When New Zealanders commemorate Anzac Day today on April 25, it’s not only to honour the soldiers who lost their lives in World War I and subsequent conflicts, but also to mark a defining event for national identity.

The battle of Gallipoli against the Ottoman Empire, the story goes, was where the young nation passed its first test of courage and determination.

The question of why New Zealand soldiers ended up on Turkish beaches in April 1915 is typically not part of these commemorations. Rather, our collective memories begin with the moment of the early morning landing.

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Consider, for example, the timing of the Anzac Day dawn service, or the Museum of New Zealand-Te Papa Tongarewa’s exhibition, Gallipoli: The Scale of Our War, which plunges visitors straight into the action.

This selective retelling of history is necessary for the “coming of age” narrative to work. It helps conceal that Britain was pursuing its own colonial ambitions against the Ottomans, and that New Zealand took part in World War I as “a member of the British club”, as historian Ian McGibbon puts it, loyally devoted to the imperial cause.

Against the background of the recent horrors and escalating tensions in the Middle East, however, it seems more important than ever to make these silences speak in our commemorations of Gallipoli.

Britain’s colonial interests
While the causes of World War I are complex and multifaceted, historians have extensively documented that Britain had long seen parts of the decaying Ottoman Empire as prey for colonial expansion.

Already, in the late 1800s, Britain had taken control of Cyprus and Egypt.

Turkey’s Middle Eastern possessions were of interest to the government in London because they provided not only a land route to the colony in India, but also rich oil reserves.

Hence, when the Ottoman Empire signed an alliance with Germany — mainly to guard against Russian territorial aspirations – and somewhat reluctantly entered World War I, the British did not lament this as a diplomatic defeat.

“The decrepit Ottoman Empire was more useful to them as a victim than as a dependent ally,” as the late historian Michael Howard explained.

The day after Britain declared war on the Ottomans on November 5, 1914, British troops attacked Basra (in today’s southern Iraq) to secure nearby oil facilities.

In the following months, the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia won a number of easy victories, which fuelled the belief the Turkish military was weak. This in turn led Britain to devise a plan to launch a direct strike on Constantinople, the Ottoman capital.

First, however, they had to clear the Gallipoli peninsula of enemy defences. And who better suited to this task than the first convoy of Anzac troops, just a short distance away in Egypt after passing through the Suez Canal?

Palestine: a complex tangle of pledges
As is well known, war planners in London had underestimated the enemy’s military strength. The battle of Gallipoli ended in a Turkish victory over Britain and its allies.

Nevertheless, fortunes eventually turned against the Ottoman Empire.

Although a whole century has gone by, British diplomatic efforts and secret agreements that were meant to accelerate the collapse of the Ottoman Empire still shape the Middle East today.

Most significantly, it is the violent conflict over Palestine that can be traced back to colonial power dealings during World War I. The crux of the problem is that Britain affirmed three irreconcilable wartime commitments in relation to Palestine.

First, in the hope of initiating an Arab revolt against Ottoman rule, the British made promises to Sharif Husayn, the emir of Mecca, about the creation of an independent Arab kingdom.

Second, in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided the Ottomans’ Arab lands into British and French spheres of interest, Palestine was designated for international administration.

Third, in the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, the British government pledged support for a “Jewish national home” in Palestine — a move motivated by a mixture of realpolitik and Biblical romanticism.

In the end, it was the third commitment that turned out to be the most enduring.

How should we remember Gallipoli?
Amid this complex history, we must not forget the thousands of New Zealand soldiers who died in World War I — men who had either volunteered, expecting a quick and heroic war, or served as draftees.

However, we need to have a public discussion about whether it is still appropriate for our commemorations to skip over the question of why these men fought in Europe and the Mediterranean.

Facing up to this question not only makes us aware of our responsibilities towards the Middle East problem, but it can also serve as a lesson for the future — not to blindly follow great powers into their military adventures.

Olli Hellmann, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Waikato. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The senseless slaughter of World War I began with the murder of a single man, a Crown Prince of a European empire whose name no one was particularly familiar with at the time. Archduke Franz Ferdinand Carl Ludwig Joseph Maria was the presumptive heir to the Austrian-Hungarian empire in June of 1914.

His assassin was a young Bosnian Serb student and the murder of the Crown Prince set off a cataclysmic series of events resulting in the deaths of over 20 million people, half of whom were civilians. An additional 20 million people were wounded.

Entire generations of young men from England, France, Russia, Austria, and Germany were lost. National economies were ruined. In economic terms, World War I caused the greatest global depression of the 20th century. Debts by all the major countries (except the USA) haunted the post-war economic world. Unemployment soared. Inflation increased, most dramatically in Germany where hyperinflation meant that a loaf of bread costs 200 million marks.

World War I ended a period of economic success. Twenty years of fiscal insecurity and suffering followed. It is thought that veterans returning home from World War I brought with them the Spanish Flu, which killed almost one million Americans. The war also laid the groundwork for World War II.

Wherever they go, suffering and death, war crimes and atrocities, profits, and stock buybacks follow.

Was it simply the murder of the Crown Prince that caused a world war or were other factors at work? Why did the United States get involved in a European conflict, particularly when an overwhelming number of Americans were against the United States being involved?

Despite major public opposition to the war, Congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of it: 373 to 50 in the House of Representatives, 82 to six in the Senate. The politicians defied the wishes of the people they were supposed to represent. What happened? Was something else driving their votes?

J.P. Morgan and Company was one of the largest investment banking firms in the world. J.P. Morgan himself was the official business agent in the United States for the British government and the main contact for Allied loans during the war. Similarly, E.I. du Pont Company was the largest chemical firm in America. These two phenomenally wealthy and powerful companies along with other US manufacturers, including US weapons manufacturers, were closely aligned with President Woodrow Wilson.

When World War I began, JP Morgan had extensive loans to Europe which would be lost if the allies were defeated. Du Pont and other US weapons manufacturers stood to make astronomical profits if the United States entered the war. Historian Alan Brugar wrote that for every soldier who died in battle, the international bankers made a profit of $10,000. As J.P. Morgan wrote to Wilson in 1914, “The war should be a tremendous opportunity for America.”

When the war concluded and the dead and wounded were counted, suspicions grew in the United States that nefarious business interests had propelled US involvement into the great slaughter. Investigative reporting and congressional hearings were initiated.

In 1934 a book written by Helmuth Engelbrecht called The Merchants of Death became a best seller. The book exposed the unethical business practices of weapons manufacturers and analyzed their enormous profits during World War I. The author concluded that “the rise and development of the arms merchants reveals them as a growing menace to World Peace.” While not the only reason for the US entering the war, it became clear the Merchants of Death lobbied both Congress and the President for war.

The American public was incensed. In 1934 almost 100,000 Americans signed a petition opposing increased armament production. Veterans paraded through Washington DC in 1935 in a march for peace. And Marine Major General Smedley Butler, two-time Medal of Honor winner, published his book War is a Racket, claiming he had been “a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism.” His book too became a bestseller.

The growing wave of public outrage led Senator Gerald Nye to initiate congressional hearings investigating whether US corporations, including weapons manufacturers, had led the United States into World War I. In two years, the Nye committee held 93 hearings and called more than 200 witnesses to testify, including JP Morgan and Pierre S. DuPont.

The committee conducted an extensive investigation searching the records of weapons manufacturers. They uncovered criminal and unethical actions including bribery of foreign officials, lobbying the United States government to obtain foreign sales, selling weapons to both sides of international disputes, and the covert undermining of disarmament conferences.

“The committee listened daily to men striving to defend acts which found them nothing more than international racketeers, bent upon gaining profit through a game of arming the world to fight itself,” Senator Nye declared in an October 1934 radio address.

The Senate Nye Committee recommended price controls, the transfer of Navy shipyards out of private hands, and increased industrial taxes. Senator Nye suggested that upon a declaration of war by Congress, taxes on annual income under $10,000 should automatically be doubled and higher incomes should be taxed at 98%. A journalist wrote at the time, “If such policies were enacted, businessmen would become our leading pacifists.”

The American public was outraged at the committee’s findings and so created some of the largest peace organizations the country had ever known. Committed to staying out of all future European wars, American college campuses in the 1930s had thousands of students taking oaths swearing they would never fight in a foreign war.

Farmers, laborers, intellectuals, ministers, people from all walks of life declared they would never again participate in a war fought to increase the profits of corporations.

And then, business fought back. They lobbied those in Congress to cut off funding for the Nye committee, which they soon did. A smear campaign was orchestrated against Senator Nye. The committees’ days were numbered.

In the end, the Nye Committee demonstrated that “these businesses were at the heart and center of a system that made going to war inevitable. They paved and greased the road to war.” With World War II, the Military Industrial Complex would explode and come to dominate American economic and political life.

Today, the Merchants of Death thrive behind a veil of duplicity and slick media campaigns. They have assimilated mainstream media and academia into their conglomerate. But their crimes are clear, and the evidence is overwhelming. Wherever they go, suffering and death, war crimes and atrocities, profits, and stock buybacks follow.

Ninety years after the original Merchants of Death hearings, the 2023 Merchants of Death War Crimes Tribunal will hold United States weapons manufacturers accountable for aiding and abetting the United States government in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity. This Tribunal will shine a light on those who profit from war and will seek to end their bloody franchise. Let this time be the last time. We may not have another chance.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Brad Wolf.

What happened on the Gallipoli peninsula in Turkey 108 years ago has shocked and shaped Aotearoa New Zealand ever since. The challenge in the 21st century, then, is how best to give contemporary relevance to such an epochal event.

The essence of the Anzac story is well known. As part of the first world war British Imperial Forces, the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzacs) landed at Gallipoli on April 25 1915. For eight months they endured the constant threat of death or maiming in terrible living conditions.

Ultimately, their occupation of that narrow and rugged piece of Turkish coast failed. The 30,000 Anzacs were evacuated after eight months. More than 2700 New Zealand and 8700 Australian soldiers died, with many more wounded.

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The first anniversary of the landing was a day of mourning, with Anzac Day becoming a public holiday in 1922. A remembrance day of sorrow mixed with pride, it has grown over the years to include all those who served and died in later international conflicts.

Over time, various narratives and themes have emerged from that Gallipoli “origin story”: of Aotearoa New Zealand’s emergence as a nation, proving itself to Britain and Empire; of the brave, fit, loyal soldier-mates who emblemised the Kiwi spirit of egalitarianism, fairness and duty. All this mingled with the lasting shock and underlying anger at class hierarchy and the British leadership’s incompetence.

But historians know well that the “Anzac spirit” is a complex and ever-evolving idea. In 2023, what do we teach school-aged children about its meaning and significance? One way forward is to rethink those Anzac narratives and tropes in a more complex way.

Colonialism and class
The Anzac story is tied up in the nation’s history as part of the British Empire. The Anzac toll was just part of a staggering 46,000 “Britons” — including many from India and Ireland — who died at Gallipoli.

Some 86,000 Turks also died defending their peninsula. We need to teach about the Anzac sacrifice in the context of a global conflict where the magnitude of loss was horrific.

Importantly, Anzac themes are bound up in early forms of colonial nationalism: New Zealand proving itself to Britain and developing its own fighting mentality on battlefields far from home.

Part of this involves the notion of incompetent British commanders who let down the Anzac troops — but this is part of a bigger story.

Focusing on imperial and class hierarchies of the time can place what happened in that broader context. The legendary story of Chunuck Bair, taken on August 8 by Colonel William Malone’s Wellington Regiment, but where most of the soldiers were killed when they were not relieved in time, is particularly evocative.

Māori and the imperial project
From our vantage point in the present, of course, we cannot ignore the Māori experience of war and colonialism. As the historian Vincent O’Malley has suggested, New Zealand’s “great war” of nation-making was actually Ngā pakanga o Aotearoa — the New Zealand Wars.

It’s time to teach the complexity of this past and the multiple perspectives on it. For example, Waikato leader Te Puea Hērangi led opposition to World War I conscription and spoke against Māori participation on the side of a power that had only recently invaded her people’s land.

Conversely, Māori seeking inclusion in the settler nation did participate. On July 3, 1915, the 1st Māori Contingent landed at Anzac Cove. Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck) (Ngāti Mutunga) was to say:

Our feet were set on a distant land where our blood was to be shed in the cause of the Empire to which we belonged.

These words echo the familiar Anzac trope of the New Zealand nation being born at Gallipoli. Such sentiments led to postwar pilgrimages to retrace the steps of ancestors and claim the site as part of an Anzac heritage — a corner of New Zealand even.

For many young New Zealanders it has become a rite of passage, part of the big OE. That a visit to Anzac Cove is still more popular than visiting the sites of Ngā pakanga o Aotearoa is something our teaching can investigate.

Mateship and conformity
The notion of the Anzac soldier as courageous and beyond reproach, willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for nation and empire, is also overdue for revision. The “glue” of mateship — a potent combination of masculine bravery and strength with extreme loyalty to fellow soldiers — is again a contested narrative.

By the 1970s, as historian Rowan Light’s work shows, there was a significant challenge to such perceptions from the counterculture, peace protesters and feminists. And by the 1980s, veterans were sharing their stories more candidly with writer Maurice Shadbolt and war historian Chris Pugsley.

Teaching about the meaning of mateship might examine the history of those peer-pressured into participating in war, those who were conscripted and had no choice, and more on the fate of conscientious objectors like Archibald Baxter. At its worst, the idea of mateship was window dressing for uniformity and parochialism.

New Zealanders today have complex multicultural and global roots. We have ancestors who were co-opted to fight on different sides in 20th-century wars, including those who fought anti-colonial wars in India, Ireland and Samoa.

Some came here as refugees escaping conflict. Jingoism and what it really represents deserves critical analysis.

Poppies and peace
The ubiquitous poppy, an icon much reproduced in classrooms, is also ripe for contextualisation and debate over its meaning. In the age of global environmental crisis, it can be seen as more than a symbol of sacrifice immortalised in verse and iconography.

The poppy also reminds us of the landscapes devastated by the machinery of war that killed and maimed people, plants and animals. It contains within it myriad lessons about the threats science and technology can pose to a vulnerable planet.

Anzac Day rose from the shock, loss and grief felt by those on the home front. And beyond the familiar tropes of nationalism, mateship and egalitarianism, this remains its overriding mood.

Remembering and learning about the terrible physical and mental cost of war is the real point of those familiar phrases “lest we forget” and “never again”. That spirit of humanitarianism chimes with Aotearoa New Zealand’s modern role and evolving self-image as a peacekeeping, nuclear-free nation.

Anzac Day also speaks to the need for global peace and arbitration, and how war is no viable solution to conflict. Those are surely lessons worth teaching.

Dr Katie Pickles is professor of history, University of Canterbury. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the product of ancient ethnic hatreds. It is the tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same land. It is a manufactured conflict, the outcome of a 100-year-old colonial occupation by Zionists and later Israel, backed by the British, the United States and other major imperial powers. This project is about the ongoing seizure of Palestinian land by the colonizers. It is about the rendering of the Palestinians as non-people, writing them out of the historical narrative as if they never existed and denying them basic human rights. Yet to state these incontrovertible facts of Jewish colonization — supported by innumerable official reports and public and private communiques and statements, along with historical records and events — sees Israel’s defenders level charges of anti-Semitism and racism.

Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, in his book “The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonization and Resistance, 1917-2017” has meticulously documented this long project of colonization of Palestine. His exhaustive research, which includes internal, private communications between the early Zionists and Israeli leadership, leaves no doubt that the Jewish colonizers were acutely aware from the start that the Palestinian people had to be subjugated and removed to create the Jewish state. The Jewish leadership was also acutely aware that its intentions had to be masked behind euphemisms, the patina of biblical legitimacy by Jews to a land that had been Muslim since the seventh century, platitudes about human and democratic rights, the supposed benefits of colonization to the colonized and a mendacious call for democracy and peaceful co-existence with those targeted for destruction.

“This is a unique colonialism that we’ve been subjected to where they have no use for us,” Khalidi quotes Said as having written. “The best Palestinian for them,” Said wrote, “is either dead or gone. It’s not that they want to exploit us, or that they need to keep us there in the way of Algeria or South Africa as a subclass.”

Zionism was birthed from the evils of anti-Semitism. It was a response to the discrimination and violence inflicted on Jews, especially during the savage pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe in the late 19th century and early 20th century that left thousands dead. The Zionist leader Theodor Herzl in 1896 published “Der Judenstaat,” or “The Jewish State,” in which he warned that Jews were not safe in Europe, a warning that within a few decades proved terrifyingly prescient with the rise of German fascism.

Britain’s support of a Jewish homeland was always colored by anti-Semitism. The 1917 decision by the British Cabinet, as stated in the Balfour Declaration, to support “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” was a principal part of a misguided endeavor based on anti-Semitic tropes. It was undertaken by the ruling British elites to unite “international Jewry” — including officials of Jewish descent in senior positions in the new Bolshevik state in Russia — behind Britain’s flagging military campaign in World War I. The British leaders were convinced that Jews secretly controlled the U.S. financial system. American Jews, once promised a homeland in Palestine, would, they thought, bring the United States into the war and help finance the war effort. To add to these bizarre anti-Semitic canards, the British believed that Jews and Dönmes — or “crypto-Jews” whose ancestors had converted to Christianity but who continued to practice the rituals of Judaism in secret — controlled the Turkish government. If the Zionists were given a homeland in Palestine, the British believed, the Jews and Dönmes would turn on the Turkish regime, which was allied with Germany in the war, and the Turkish government would collapse. World Jewry, the British were convinced, was the key to winning the war.

“With ‘Great Jewry’ against us,” warned Britain’s Sir Mark Sykes, who with the French diplomat François Georges-Picot created the secret treaty that carved up the Ottoman Empire between Britain and France, there would be no possibility of victory. Zionism, Sykes said, was a powerful global subterranean force that was “atmospheric, international, cosmopolitan, subconscious and unwritten, nay often unspoken.”

The British elites, including Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, also believed that Jews could never be assimilated in British society and it was better for them to emigrate. It is telling that the only Jewish member of Prime Minister David Lloyd George’s government, Edwin Montagu, vehemently opposed the Balfour Declaration. He argued that it would encourage states to expel its Jews. “Palestine will become the world’s ghetto,” he warned.

This turned out to be the case after World War II when hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, many rendered stateless, had nowhere to go but Palestine. Often, their communities had been destroyed during the war or their homes and land had been confiscated. Those Jews who returned to countries like Poland found they had nowhere to live and were often victims of discrimination as well as postwar anti-Semitic attacks and even massacres.

The European powers dealt with the Jewish refugee crisis by shipping victims of the Holocaust to the Middle East. So, while leading Zionists understood that they had to uproot and displace Arabs to establish a homeland, they were also acutely aware that they were not wanted in the countries from which they had fled or been expelled. The Zionists and their supporters may have mouthed slogans such as “a land without a people for a people without a land” in speaking of Palestine, but, as the political philosopher Hannah Arendt observed, European powers were attempting to deal with the crime carried out against Jews in Europe by committing another crime, one against Palestinians. It was a recipe for endless conflict, especially since giving the Palestinians under occupation full democratic rights would risk loss of control of Israel by the Jews.

Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the godfather of the right-wing ideology that has dominated Israel since 1977, an ideology openly embraced by Prime Ministers Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Benjamin Netanyahu, wrote bluntly in 1923: “Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’ ”

This kind of public honesty, Khalidi notes, was rare among leading Zionists. Most of the Zionist leaders “protested the innocent purity of their aims and deceived their Western listeners, and perhaps themselves, with fairy tales about their benign intentions toward the Arab inhabitants of Palestine,” he writes. The Zionists — in a situation similar to that of today’s supporters of Israel — were aware it would be fatal to acknowledge that the creation of a Jewish homeland required the expulsion of the Arab majority. Such an admission would cause the colonizers to lose the world’s sympathy. But among themselves the Zionists clearly understood that the use of armed force against the Arab majority was essential for the colonial project to succeed. “Zionist colonization … can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population — behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach,” Jabotinsky wrote.

The Jewish colonizers knew they needed an imperial patron to succeed and survive. Their first patron was Britain, which sent 100,000 troops to crush the Palestinian revolt of the 1930s and armed and trained Jewish militias known as the Haganah. The savage repression of that revolt included wholesale executions and aerial bombardment and left 10% of the adult male Arab population killed, wounded, imprisoned or exiled. The Zionists’ second patron became the United States, which now, generations later, provides more than $3 billion a year to Israel. Israel, despite the myth of self-reliance it peddles about itself, would not be able to maintain its Palestinian colonies but for its imperial benefactors. This is why the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement frightens Israel. It is also why I support the BDS movement.

The early Zionists bought up huge tracts of fertile Palestinian land and drove out the indigenous inhabitants. They subsidized European Jewish settlers sent to Palestine, where 94% of the inhabitants were Arabs. They created organizations such as the Jewish Colonization Association, later called the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association, to administer the Zionist project.

But, as Khalidi writes, “once colonialism took on a bad odor in the post-World War II era of decolonization, the colonial origins and practice of Zionism and Israel were whitewashed and conveniently forgotten in Israel and the West. In fact, Zionism — for two decades the coddled step-child of British colonialism — rebranded itself as an anticolonial movement.”

“Today, the conflict that was engendered by this classic nineteenth-century European colonial venture in a non-European land, supported from 1917 onward by the greatest Western imperial power of its age, is rarely described in such unvarnished terms,” Khalidi writes. “Indeed, those who analyze not only Israeli settlement efforts in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, but the entire Zionist enterprise from the perspective of its colonial settler origins and nature are often vilified. Many cannot accept the contradiction inherent in the idea that although Zionism undoubtedly succeeded in creating a thriving national entity in Israel, its roots are as a colonial settler project (as are those of other modern countries: the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). Nor can they accept that it would not have succeeded but for the support of the great imperial powers, Britain and later the United States. Zionism, therefore, could be and was both a national and a colonial settler movement at one and the same time.”

One of the central tenets of the Zionist and Israeli colonization is the denial of an authentic, independent Palestinian identity. During the British control of Palestine, the population was officially divided between Jews and “non-Jews.” “There were no such thing as Palestinians … they did not exist,” onetime Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir quipped. This erasure, which requires an egregious act of historical amnesia, is what the Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called the “politicide” of the Palestinian people. Khalidi writes, “The surest way to eradicate a people’s right to their land is to deny their historical connection to it.”

The creation of the state of Israel on May 15, 1948, was achieved by the Haganah and other Jewish groups through the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and massacres that spread terror among the Palestinian population. The Haganah, trained and armed by the British, swiftly seized most of Palestine. It emptied West Jerusalem and cities such as Haifa and Jaffa, along with numerous towns and villages, of their Arab inhabitants. Palestinians call this moment in their history the Nakba, or the Catastrophe.

“By the summer of 1949, the Palestinian polity had been devastated and most of its society uprooted,” Khalidi writes. “Some 80 percent of the Arab population of the territory that at war’s end became the new state of Israel had been forced from their homes and lost their lands and property. At least 720,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians were made refugees. Thanks to this violent transformation, Israel controlled 78 percent of the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, and now ruled over the 160,000 Palestinian Arabs who had been able to remain, barely one-fifth of the prewar Arab population.”

Since 1948, Palestinians have heroically mounted one resistance effort after another, all unleashing disproportionate Israeli reprisals and a demonization of the Palestinians as terrorists. But this resistance has also forced the world to recognize the presence of Palestinians, despite the feverish efforts of Israel, the United States and many Arab regimes to remove them from historical consciousness. The repeated revolts, as Said noted, gave the Palestinians the right to tell their own story, the “permission to narrate.”

The colonial project has poisoned Israel, as feared by its most prescient leaders, including Moshe Dayan and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a right-wing Jewish extremist in 1995. Israel is an apartheid state that rivals and often surpasses the onetime savagery and racism of apartheid South Africa. Its democracy — which was always exclusively for Jews — has been hijacked by extremists, including current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have implemented racial laws that were once championed mainly by marginalized fanatics such as Meir Kahane. The Israeli public is infected with racism. “Death to Arabs” is a popular chant at Israeli soccer matches. Jewish mobs and vigilantes, including thugs from right-wing youth groups such as Im Tirtzu, carry out indiscriminate acts of vandalism and violence against dissidents, Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and the hapless African immigrants who live crammed into the slums of Tel Aviv. Israel has promulgated a series of discriminatory laws against non-Jews that eerily resemble the racist Nuremberg Laws that disenfranchised Jews in Nazi Germany. The Communities Acceptance Law permits exclusively Jewish towns in Israel’s Galilee region to bar applicants for residency on the basis of “suitability to the community’s fundamental outlook.” The late Uri Avnery, a left-wing politician and journalist, wrote that “Israel’s very existence is threatened by fascism.”

In recent years, up to 1 million Israelis have left to live in the United States, many of them among Israel’s most enlightened and educated citizens. Within Israel, human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists — Israeli and Palestinian — have found themselves vilified as traitors in government-sponsored smear campaigns, placed under state surveillance and subjected to arbitrary arrests. The Israeli educational system, starting in primary school, is an indoctrination machine for the military. The Israeli army periodically unleashes massive assaults with its air force, artillery and mechanized units on the largely defenseless 1.85 million Palestinians in Gaza, resulting in thousands of Palestinian dead and wounded. Israel runs the Saharonim detention camp in the Negev Desert, one of the largest detention centers in the world, where African immigrants can be held for up to three years without trial.

The great Jewish scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz, whom Isaiah Berlin called “the conscience of Israel,” saw the mortal danger to Israel of its colonial project. He warned that if Israel did not separate church and state and end its colonial occupation of the Palestinians it would give rise to a corrupt rabbinate that would warp Judaism into a fascistic cult. “Religious nationalism is to religion what National Socialism was to socialism,” said Leibowitz, who died in 1994. He saw that the blind veneration of the military, especially after the 1967 war in which Israel captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem, would result in the degeneration of the Jewish society and the death of democracy.

“Our situation will deteriorate to that of a second Vietnam [a reference to the war waged by the United States in the 1970s], to a war in constant escalation without prospect of ultimate resolution,” Leibowitz wrote. He foresaw that “the Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police — mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 million to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the State of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people’s army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.”

The Zionists could never have colonized the Palestinians without the backing of Western imperial powers whose motives were tainted by anti-Semitism. Many of the Jews who fled to Israel would not have done so but for the virulent European anti-Semitism that by the end of World War II saw 6 million Jews murdered. Israel was all that many impoverished and stateless survivors, robbed of their national rights, communities, homes and often most of their relatives, had left. It became the tragic fate of the Palestinians, who had no role in the European pogroms or the Holocaust, to be sacrificed on the altar of hate.

This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

There once lived an odd little man — five feet nine inches tall and barely 140 pounds sopping wet — who rocked the lecture circuit and the nation itself. For all but a few activist insiders and scholars, U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Darlington Butler is now lost to history. Yet more than a century ago, this strange contradiction of a man would become a national war hero, celebrated in pulp adventure novels, and then, 30 years later, as one of this country’s most prominent antiwar and anti-imperialist dissidents.

Raised in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and educated in Quaker (pacifist) schools, the son of an influential congressman, he would end up serving in nearly all of America’s “Banana Wars” from 1898 to 1931. Wounded in combat and a rare recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor, he would retire as the youngest, most decorated major general in the Marines.

A teenage officer and a certified hero during an international intervention in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion of 1900, he would later become a constabulary leader of the Haitian gendarme, the police chief of Philadelphia (while on an approved absence from the military), and a proponent of Marine Corps football. In more standard fashion, he would serve in battle as well as in what might today be labeled peacekeeping, counterinsurgency, and advise-and-assist missions in Cuba, China, the Philippines, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, France, and China (again). While he showed early signs of skepticism about some of those imperial campaigns or, as they were sardonically called by critics at the time, “Dollar Diplomacy” operations — that is, military campaigns waged on behalf of U.S. corporate business interests — until he retired he remained the prototypical loyal Marine.

But after retirement, Smedley Butler changed his tune. He began to blast the imperialist foreign policy and interventionist bullying in which he’d only recently played such a prominent part. Eventually, in 1935 during the Great Depression, in what became a classic passage in his memoir, which he titled “War Is a Racket,” he wrote: “I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service… And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”

Seemingly overnight, the famous war hero transformed himself into an equally acclaimed antiwar speaker and activist in a politically turbulent era. Those were, admittedly, uncommonly anti-interventionist years, in which veterans and politicians alike promoted what (for America, at least) had been fringe ideas. This was, after all, the height of what later pro-war interventionists would pejoratively label American “isolationism.”

Nonetheless, Butler was unique (for that moment and certainly for our own) in his unapologetic amenability to left-wing domestic politics and materialist critiques of American militarism. In the last years of his life, he would face increasing criticism from his former admirer, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the military establishment, and the interventionist press. This was particularly true after Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany invaded Poland and later France. Given the severity of the Nazi threat to mankind, hindsight undoubtedly proved Butler’s virulent opposition to U.S. intervention in World War II wrong.

Nevertheless, the long-term erasure of his decade of antiwar and anti-imperialist activism and the assumption that all his assertions were irrelevant has proven historically deeply misguided. In the wake of America’s brief but bloody entry into the First World War, the skepticism of Butler (and a significant part of an entire generation of veterans) about intervention in a new European bloodbath should have been understandable. Above all, however, his critique of American militarism of an earlier imperial era in the Pacific and in Latin America remains prescient and all too timely today, especially coming as it did from one of the most decorated and high-ranking general officers of his time. (In the era of the never-ending war on terror, such a phenomenon is quite literally inconceivable.)

Smedley Butler’s Marine Corps and the military of his day was, in certain ways, a different sort of organization than today’s highly professionalized armed forces. History rarely repeats itself, not in a literal sense anyway. Still, there are some disturbing similarities between the careers of Butler and today’s generation of forever-war fighters. All of them served repeated tours of duty in (mostly) unsanctioned wars around the world. Butler’s conflicts may have stretched west from Haiti across the oceans to China, whereas today’s generals mostly lead missions from West Africa east to Central Asia, but both sets of conflicts seemed perpetual in their day and were motivated by barely concealed economic and imperial interests.

Nonetheless, whereas this country’s imperial campaigns of the first third of the twentieth century generated a Smedley Butler, the hyper-interventionism of the first decades of this century hasn’t produced a single even faintly comparable figure. Not one. Zero. Zilch. Why that is matters and illustrates much about the U.S. military establishment and contemporary national culture, none of it particularly encouraging.

Why No Antiwar Generals

When Smedley Butler retired in 1931, he was one of three Marine Corps major generals holding a rank just below that of only the Marine commandant and the Army chief of staff. Today, with about 900 generals and admirals currently serving on active duty, including 24 major generals in the Marine Corps alone, and with scores of flag officers retiring annually, not a single one has offered genuine public opposition to almost 19 years worth of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars. As for the most senior officers, the 40 four-star generals and admirals whose vocal antimilitarism might make the biggest splash, there are more of them today than there were even at the height of the Vietnam War, although the active military is now about half the size it was then. Adulated as many of them may be, however, not one qualifies as a public critic of today’s failing wars.

Instead, the principal patriotic dissent against those terror wars has come from retired colonels, lieutenant colonels, and occasionally more junior officers (like me), as well as enlisted service members. Not that there are many of us to speak of either. I consider it disturbing (and so should you) that I personally know just about every one of the retired military figures who has spoken out against America’s forever wars.

The big three are Secretary of State Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson; Vietnam veteran and onetime West Point history instructor, retired Colonel Andrew Bacevich; and Iraq veteran and Afghan War whistleblower, retired Lieutenant Colonel Danny Davis. All three have proven to be genuine public servants, poignant voices, and — on some level — cherished personal mentors. For better or worse, however, none carry the potential clout of a retired senior theater commander or prominent four-star general offering the same critiques.

Something must account for veteran dissenters topping out at the level of colonel. Obviously, there are personal reasons why individual officers chose early retirement or didn’t make general or admiral. Still, the system for selecting flag officers should raise at least a few questions when it comes to the lack of antiwar voices among retired commanders. In fact, a selection committee of top generals and admirals is appointed each year to choose the next colonels to earn their first star. And perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that, according to numerous reports, “the members of this board are inclined, if not explicitly motivated, to seek candidates in their own image — officers whose careers look like theirs.” At a minimal level, such a system is hardly built to foster free thinkers, no less breed potential dissidents.

Consider it an irony of sorts that this system first received criticism in our era of forever wars when General David Petraeus, then commanding the highly publicized “surge” in Iraq, had to leave that theater of war in 2007 to serve as the chair of that selection committee. The reason: he wanted to ensure that a twice passed-over colonel, a protégé of his — future Trump National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster — earned his star.

Mainstream national security analysts reported on this affair at the time as if it were a major scandal, since most of them were convinced that Petraeus and his vaunted counterinsurgency or “COINdinista” protégés and their “new” war-fighting doctrine had the magic touch that would turn around the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In fact, Petraeus tried to apply those very tactics twice — once in each country — as did acolytes of his later, and you know the results of that.

But here’s the point: it took an eleventh-hour intervention by America’s most acclaimed general of that moment to get new stars handed out to prominent colonels who had, until then, been stonewalled by Cold War-bred flag officers because they were promoting different (but also strangely familiar) tactics in this country’s wars. Imagine, then, how likely it would be for such a leadership system to produce genuine dissenters with stars of any serious sort, no less a crew of future Smedley Butlers.

At the roots of this system lay the obsession of the American officer corps with “professionalization” after the Vietnam War debacle. This first manifested itself in a decision to ditch the citizen-soldier tradition, end the draft, and create an “all-volunteer force.” The elimination of conscription, as predicted by critics at the time, created an ever-growing civil-military divide, even as it increased public apathy regarding America’s wars by erasing whatever “skin in the game” most citizens had.

More than just helping to squelch civilian antiwar activism, though, the professionalization of the military, and of the officer corps in particular, ensured that any future Smedley Butlers would be left in the dust (or in retirement at the level of lieutenant colonel or colonel) by a system geared to producing faux warrior-monks. Typical of such figures is current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Mark Milley. He may speak gruffly and look like a man with a head of his own, but typically he’s turned out to be just another yes-man for another war-power-hungry president.

One group of generals, however, reportedly now does have it out for President Trump — but not because they’re opposed to endless war. Rather, they reportedly think that The Donald doesn’t “listen enough to military advice” on, you know, how to wage war forever and a day.

What Would Smedley Butler Think Today?

In his years of retirement, Smedley Butler regularly focused on the economic component of America’s imperial war policies. He saw clearly that the conflicts he had fought in, the elections he had helped rig, the coups he had supported, and the constabularies he had formed and empowered in faraway lands had all served the interests of U.S. corporate investors. Though less overtly the case today, this still remains a reality in America’s post-9/11 conflicts, even on occasion embarrassingly so (as when the Iraqi ministry of oil was essentially the only public building protected by American troops as looters tore apart the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, in the post-invasion chaos of April 2003). Mostly, however, such influence plays out far more subtly than that, both abroad and here at home where those wars help maintain the record profits of the top weapons makers of the military-industrial complex.

That beast, first identified by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, is now on steroids as American commanders in retirement regularly move directly from the military onto the boards of the giant defense contractors, a reality which only contributes to the dearth of Butlers in the military retiree community. For all the corruption of his time, the Pentagon didn’t yet exist and the path from the military to, say, United Fruit Company, Standard Oil, or other typical corporate giants of that moment had yet to be normalized for retiring generals and admirals. Imagine what Butler would have had to say about the modern phenomenon of the “revolving door” in Washington.

Of course, he served in a very different moment, one in which military funding and troop levels were still contested in Congress. As a longtime critic of capitalist excesses who wrote for leftist publications and supported the Socialist Party candidate in the 1936 presidential elections, Butler would have found today’s nearly trillion-dollar annual defense budgets beyond belief. What the grizzled former Marine long ago identified as a treacherous nexus between warfare and capital “in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives” seems to have reached its natural end point in the twenty-first century. Case in point: the record (and still rising) “defense” spending of the present moment, including — to please a president — the creation of a whole new military service aimed at the full-scale militarization of space.

Sadly enough, in the age of Trump, as numerous polls demonstrate, the U.S. military is the only public institution Americans still truly trust. Under the circumstances, how useful it would be to have a high-ranking, highly decorated, charismatic retired general in the Butler mold galvanize an apathetic public around those forever wars of ours. Unfortunately, the likelihood of that is practically nil, given the military system of our moment.

Of course, Butler didn’t exactly end his life triumphantly. In late May 1940, having lost 25 pounds due to illness and exhaustion — and demonized as a leftist, isolationist crank but still maintaining a whirlwind speaking schedule — he checked himself into the Philadelphia Navy Yard Hospital for a “rest.” He died there, probably of some sort of cancer, four weeks later. Working himself to death in his 10-year retirement and second career as a born-again antiwar activist, however, might just have constituted the very best service that the two-time Medal of Honor winner could have given the nation he loved to the very end.

Someone of his credibility, character, and candor is needed more than ever today. Unfortunately, this military generation is unlikely to produce such a figure. In retirement, Butler himself boldly confessed that, “like all the members of the military profession, I never had a thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is typical…”

Today, generals don’t seem to have a thought of their own even in retirement. And more’s the pity…

This is part 2 of a two-part essay. Read part

Upon U.S. entry into the war, in 1917 the Wilson administration proposed and a compliant Congress almost immediately passed the Espionage Act, a direct attack on American press freedom. The law criminalized newspaper journalists who dared to oppose the war, question the official narrative, or encourage dissent. Massive fines and stiff prison sentences were dealt out with regularity throughout the war. The postmaster general, Albert Burleson, used the Act with particular vigor, banning socialist and anti-war publications from the mails, which then was the only serious method of media distribution.

The actions of Burleson and the government were manifold and nefarious. Bilingual “watchdogs” (mainly university professors) were assigned to monitor the then-vibrant foreign-language publications for “material which may fall under the Espionage Act.” Burleson went past the foreign press and denied mail access to any publication that even vaguely criticized the war, or dared, as he declared, “to impugn the motives of the government” or even criticize “improperly our Allies.” Thus, even the esteemed liberal journal The Nation was banned in September 1918, simply for criticizing the pro-war labor leader Samuel Gompers. This official trampling of press freedom encouraged local organizations to take mass surveillance and thought policing to ever-more extreme levels. For example, the Iowa Council of Defense urged each member to spy on his fellow citizens and “find out what his neighbor thinks.”

Attorney General Thomas Gregory even boasted of his having crafted an effective mass surveillance state. Indeed, it was so effective that it can now be seen as a precursor — though less technologically advanced — of the digital surveillance state that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden unmasked during the Obama years. In April 1918, Gregory claimed, “Scores of thousands of men are under constant observation throughout the country.” The connections to the present day are manifold, relevant, and discomfiting. It was the nearly century-old Espionage Act, in fact, that Barack Obama used to wage his war on leakers, including Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning and Edward Snowden. Indeed, the liberal darling Obama prosecuted more persons under the Espionage Act than all of his predecessors combined.

Still, while Obama indicted leaker after leaker, i.e., journalistic sources, his justice department stopped short of indicting a publi­cation itself, citing the potentially dangerous precedent it would set. The Trump administration has followed in Obama’s footsteps by bringing charges against Ju­lian Assange, who — like him or not — runs a viable publication, WikiLeaks. While WikiLeaks itself has not been indicted, that is certainly still a possibility. While the mainstream U.S. press failed to rally to Assange’s side, it would behoove them to do so. If Assange is jailed or WikiLeaks is shut down, there is nothing to stop Trump or future presidents from indicting officials in the Washington Post or New York Times or the publications themselves for printing clas­sified information gleaned from leakers. By then, using World War I vintage tools, the war on the press will be over, the federal government triumphant once and for all.

American propaganda at home

When the United States declared war, many millions of Americans remained uncertain about the need for intervention and skeptical of the official justifications. After all, Democrats won the presidency in 1916 on the popularity of a specifically anti-war platform. Such sentiments were hardly vanquished in April 1917. That presented Wilson with a serious problem, one that needed to be solved immediately. The most prominent, and infamous, government answer was George Creel’s Committee on Public Information (CPI). While Wilson and Creel vehemently protested that CPI would not peddle propaganda, that’s exactly what the organization felt compelled to do: to “cultivate — even to manufacture” favorable public support for the war, in the words of historian David M. Kennedy.

What followed bordered on the ridiculous. Countless pamphlets were produced depicting German troops as rabid beasts, often shown as strangely threatening to white American women. The teaching of German was banned in many local school districts, as were history textbooks seen as too pro-German. CPI also collaborated with the hawkish National Board for Historical Service to craft and distribute various “war study courses” to the nation’s schools. Education, too, is a regular victim of the warfare state.

Creel had few compunctions about his work and left behind an instructive legacy of unsubtle statements. He unapologetically described his job as “the fight for the minds of men, for the conquest of their convictions.” His methods were varied and increasingly nefarious. CPI unleashed 75,000 “Four-Minute Men” on local communities. They were prominent citizens with reliably pro-war viewpoints who whipped up support through millions of brief speeches across the nation. Creel’s agency also distributed 75 million copies of pamphlets explaining the official government case for war. What’s more, the Committee even published pro-war advertisements in popular journals such as the Saturday Evening Post to shamelessly persuade the people. Consumerism, it seemed, had finally dovetailed with government propaganda.

The war on “hyphenated” Americans

“Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of the Republic.” —Woodrow Wilson (1919)

Nativism and xenophobia are as American as apple pie, and are pervasive themes in U.S. history. However, the flames of anti-immigrant sentiment reached a fever pitch in the World War I era. By then, the recent wave of new immigrants — Italians, Poles, Slavs, and Jews — outnumbered the old-stock immigrants composed of Western and Northern Europeans. This inspired fear among native Anglo Americans. Just before the war, Henry Ford’s automotive workers on the assembly line attended a factory school for immigrants in which the first English sentence students learned was “I am a good American.”

By 1916, even the supposedly progressive Wilson framed his campaign partly around the concept of Americanism, as defined by the Anglo elite. So-called hyphenated Americans had no place in a United States, and new loaded terms such as “100 percent Americanism” took hold. Even before the war, Wilson gave voice to xenophobia, directed at once-admired German-Americans, as he stated,  “There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws … who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life…. Such creatures … must be crushed out.” Then, during his official war address, he claimed that there were “millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy who live amongst us…. If there should be disloyalty, it will be dealt with, with a firm hand of repression….” It was.

Scapegoating of German and new immigrants and the vigilantism against them straddled the lines of official and unofficial policy. Quasi-vigilante groups such as the massive American Protective League (APL) even managed to enter into a formal relationship with Gregory’s Justice Department. APL members, who stood 250,000 strong by war’s end, spied on neighbors and co-workers, sniffing out even the vaguest hints of dissent. Owing to his vitual deputization of the APL members, Attorney General Gregory went so far as to boast, “I have today several hundred thousand private citizens … engaged in … assisting the heavily overworked Federal authorities in keeping an eye on disloyal individuals and making reports of disloyal utterances.”

APL members rapidly slid into more nefarious arenas — burglary, illegal wiretapping, slander, citizens’ arrests, opening private mail, and, eventually, even physical violence. For perhaps the first time in U.S. history, whites — mostly Germans, pacifists, and socialists — were lynched wholesale. Some were viciously tarred and feathered, others outright murdered. The perpetrators almost never faced punishment. In one representative case, a German-American who had actually attempted (unsuccessfully) to join the U.S. Navy was humiliated, paraded through the streets, and murdered before a cheering crowd. At their trial, the ringleaders wore red, white, and blue ribbons. Their defense counsel described their act as “patriotic murder.” Within 25 minutes the jury found them all not guilty. The “respectable” Washington Post then commented, “In spite of excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.”

Which all links to the relevant present. Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign calls to “ban Muslims” coming from certain countries, and to “take out” the families of terrorists; and his characterizations of some Mexican and Central American refugees and migrants as “rapists” no doubt set the conditions for, and incited, a recent wave of domestic terror attacks. True, violence against Muslims — which first manifested in the highly emotive post–9/11 Bush years — and Hispanics (including the recent mass shooting in El Paso, Texas), and the recent rise in attacks on Jewish communities do not rise to the level of the First World War. Nonetheless, such actions follow in the mold of the xenophobia, racism, and alarmism the Great War produced.

Déjà vu all over again

The American people live, to a large extent, in the shadow of the world the Great War created. All war, especially war on such a grand scale, inevitably suppresses dissent, curtails liberty, and centralizes power in the federal government. Not only did that occur in World War I, but it did so to such a degree that the relationship of Americans to the federal government was completely transformed. U.S. presidents now unilaterally wage war — at home and abroad — with near total impunity.

It seems that while World War I did end, the post–9/11 “terror wars” may never come to a close. A major reason for that is the century-long centralization of foreign-policy and war-making power in the office of the president. Though Congress actually sanctioned (or rather rubber-stamped) war in April 1917, the Great War nevertheless transferred massive power to the executive branch. Indeed, Wilson’s unilateral military expeditions against Russian communists when he (and later his successor, Warren G. Harding) intervened in the Russian Civil War (1918-20) were a harbinger of things to come, great-grandfather to today’s unsanctioned interventions (and killing) in Libya, West Africa, Syria, and beyond. In retrospect, World War I and its more devilish step-child, the Second World War, proved to be the last two actual declared.

What’s more, the tacit — yet wildly vague and open-ended — congressional “authorizations” for force in Afghanistan (2001) and then Iraq (2002) bear a striking resemblance to the legislative rubber-stamp in April 1917. Wilson had said as much in his war address. It was, he declared, the “[executive branch] upon which the responsibility of conducting war and safeguarding the nation will most
directly fall.” And indeed it would. Today’s executive-as-emperor political culture is partly an outgrowth of Wilson’s precedent.

Political tribalism, no doubt prevalent today, was also common during the First World War. In spite of the cynical announcement of Republican Sen. Henry Cabot Lodges, a fierce Wilson opponent — “When this country is at war, party lines will disappear…. Both Democrats and Republicans must forget party in the presence of the common danger” — Lodge intended all along to criticize Wilson and the Democrats for their “insufficient vigor” in war prosecution. Much the same has unfolded in the “forever wars.” Bush and the Republicans pressured early Democratic acquiescence, but Dems rebelled and criticized (rightly) Bush’s failing Iraq War from 2006 to 2008. Only later, when one of their own — Barack Obama — was in office, did they suddenly support the war expansion, and it became the Republicans who portrayed the president as weak on terror. The formula flipped again when Trump took office. War, whether in 1917 or 2019, is as politically partisan as any other issue.

When the president filled the power vacuum in World War I, and Congress enabled him, it became clear that the federal courts could not and would not save liberty. Repeatedly, the Supreme Court upheld both the Espionage and Sedition Acts. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, once a darling of Progressives, wrote in Schenck v. United States, “when a nation is at war many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured.” With those words Holmes essentially spiked the promise of freedom in future wars. The same is true today, as the Supreme Court has failed to overturn the USA PATRIOT ACT or the much-abused Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF), or to shut down Guantanamo Bay and the Obama-escalated drone assassination program.

Modern liberalism, and the Democratic Party — as the Great War demonstrated — won’t save liberty either: in 1917, the vast majority of self-proclaimed Progressives sold out and followed “their man” Wilson into war, just as neo-Progressives sheepishly followed Obama down his path of war expansion. Democrats, Progressives, and too many (small “l”) liberals inflicted perhaps permanent damage on their once-optimistic social philosophy of progress. As such, according to David Kennedy, “the idea of the ‘people’ as good and educable, gave way to the ‘masses,’ brutal and volatile.”

The pro-war Progressive Walter Lippmann sensed this by war’s end, and proposed radical, undemocratic measures. The solution to man’s irrationality was to abandon real democracy and create an “intelligence bureau” to pursue “the common interests that very largely elude public opinion … managed only by a specialized class.” From that era, then, one may date the “substantial nagging fear of the people among modern liberals.”

It may be said, then, that the true casualty of the First World War was not just liberty, but the very “progressive” soul, the perhaps always-misplaced faith in government as a potential force for good. It is this cynical postwar world that Americans inhabit.

Bibliographical note: This piece draws extensively on David M. Kennedy’s book Over Here: The First World War and American Society as well as the author’s own teaching notes as lecturer from his time at West Point. Interested readers should read Kennedy’s work in full for a broader and more in-depth treatment of this massively complex subject.

This article was originally published in the January 2020 edition of Future of Freedom.

On February 4, 2002, a Predator drone circled over Afghanistan’s Paktia province, near the city of Khost. Below was al-Qaeda’s founder Osama bin Laden — or at least someone in the CIA thought so — and he was marked for death. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it later, both awkwardly and passively: “A decision was made to fire the Hellfire missile. It was fired.”  That air-to-ground, laser-guided missile — designed to obliterate tanks, bunkers, helicopters, and people — did exactly what it was meant to do.

As it happened, though (and not for the first time in its history either), the CIA got it wrong. It wasn’t Osama bin Laden on the receiving end of that strike, or a member of al-Qaeda, or even of the Taliban. The dead, local witnesses reported, were civilians out collecting scrap metal, ordinary people going about their daily work just as thousands of Americans had been doing at the World Trade Center only months earlier when terror struck from the skies.

In the years since, those Afghan scrap collectors have been joined by more than 157,000 war dead in that embattled land. That’s a heavy toll, but represents just a fraction of the body count from America’s post-9/11 wars. According to a study by the Costs of War Project of Brown University’s Watson Institute, as many as 801,000 people, combatants and noncombatants alike, have been killed in those conflicts. That’s a staggering number, the equivalent of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. But if President Donald Trump is to be believed, the United States has “plans” that could bury that grim count in staggering numbers of dead. The “method of war” he suggested employing could produce more than 20 times that number in a single country — an estimated 20 million or more Afghans, almost all of them civilians.

It’s a strange fact of our moment that President Trump has claimed to have “plans” (or “a method”) for annihilating millions of innocent people, possibly most of the population of Afghanistan. Yet those comments of his barely made the news, disappearing within days. Even for a president who threatened to unleash “fire and fury” on North Korea and usher in “the end” of Iran, hinting at the possibility of wiping out most of the civilian population of an ally represented something new.

After all, America’s commander-in-chief does have the authority, at his sole discretion, to order the launch of weapons from the vast U.S. nuclear arsenal. So it was no small thing last year when President Trump suggested that he might unleash a “method of war” that would kill at least 54% of the roughly 37 million inhabitants of Afghanistan.

And yet almost no one — in Washington or Kabul — wanted to touch such presidential comments. The White House, the Pentagon, and the State Department all demurred. So did the chief spokesman for Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. One high-ranking Afghan official apologized to me for being unable to respond honestly to President Trump’s comments. A current American official expressed worry that reacting to the president’s Afghan threats might provoke a presidential tweet storm against him and refused to comment on the record.

Experts, however, weren’t shy about weighing in on what such “plans,” if real and utilized, would actually mean. Employing such a method (to use the president’s term), they say, would constitute a war crime, a crime against humanity, and possibly a genocide.

A Trumpian Crime Against Humanity

“Massive Soviet military forces have invaded the small, nonaligned sovereign nation of Afghanistan,” President Jimmy Carter announced on January 4, 1980. “Fifty thousand heavily armed Soviet troops have crossed the border and are now dispersed throughout Afghanistan, attempting to conquer the fiercely independent Muslim people of that country.” Nine years later, the Red Army would finally limp out of that land in the wake of a war that killed an estimated 90,000 Mujahideen fighters, 18,000 Afghan troops, and 14,500 Soviet soldiers. As has been the norm in conflicts since World War I, however, civilians suffered the heaviest toll. Around one million were estimated to have been killed.

In the 18-plus years since U.S. forces invaded that same country in October 2001, the death toll has been far lower. Around 7,300 U.S. military personnel, contractors, and allied foreign forces have died there, as have 64,000 American-allied Afghans, 42,000 opposition fighters, and 43,000 civilians, according to the Costs of War Project. If President Trump is to be believed, however, this body count is low only due to American restraint.

“I have plans on Afghanistan that, if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth. It would be gone,” the president remarked prior to a July 2019 meeting with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan. “If we wanted to fight a war in Afghanistan and win it, I could win that war in a week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people.”  In September, he ramped up the rhetoric — and the death toll — further. “We’ve been very effective in Afghanistan,” he said. “And if we wanted to do a certain method of war, we would win that very quickly, but many, many, really, tens of millions of people would be killed.”

If America’s commander-in-chief is to be believed, plans and methods are already in place for a mass killing whose death toll could, at a minimum, exceed those of the Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Hundred Years’ War, and the American Revolution combined — and all in a country where the Pentagon believes there are only 40,000 to 80,000 Taliban fighters and fewer than 2,000 Islamic State militants.

President Trump claims he’d prefer not to use such methods, but if he did, say experts, his Senate impeachment trial could theoretically be followed by a more consequential one in front of an international tribunal.  “Of course, any ‘method of war’ that would kill ‘10 million people’ or ‘tens of millions’ of people in a country where the fighting force consists of 40,000 to 80,000 would be a blatant violation of the laws of war and would render President Trump a war criminal,” Daphne Eviatar, director of the Security with Human Rights program at Amnesty International USA, told TomDispatch.

Max Pensky, the co-director of the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention at the State University of New York at Binghamton, agreed. “Carrying out such a plan would certainly be a war crime because of the context of the armed conflict in Afghanistan,” he said. “And it would absolutely be a crime against humanity.” He noted that it might also constitute a genocide depending on the intent behind it.

The United States has, of course, been a pioneer when it comes to both the conduct and the constraint of warfare. For example, “General Orders No. 100: Instructions for the Government of the Armies of the United States in the Field,” issued by President Abraham Lincoln on April 24, 1863, represents the first modern codification of the laws of war. “The principle has been more and more acknowledged that the unarmed citizen is to be spared in person, property, and honor as much as the exigencies of war will admit,” reads the 157-year-old code. “All wanton violence committed against persons in the invaded country, all destruction of property not commanded by the authorized officer, all robbery, all pillage or sacking, even after taking a place by main force, all rape, wounding, maiming, or killing of such inhabitants, are prohibited under the penalty of death, or such other severe punishment as may seem adequate for the gravity of the offense.”

More recently, however, the United States has set the rules of the road when it comes to borderless assassination. In asserting the right of the military and the CIA to use armed drones to kill people from Pakistan to Yemen, Somalia to Libya, through quasi-secret and opaque processes, while ignoring previous American norms against “targeted killing,” questions about national sovereignty, and existing international law, the U.S. has created a ready framework for other nations to mimic. In October 2019, for example, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hinted that he would assassinate Mazloum Kobani, the head of the Syrian Democratic Forces and a key U.S. ally in the fight against the Islamic State in Syria. “Some countries eliminate terrorists whom they consider as a threat to their national security, wherever they are,” Erdogan said. “Therefore, this means those countries accept that Turkey has the same right.”

Historically, the United States has also pioneered the use of weapons of mass destruction. While a White House spokesperson would not address the question of whether President Trump was alluding to the use of nuclear weapons when he claimed that “Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the Earth,” it’s notable that the United States is the only country to have used such weaponry in an actual war.

The first nuclear attack, the U.S. strike on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945, left that city “uniformly and extensively devastated,” according to a study carried out in the wake of the attacks by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey. “The surprise, the collapse of many buildings, and the conflagration contributed to an unprecedented casualty rate.” Between 60,000 and 80,000 people were killed instantly. The final death toll, including those who later perished from the long-term effects of radiation sickness, was estimated at 135,000 to 150,000. An atomic attack on Nagasaki, carried out three days later, was calculated to have killed another 50,000 to 75,000 people.

Theoretical War Crimes and Real Civilian Deaths

Just days before mentioning the possibility of annihilating tens of millions of Afghans, President Trump took the Taliban to task for killing 12 people, including 10 Afghan civilians and one American soldier, in a car bombing while peace talks with the militant group were underway. At the time, he tweeted: “What kind of people would kill so many in order to seemingly strengthen their bargaining position?” Weeks later, he would clear three military service members of war crimes, one of them convicted of murdering two Afghan civilians, another charged with the murder of an Afghan man.

Amnesty’s Daphne Eviatar believes that the president’s “disregard toward the lives of civilians” may have led to less precise American attacks in recent years. “We’ve seen a dramatic rise in civilian casualties from U.S. military operations since Trump took office, including in Afghanistan,” she told TomDispatch.

An October report by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), analyzing the war from July to the end of September 2019, documented the highest number of civilian casualties it had recorded in a single quarter since it began systematically doing so in 2009. During the first nine months of last year, in fact, UNAMA tallied the deaths of 2,563 civilians and the wounding of 5,676 more — the majority by “anti-government” forces, including the Taliban and ISIS. UNAMA found, however, that “pro-government forces,” including the U.S. military, killed 1,149 people and injured 1,199 others in that period, a 26% increase from the corresponding timeframe in 2018.

Of course, such numbers would be dwarfed were Donald Trump to decide to “win” the Afghan War in the fashion he hinted at twice last year, even as peace talks with the Taliban were underway. Johnny Walsh, a senior expert on Afghanistan at the United States Institute of Peace and a former lead adviser for the State Department on the Afghan peace process, chalked Trump’s purported plans up to a “rhetorical flourish” and doubts they actually exist. “I am not at all aware of any plan to escalate the conflict or use nuclear weapons,” he told TomDispatch.

Whether or not such plans are real, civilian casualties in Afghanistan continue to rise, prompting experts to call for additional scrutiny of U.S. military operations.  “It’s tempting to dismiss some of the President’s more provocative statements,” said Amnesty’s Daphne Eviatar, “but we do need to take very seriously the exponential increase in civilian casualties from U.S. military operations since 2017 and ensure every one is thoroughly and independently investigated, and the results made public, so we can know if they’re the result of an unlawful Trump administration policy or practice.”

As 2020 begins, with America’s Afghan war in its 19th year and “progress” as nonexistent as ever, a beleaguered president continues to mull over just how to end America’s “endless wars” (while seemingly expanding them further). Under the circumstances, who knows what might happen in Afghanistan? Will 2020 be the year of peace or of Armageddon there — or will it simply bring more of the same?  With a president for whom “plans” may be more figurative than literal, all of this and the fate of perhaps 20 million or more Afghans remain among the great “unknown unknowns” of our time.

This piece originally appeared on Antiwar.com.

They lived in similar squalor, shared the same God, and celebrated the same holidays. It was December 24, 1914, Christmas Eve, and – though they spoke different languages and had ruthlessly killed one another for over four months – the British and German soldiers in the opposing trench lines had much in common.

The ruling families, the leaders of the prominent monarchies of Germany, Russia, and England were literally blood relatives. Indeed, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany was Queen Victoria’s grandson and regularly visited the British Isles throughout his youth. Given the commonalities of the mostly working-class soldiers in the opposing trenches, perhaps, then, it should come as little surprise that some British an German enlisted men spontaneously, and unofficially, called a truce that Christmas, and, in their own way, celebrated the birth of Christ – their shared savior – together, if only for a moment. How beautiful it was…

These days, the war described is known as World War I, but, since the boys on the frontline couldn’t then imagine another maelstrom so terrible would follow, it was known, at the time, simply as the Great War. Warfare of such dimensions had never unfolded before. The scale of the bloodshed had been unthinkable even a Christmas before – about a million men had been killed since August – yet by then stalemate reigned as both sides settled into trench lines that stretched from Belgium to Switzerland. A peculiar, ultimately absurd, form of hyper-nationalism had recently infected Europe, and, when combined with a worldwide competition for colonies, caused this arguably existential war. So prevalent, in fact, was the jingoistic patriotism of the era that even the socialists of each nation initially, and widely, supported the march to war.

Those were dark times. To simplify the military analyses of the war, the tactics (mass formation infantry attacks) had yet to catch up with the more lethal technology (machine guns, poison gas, and airplanes) of the day. The senseless delusion of nationalism ought to have died a bloody death – metaphorically riddled with bullets whilst stuck in endless strands of barbed wire – commensurate with the murder of so many millions of naive troopers. It didn’t, unfortunately, and across the globe today – even in normally circumspect Western Europe – insular nationalism is again on the rise. Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Bolsinaro, Modi, Orban…they’re all symptoms of the resurgence of this worldwide disease. Spoiler alert: it didn’t end well last time around.

Still, I digress – back to the Christmas truce. Though some have described the widespread phenomenon as somewhat apocryphal, some version of the following certainly did occur. Up and down the lines that first Christmas Eve of the Great War, German soldiers sang well-known holiday songs, such as “Silent Night.” Though the language of the verses differed on either side of the trenches, the melodies and content were widely known. British troops joined in the rather solemn caroling, as did some brass bands, along both sides of the lines.

At dawn on Christmas Day, Germans and Britons – up and down the firing line – emerged from their trenches and ventured into the deadly “No Man’s Land” between the armies. Some brought Christmas trees along; others exchanged cigarettes and snacks with their normative enemies. None brought weapons. During the brief, beautiful, gesture of peace, many soldiers also took the opportunity to identify, retrieve, and bury the bodies of comrades stranded between the trench lines. In one sector, at least, the opposing troops played an ad hoc game of soccer – another shared cultural pastime. As one participant, German Lieutenant Kurt Zehmisch, remembered: “How marvelously wonderful, yet how strange it was. The English officers felt the same way about it. Thus Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time.”

The undeniable beauty, the event’s last gasp of wartime chivalry, aside, it was never to be repeated – not on the four following Christmases of that war, nor in the interminable global warfare that has since followed. Senior officers on both sides, rightfully, had been terrified by the 1914 display of class and species solidarity, and brutally quashed such cross-trench harmony in years to come, with threats of disciplinary action. So it goes…

Nonetheless, as today’s forever wars rage – decades longer than the first Great War of old – the time for spontaneous truce between the grassroots ranks of all sides couldn’t be more essential. I know, I know, contemporary wars are geographically diffuse, rage far from the European continent, and are waged between belligerents that practice different religions. On the surface, at least, these caveats seem sensible. But are they? What if Americans and Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, Somalians, et. al., have more in common – even now – than most assume?

Bear with me now: it ain’t as much of a stretch as it may seem. First off, contrary to popular belief, Christians and Muslims worship the same god, if with a different flavor of tradition. Figures such as Abraham, King David, Jesus, and, especially Mary, figure prominently in the Koran. Islam, as such, though often distorted – as it was (and is) in certain bellicose strands of Christianity – is best seen as an extension, or addition, to the Judeo-Christian tradition, rather than a unique religion. Furthermore, the grunts on either side of America’s “terror wars” still share extraordinary commonalities.

Both are often drawn to military service by the limited economic opportunities in their respective societies. The soldiers who served under me typically joined as a means to a fiscal end – paying off college debt, learning a trade, or seeking healthcare and housing security. The foot soldiers in the Taliban buried IEDs and laid in wait to ambush my troops, as often as not, for a steady paycheck, a sense of dignity and purpose in a circumscribed Third World job market. American and Taliban grunts, for example, share more than they diverge. Both wage wars not of their own making; neither possess a clear path to victory; neither count many prospects in civilian life. Both believe the purported birth of Jesus to be a profound matter. The same can be said of the antagonists across America’s wars today. Let them all lay down their arms, for a moment, and celebrate in solidarity this Christmas. If only…

Alas, nationalism, particularly in its more pugnacious form, is again on the rise – from Brazil to Bengal. Yet, logically, it should be extinct. That it isn’t, and shows no signs of dissipation, might just presage the extinction of us, the human race! Truly existential threats pervade this world – climate change and potential nuclear warfare for starters – and even cursory historical analysis demonstrates that democracies, or republics, cannot weather indefinite warfare. America’s Army Chief of Staff during World War II, George Marshall, began his career as a young lieutenant engaged in an indecisive, endless war in the Philippines. The experience stuck. Decades later, Marshall, one of this nation’s most effective and humble military leaders, opined that “a democracy cannot fight a Seven Years War.” What, one wonders, would the former general, secretary of defense, and secretary of state, think of an American war that’s well into it’s 19th year?

As the should-be-bombshell Afghanistan Papers – long since buried by the impeachment charade dominating Capitol Hill and the media – definitively demonstrated, today’s generals and admirals can’t be counted on, neither for competence nor character. No, the movement for peace must come from the grassroots, from the under-privileged and under-served combatants on both sides of the contemporary fighting lines.

Truth is, as a troop commander in Kandahar in 2011-12, I had (crazy as it may sound) more in common with my counterpart in the local Taliban than with my star-fixated colonels and generals in the U.S. Army. At least my Taliban mirror also faced the daily prospect of death and undoubtedly knew the pain of burying young men under his command. I only wish that one of us, both of us, had had the courage to lay down our guns, take that exceedingly alluring risk, and met halfway between my outpost and his village, defied our respective commanders, and shared a Christmas moment.

Maybe it is fantasy; as is my hope that other belligerents will attempt this remarkable 1914-inspired protest tonight and tomorrow. Still, dreams, as they say, are what makes life tolerable…

Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.comHis work has appeared in the LA Times, The Nation, Huff Post, The Hill, Salon, Truthdig, Tom Dispatch, among other publications. He served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

In the spring of 1917, in the days following Operation Alberich, a strategic withdrawal by the German army to the heavily fortified Hindenburg Line dividing the French countryside, two soldiers are dispatched with a warning. They have only 24 hours to deliver orders to the Second Battalion, 1,600 strong, to cancel attack plans that unwittingly play into a German plot. This tale, reportedly told to filmmaker Sam Mendes by his paternal grandfather who fought in World War I, is the basis for his captivating cinematic reimagining, “1917.”

Wilderness shots bookend this arresting study in mise-en-scene. A bucolic field is bordered by forest, copses and meadows in between as the camera pulls back to reveal a soldier sitting foreground, Lance Corporal Schofield (George MacKay). As the camera pulls further back, we find Schofield is with his comrade, Lance Corporal Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman). When they are summoned by their superiors, the camera recedes even further to reveal that they are not alone. Instead, they are sitting on the perimeter of a sprawling British army unit dug into the landscape in a maze of battle-worn trenches.

With the camera leading and trailing and looping around them, Mendes and his army of artists and actors populate the trenches with soldiers doing everything from sleeping to sharing a cigarette, singing, cooking, fighting, yelling and eating. The two lads enter a bunker and are given orders by General Erinmore (Colin Firth), who adds that Blake’s brother is among the soldiers at risk of falling into the German trap.

Periodically pursued through the decades, the one-take movie is a filmmaker’s coveted conundrum. Its first notable appearance is the 1948 Hitchcock classic, “Rope,” in which James Stewart solves a murder based on the Leopold and Loeb case of the 1920s. The effect of a single take employs edits hidden in moments where the screen is blackened or otherwise obscured. When digital photography entered the lexicon, it accommodated longer takes than the 11-minute running time of a 1,000 foot film load. The first feature-length film done in a single take without hidden edits is 2002’s “Russian Ark,” shot on location in the Hermitage Museum, the former Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Editing is the filmmaker’s principal tool to govern pacing. In “1917,” to compensate for its lack, Mendes cleverly directs his actors to increase the speed of their gait, which translates into greater urgency, augmented by the two figures’ frequent change of position in relation to the camera. Dialog comes faster, off-camera space is employed to suggest mortal danger, and yes, despite the fact that we are over 10 minutes into the movie without a single edit, the intensity escalates.

Mendes made his name as a stage director, winning back-to-back Olivier Awards in 1995-56 for his West End revivals of “The Glass Menagerie” and “Company.” A Tony nomination for “Cabaret” came the following year, leading to his film debut, “American Beauty,” which won him an Oscar and a Golden Globe Award. In it, he demonstrated a dramaturg’s ease with his outstanding cast, including Annette Bening and Kevin Spacey, who won an Oscar for his work.

While there was little doubt he could work with actors, it wasn’t until he directed the James Bond classic “Skyfall” in 2012 that Mendes proved beyond doubt he had mastered the visual component of filmmaking. Here, he reteams with that film’s creatives, Oscar-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins and production designer Dennis Gassner, whose muddy craters with soldiers’ remains worn into the walls are as eerie as his graveyard of cannons self-sabotaged by Germans in their retreat. A denuded cherry orchard in blossom and the ghostly ruins of a bombarded village are just some of the breathtaking warscapes traversed by Blake and Schofield on their way to deliver their message.

In what is essentially a two-hander, Chapman and MacKay acquit themselves well with a screenplay that hamstrings their performances and likewise the entire, glorious endeavor. Written by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, best known for T.V.’s “Penny Dreadful,” “1917” doesn’t go anywhere. Naturalistic dialogue is mostly about nothing extraordinary—an argument over whether they should rest or continue, or reminiscences of home. Both actors are given ample opportunity to display their craft during one particular mortal moment which, with a lesser cast and director, might have been rendered hopelessly maudlin.

In the end, having fulfilled his mission, Schofield sits by a tree, as he did at the film’s beginning, and gazes out on the countryside. Yes, he has grown through the process, but if there is a point to “1917,” it’s difficult to discern, which doesn’t make it a bad or unenjoyable movie. It is an unusual epic told in a unique way that manages to engage even as it struggles to become more than just a cinematic exercise.