an age which is now drawing to a close, the positive as compared with the negative side of the League of Nations proposal opens out. Behind the primarily negative project of 'no war upon earth,' appears as a necessary corollary a new economic phase in history, in which there will be a collective regard for the common weal of mankind. The examination and elaboration of the possibilities of economic world-control, already immensely foreshadowed by the gigantic poolings that have been forced upon the powers allied against Germany, is one of the most rapidly expanding chapters in the study of the League of Nations project.
V
Another considerable body of criticism hostile to the League of Nations proposal is grouped about certain moral facts. Before concluding these introductory remarks, it is advisable to discuss this, not merely in order to answer so much of it as amounts to an argument against the world-league project, but also because it opens out before us the real scope of the League of Nations proposal. There seems to be a disposition in certain quarters to underestimate the scale upon which a League of Nations project can be planned. It is dealt with as if it were a little legal scheme detached from the main body of human life. It seems to be assumed that some little group of 'jurists,' sitting together in a permanent conference at The Hague or in New York, will be able to divert the whole process of humanity into new channels, to overcome the massive, multitudinous, and tremendous forces that make for armed conflict and warfare among men, and to inaugurate a new era of peace throughout the world.
The change we contemplate here is not to be so easily achieved. It is a project of world-politics, and there is no modest way of treating such a project. It would be better left alone than treated timidly. It is a change in which nations and political and educational svstems are the counters, and about which we must think, if we are to think effectively, in terms of the wealth of nations and millions of men. It is a proposal to change the life and mentality of everyone on earth.
Now the thought of those who direct their attention to the moral probabilities of a world-peace turns largely upon the idea of loyalty. They apprehend man as a creature of intense essential egotism, who has to be taught and trained very painfully and laboriously to unselfishness, and the substitution of great and noble ends for base and narrow ones. They argue that he was in his origins a not very social creature who has been forced by his own inventions into a larger circle of intercourse. He had learned his first unselfishness from his mother in the family group; he had been tamed into devotion by the tribe and his tribal religion; the greater dangers of a solitary life had enforced these subjugations upon him. But he still relapses very readily into base self-seeking. His loyalty to his nation may easily become a mere extension of his personal vanity; his religious faith a cloak for hatred of and base behavior toward unbelievers. In times of peace and security, the great forms in which he lives do so tend to degenerate. And the great justification of war from this point of view is that it creates a phase of national life in which a certain community of sacrifice to a common end, a certain common faithfullless and helpfulness, is exacted as a matter of course from every citizen. Men are called upon to die, and all are called upon to give help and suffer privations. War gives reality to loyalty. It is the fire that makes fine the clay of solidarity Thc war-phase has been hitherto a binding and confirming phase in the life of communities, while peace has been a releasing and relaxing phase. And if we are to contemplate a state of the world in which there is to be no warfare, we must be prepared also, these critics argue, for a process of moral disintegration.
The late Professor William James found enough validity in this line of thought to discuss it very seriously. In his essay on 'The Moral Equivalent of War' he deals very illuminatingly with this question. He agrees that to relieve the consciousness of ordinary men from the probability of war without substituting any other incentive to devotion, may be a very grave social loss. His own suggestion for giving every citizen a sense of obligation and ownership in the commonwealth for weaving the ideas of loyalty and service, that is, into every life, is to substitute the collective war of mankind against ignorance, confusion, and natural hardships, for the war between man and man; to teach this, not only theoretically, but by the very practical expedient of insisting upon a period of compulsory state service for every citizen, male or female. He proposes to solve at the same time this moral problem and an equally grave social problem by making the unskilled or semi-skilled part of the labor in the (nationalized) mines, in the (nationalized) fisheries, in hospitals, in many types of factory, and so forth a public service. Personal freedom, he insists, has invariably been bought, and must always be bought by responsible participation in the toils and cares of that system of law and service which constitutes the framework of human liberty.
It would be idle to deny the substantial truth in this type of criticism of peace. To recognize it is to sweep out of one's mind all dreams of a world-peace contrived by a few jurists and influential people in some odd corner of the world's administrative bureaus. Permanent world-peace must necessarily be a great process and state of affairs, greater, indeed, than any warprocess, because it must anticipate, comprehend, and prevent any warprocess, and demand the understanding, the willing and conscious participation of the great majority of human beings. We, who look to it as a possible thing, are bound not to blind ourselves to, or conceal from others, the gigantic and laborious system of labors, the immense tangle of cooperations, which its establishment involves. If political institutions or social methods stand in the way of this great good for mankind it is fatuous to dream of compromises with them. A world peace organization cannot evade universal relationships.
It is clear that, if a world-league is to be living and enduring, the idea of it and the need and righteousness of its service must be taught by every educational system in the world. It must either be served by, or be in conflict with, every religious organization; it must come into the life of everyone, not to release men and women from loyalty, but to demand it for itself.
The answer to this criticism that the world-peace will release men from service, is therefore, that the world-peace is itself a service. It calls, not as war does, for the deaths, but for that greater gift, the lives, of men. The League of Nations cannot be a little thing; it is either to be a great thing in the world, an overriding idea of a greater state, or nothing. Every state aims ultimately at the production of a sort of man, and it is an idle and a wasteful diplomacy, a pandering to timidities and shams, to pretend that the World-League of Nations is not ultimately a state aiming at that ennobled individual whose city is the world.
Copyright © The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; February, 1919; The Idea of a League of Nations; Volume 123, No. 2; pages 77-82
Viscount Grey, one of the three authors of the above article, was British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey (Lord Grey), 1st Viscount . He should not be confused with Earl Albert Grey: house-schiff.html.
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(8) Bolsheviks disparaged Parvus to hide their ties; Wells likewise
Alexander Parvus was a Jewish Bolshevik who worked as a German Agent to bring about the defeat of Russia during World War I. The German Government provided money to the Bolsheviks because Revolution would facilitate the collapse of the Tsar's government. Parvus channeled Germany money to the Bolsheviks, and facilitated the passage of Lenin through Germany on his way to Russia, but the Bolsheviks disparaged him to hide the tie.
They similarly disparaged Wells, but it should be viewed in the same light. After his visit to Russia in 1920 (at the invitation of the Government), he was the Soviet Government's main apologist in Britain. He engaged Winston Churchill in debate over the merits of the Soviet regime:
WINSTON CHURCHILL VS. WELLS; Further Echoes of the Controversy Over Russian Conditions Under Bolshevist Rule WELLS HITS BACK AGAIN.
CHURCHILL ANSWERS WELLS.
January 9, 1921, Sunday
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F70C1EFF3E5810738DDDA00894D9405B818EF1D3 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9806EFDE153CE533A2575AC0A9679C946095D6CF
Alexander Parvus (born Israel Gelfand) and Yakov Ganetsky (who passed the German money on to Lenin) were both Jewish.
8.1 Alexander Parvus - conduit of Germany money to the Bolsheviks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Parvus
Alexander Parvus
Parvus was born Israel Lazarevich Gelfand; his last name in English is sometimes rendered Gelfant, Helfand, Helfant or Helphand) in Belarus shtetl Berezino, the son of Jewish parents. He was raised in Odessa (today's Ukraine), where he began associating with the Jewish revolutionary (The Bund) circles. ... .
In 1900, he met Vladimir Lenin for the first time, in Munich, each admiring the other's theoretical works. Parvus encouraged Lenin to begin publishing his revolutionary paper Iskra. ...
During this time he developed the concept of using a foreign war to provoke an internal revolt within a country. It was at this time that Parvus revived, from Marx, the concept-strategy of "permanent revolution" (See the linked Wikipedia article). He communicated this philosophy to Trotsky who then further expanded and developed it. Through Trotsky, the method was eventually adopted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in Lenin's April Theses in 1917. ...
While in Turkey, Parvus became close with German ambassador Baron Hans Freiherr von Wangenheim who was known to be partial to establishing revolutionary fifth columns among the allies. Consequently, Parvus offered his plan via Baron von Wangenheim to the German General Staff: the paralyzing of Russia via general strike, financed by the German government[7] (which, at the time, was at war with Russia and its allies). Von Wagenheim sent Parvus to Berlin where the latter arrived on the 6th of March, 1915 and presented a 20 page plan titled A preparation of massive political strikes in Russia to the German government. Parvus' detailed plan recommended the division of Russia by sponsoring the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, encouraging ethnic separatists in various Russian regions, and supporting various writers whose criticism of Tsarism continued during wartime. Basing himself on his 1905 experiences, Parvus theorised that the division of Russia and its loss in the First World War was the best way to bring about a socialist revolution.
Kaiser Wilheim's secret intelligence services now saw their earlier manipulation and cultivation of Parvus had paid off and advised the government to review Parvus' plan. German authorities now saw that Tsar Nicholas II was firm in his commitment to the allies and had refused to sign a separate peace treaty with Germany, instead moving out the slogan "War to its victorious end!". Parvus' new German case officer was given 2 million marks to start Parvus' plan. ...
Parvus placed his bets on Lenin, as the latter was not only a radical but willing to accept the sponsorship of the Tsar's wartime enemy, Germany. The two met first in Berne and agreed to collaborate. Parvus assiduously cultivated Lenin, however Lenin kept him at arms length to disguise Parvus' new role as a German agent.[citation needed] German intelligence set up Parvus' financial network via offshore operations in Copenhagen, setting up relays for German money to get to Russia via fake financial transactions between front organizations. ...
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8.2 Bolsheviks called Parvus 'renegade', 'chauvinist' & 'revisionist' to hide their ties - Volkogonov
Lenin: Life and Legacy
Dmitri Volkogonov
Translated and edited by Harold Shukman
HarperCollinsPublishers, London, 1994
{p. 110} The Bolshevik Revolution, when it came, would offer Germany a unique oportunity to win the war. Ludendorff
{p. 111} would declare frankly that the Soviet government 'exists thanks to us'. ...
Did the Bolsheviks receive German money for the revolution? The historian S. P. Melgunov claimed that one should look for the 'German golden key in the pockets of Parvus [Helpland], who was connected both to the socialist world and the German foreign ministry and representatives of the German General Staff'. ...
In order to life the veil further, we must concentrate on two figures. The first is Alexander Lazarevich Helpland (also known as Parvus and Alexander Moskovich). The second, who is even more obscure, in Yakov Stanislavovich Furstenberg (also known as Ganetsky ...).
{p. 112} Lenin had long kept an eye on Parvus, but always kept his dlstance. ...
Like Trotsky, Parvus played a prominent part in the 1905 revolution - unlike Lenin, who was little more than an extra. Both Trotsky and Parvus were arrested in St Petersburg and exiled, separately, to Siberia, whence they both escaped ... Most of his time was taken up with his favourite occupation, commerce, in which he did extremely well. ...
{p. 113} When the war began, Parvus, now a rich man, became consumed by the idea of helping Germany by bringing about revolution in Russla ...
Western historians have asserted that Lenin met Parvus in Zurich or Berne in May 1915. ... Parvus described their meeting in detail in a pamphlet entitled, 'In the Struggle for the Truth', confirming that it took place in Zurich. ...
{p. 114} One day in May he unexpectedly entered a restaurant where emigres ate, and went straight to a table where Lenin, Krupskaya, Inessa Armand and Kasparov, another close friend, were sitting. After brief conversation, Lenin and Krupskaya accompanied Parvus to their apartment, where they talked until evening.
Parvus wrote of this meeting: 'I told Lenin my views on the social-revolutionary consequences of the war and also drew his attention to the fact that, as long as the war was going on, there would be no revolution in Germany: revolution was possible only in Russia which would blow up as a result of a German victory.' The meeting was confirmed by the Bolshevik, Arthur Zifeldt, who saw Lenin and Parvus leaving the restaurant together. ...
Parvus had frequent meetings with another of Lenin's close associates, Karl Radek, who in 1924 wrote a sketch of him, based on personal recollections. ... Kerensky wrote: '... Ganetsky's "financial affairs" with Parvus were continued in Petrograd by the Bank of Siberia, where ... very large sums came from Berlin via the New Bank in Stockholm through the mediation of the same Ganetsky.' Kerensky could rightly claim that the first historical research into Bolshevik-German links was carried out by his government. ...
An Austro-Hungarian diplomat in Copenhagen, one Grebing, also recalled that 'Parvus and Furstenberg-Ganetsky
{p. 115} carried on trade between Scandanavia and Russia with German help. ... Parvus would receive goods from Germany, including surgical instruments, medical and chemical products, contraceptives, and clothes which were needed in Russia, and Ganetsky, as the Russian agent, would forward them. None of the money realized from the sale of these goods in Russia was, however, paid to the Germans, but was instead used to finance Lenin's propaganda from the first day of the revolution.' The system worked superbly to screen the financial connections. Similarly, Bolshevik abuse of Parvus as a 'renegade', 'social chauvinist' and 'revisionist' also provided intermittent camouflage and an impression of their distance from him. ...
Although Lenin was not personally involved in any of these dealings, he was well informed about them. Moreover, they could not take place without his agreement, although in the event of their public failure, he would have remained in the clear. ...
The money, meanwhile, was much needed. A former tsarist counter-intelligence agent, recruited by the Provisional Government to investigate Bolshevik links with the Germans, found that one of the channels for financing the Party on the eve of the revolution ran from Ganetsky to Sumenson. ...
[p. 120} French counter-intelligence, not to be left out, reported in the spring of 1917 that Lenin ... met a representative of the German embassy called Dallenvach at Scioppa's restaurant in Berne. The meeting concerned Lenin's forthcoming journey through Germany to Russia.
Lenin was well aware that the Germans were just as interested in allowing Russian revolutionaries to pass through Germany as he was, and through the Swiss socialist Fritz Platten he set certain conditions which he hoped would provide the Bolsheviks with a political and historical alibi. He strengthened his own cover by refusing to meet Parvus in Stockholm. Parvus recalled the incident: 'I was in Stockholm when Lenin was passing through. He refused a personal meeting. Through a mutual friend I conveyed to him that the main aim now was peace, and hence the conditions for peace. I asked what he intended to do. Lenin replied that he was not involved in diplomacy, his business was social revolutionary agitation.' Not suprisingly, once he had achieved his aim, Lenin rejected Parvus with contempt. The deed was done. The machine, started by Parvus, required no further personal contact. ...
When their Swedish ferry docked at Trolleborg, Lenin was met by Ganetsky ...
{p. 121} Ganetsky provided the Bolsheviks with everything they needed, including tickets for the rest of the journey. Yet Lenin would later insist he had had no financial dealings with Ganetsky.
The press and the Swedish social democrats took a great interest in Lenin during his stopover in Stockholm. A dinner in his honour was held in the Hotel Regina, he was filmed, gave press interviews, and was welcomed by the mayor, K. Lindhagen. Feeling that he was entering a phase for which he had waited and worked all his life, he spoke like a leader, like the brain and nerves of the revolution. And he was impatient to move ahead: socialism was no longer a distant utopia.
On the way to the Russian border he sent a cable to Karpinsky in Geneva, expressing satisfaction with the way the Germans had observed the agreed conditions. He also cabled Petrograd, suggesting his arrival be announced in Pravda: he was not returning like an ordinary emigre, but like an instant leader.
When Lenin's connections with the Germans were being investigated by the Provisional Government, and the order for his arrest was issued in July 191, no less than twenty-one volumes of evidence were collected. But the case fizzled out because Kerensky thought the main threat to his regime was coming from the right, and that he needed support from the left, including the Bolsheviks. After the seizure of power, Lenin at once set about dealing with all this compromising evidence. He took personal charge of finding, confiscating and apparently destroying it.
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8.3 Yakov Ganetsky arranged German funding with Parvus; later Chief Soviet banker; was also Jewish
Yakov Ganetsky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakov_Ganetsky
Yakov Stanislavovich Ganetsky (also spelled Hanecki), also known as Jakub Fürstenberg (Fuerstenberg) (15 March 1879, Warsaw Ñ 26 November 1937), a prominent Old Bolshevik and close associate of Vladimir Lenin. Famous as one of the financial wizards who arranged through his close working relationship with Alexander Parvus the secret German funding that saved the Bolsheviks. After the October Revolution of 1917 served as Chief Soviet banker, trade representative and Ambassador to Latvia. ==
TripAtlas.com - About Yakov_Ganetsky
Yakov Ganetsky was born in Warsaw, then in the Russian Empire, into the family of a factory owner of Jewish origin. In 1896 he joined the Bolshevik fraction of the RSDRP; he was also a member of the Bund.
http://tripatlas.com/Yakov_Ganetsky{end}
More on the politics of attempt to form the League of Nations as a World Government; Israel Zangwill on Zionism, the Peace Conference and the Protocols of Zion: toolkit3.html.
How could Wells be a member of Cecil Rhodes' "One World" movement (opensoc.html), while at the same time supporting Lenin, a man trying to destroy it?
Leo Szilard and H.G. Wells, founders of the Green Left. Leo Szilard helped create the first nuclear chain reaction, and initiated the letter to Roosevelt that got the Manhattan Project under way. Later, he warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons, and joined Wells' crusade for World Government: szilard.html.
The text of the Fourteen Points: c20-doc.html.
The Jewish identities of Lenin and Trotsky: lenin-trotsky.html.
Robert John, Behind the Balfour Declaration: balfour.html.
Lloyd George on why Britain made "a contract with Jewry", via the Balfour Declaration: l-george.html.
Israel Zangwill puts his vision of World Government: zangwill.html.
Wells & Bertrand Russell continued to work for World Government - Open Society, Open Conspiracy: opensoc.html.
H.G. Wells' plans for World Government:
The Open Conspiracy: opencon.html. 4 other books by H.G. Wells on World Government: hgwells.html.
On the one hand, world unity seems desirable; on the other, its promoters concealed the true nature of the despotism being created in Russia. Can we trust them?
"Colonel" Edward House's "novel" of 1912, Philip Dru: Administrator, a model Woodrow Wilson followed; and Jacob Schiff's campaigns for Zionism and World Government: house-schiff.html.
To purchase a second-hand copy of H. G. Wells' books via Abebooks (specify which book): http://dogbert.abebooks.com/abe/BookSearch?an=h+g+wells.
Write to me at contact.html.
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