HomeTHE DAY THE GUNS FELL SILENT
Today is the eighty-ninth anniversary of Armistice Day, the end of World
War I. This was ‘the war to end all wars”. Instead it laid the groundwork for
World War II and for the current conflicts in the Middle East and it justified ethnic
nationalism which led to ethnic cleansing. It is a lesson in good intentions gone
wrong.
Good morning!
Today is Armistice Day, the day the guns fell silent at the end of World War I. It was the Great War, the War to end All Wars, The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy.
When it ended more than 8 million people had died in combat, more that 8 million civilians had perished, and millions more people were missing, never to be found. At least 21 million soldiers were maimed for life, some of them gruesomely. If one attributes to World War I the deaths of the victims of the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918, and there is some reason to do so, then one must add 21 million people to the roll of the dead.
World War I serves as an object lesson in the dangers of a foreign diplomacy based solely upon self-serving policies detached from any values other than success.
Paradoxically, it also shows the dangers and unintended consequences of idealism set free from the constraints of reality.
The briefest of histories:
By the early part of the twentieth century, the Ottoman Empire was weak and beginning to break apart. The province of Bosnia Herzegovina, populated then as now by Serbo-Croatian speaking people, broke away and was annexed by Austro-Hungary. This enraged many Serbs who felt that Bosnia ought to have been annexed to Serbia. Serbian nationalists, helped by the head of Serbian Military Intelligence but probably no one else in the Serbian government, slipped into Bosnia and assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne in Sarajevo. The head of Serbian Military Intelligence was a member of the Black Hand, one of many Serbian nationalist groups willing to use violence to achieve its ends. Austro-Hungary, deciding to end conflicts with Serbia once and for all, demanded a number of steps including that Serbia disband the societies--what we today would call terrorist organizations. They imposed a number of other requirements also, but not in good faith since they had decided in advance that a military response was required. They instructed their ambassador in Serbia to reject any response—even one of full compliance—as insufficient.
The great powers of that day were engaged in what was called the Great Game, a series of diplomatic and military maneuvers designed to increase power and influence. This had resulted in a web of treaties and alliances that caused this particular circumstance to spin out of control
When Austro-Hungary moved against Serbia, Russia mobilized its armies, so Germany declared war on Russia, so France was set to declare war on Germany. Germany, seeing herself facing a two front war, and acting on the doctrine of preemptive war, quickly attacked France in the west but did so through Belgium—they felt circumstances dictated this. Britain, bound by treaty to Belgium, then entered the war.
Each of these nations felt that it was acting in defense of self or others. Austria-Hungary was responding to a terror attack, Serbia felt it was a victim of big power machinations, and all the other nations came to the aid of allies under attack. No one was responsible for the war, you see; no one started it.
By the end of the war all of the major powers were talking about the need for a new order, the need for an international means of preventing war and intervening when war began. They envisioned a League of Nations through which the people of the world would act whenever aggression happened anywhere in the world. And everyone was speaking of the rights of peoples to have self rule and self determination. Much of this was codified in President Woodrow Wilson’s so called Fourteen Points.
The idea was a great one: allow each people to determine its own future. Promises to that effect were made and many of them were acted upon. Various peoples living under the Austro-Hungarian Empire ended up with new nations: Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia--the land of the southern Slavs--were created, and Poland reemerged as a nation.
But other promises were made as well. Britain promised King Hussein of the Hejaz, Sharif of Mecca, that if he joined the British in fighting the Ottomans there would be an Arab Caliphate stretching from Yemen to the north and including the old Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Damascus—that is, all of present day Kuwait, Jordan and much of Iraq and Syria. Beirut and Aleppo, having large Christian communities and involving French interests, were to be discussed at a later date. The Arabs—with good reason--understood this to include Palestine, though the English later said they never meant that to be so. Yet, Hussein of Hejaz, to whom the promises were made, stated that he was verbally assured the territory of the Caliphate to be included Jerusalem, and T. E. Lawrence confirmed that such a promise had been made. In any event, the Arab Caliphate never came to be because England and France had other plans for the area. Their promises to Hussein were lies.
And there is then the matter of promising too much to too many. Britain seems to have promised Palestine to both the planned Arab state and to a planned Jewish state.
Because of the failure to honor promises made, and because of the giving of Arab land for a Jewish state, many in the Arab world still do not trust the Western powers.
There was one other triumph of cynicism and vengeance that being the extent of the penalties and reparations imposed upon Germany. Germany was the fourth nation to enter into World War I, yet since both Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire were gone, dismantled into their component parts, Germany carried the burden of the losing side. The severity of the penalties imposed upon it, in violation of the understandings at the time of the Armistice, set the stage for World War II.
The Kurds were promised a homeland that would include Mosul and large parts of Turkey—this was actually included in a peace treaty signed with the Ottoman government in 1920, but the Republican government of Kemal Attaturk rejected the treaty for that and other territorial reasons. And the Armenians were also promised, in the same treaty, a large portion of Eastern Turkey. These promises were invalidated when the Turks refused to accept them and went to war with their neighbors to hold or regain the claimed lands. The allies chose to negotiate rather than enforce the Treaty of Sevres, an understandable decision for which the Kurds and the Armenians [aid the price.
And so idealism was cast adrift, in the one instance by the same manipulative diplomacy that caused World War I in the first place and in the second instance by the hesitance to return to combat to enforce the stated ideals of ethnic nationalism. Peace is also an ideal, and war is horrifying; so which ideal is more important, peace or a freedom that self-determination?
But even where promises were fulfilled and new nations came into being, problems arose. Just what is the limit of an ethnic group’s geography? What happens when such territories overlap, where two or three different ethnic groups, each seeking to be part of their broader national group, live side by side? How much territory does it take to establish a functional nation? What happens when deep emotional ties bind one ethnic group to parts of their homeland that now have a predominance of another group?
We are today living with those very questions in some of the same territories that were in dispute in 1918. Today, in the case of Serbia and Kosovo, for example, the field of Kosovo is where the Serbs suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Turks, but like the Alamo in American history is deemed to be nationalistically sacred. And then, during World War I, the Serb nation, facing defeat at the hands of the Austro-Hungarians, gathered as a single people in the same field of Kosovo to decide their fate. They chose to move as a people to march to safe territory. Today, they do not wish to give up that field. It is part of what for them is sacred land.
Conflict in the Balkans was delayed for decades by the creation of a multiethnic state the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later called Yugoslavia. But that did not hold against the call for ethnic nationalism and Bosnia, which finally exploded in the 1990’s, was always a patchwork quilt of ethnic groups.
That kind of ethnic violence is always endemic to human society and was part of several smaller wars in the Balkans just before World War I. But it was encouraged by the idealistic dreams of the allies in World War I. The rhetoric of the victors lives on today in the calls for nationhood of the Basques, the Kurds and the Palestinians. Are their dream legitimate, or to be dismissed? On what basis are they either legitimate or dismissible?
One of the penalties of the British lies to people during World War I was that people promised nationhood are still striving to achieve it, and are using violence to do so.
So what are the lessons of World War I, both national and personal?
I am going to focus on three things: manipulation, vengeance and idealism
First, manipulation: We do that don’t we? We manipulate people. (You don’t, of course, but we do. We manipulate people for sex, power, money, respct.) Actions that aim purely for practical gain, bereft of any connection to basic humanistic values, and seeking short term gains are destined to fail. If as a nation or a people or a person we lie to, cheat or manipulate other people, we may well gain a short term benefit, but we will suffer long term consequences. I believe that the bombings of the London underground and bus system just a few years ago are part of a long chain of events and actions that link back to the British lies to the Arab people during and in the aftermath of World War I. if I as an individual lie cheat or manipulate, I also believe that while I may have short term gain, I will merely set the stage for later problems.
There is something else, however, that is important here.
Divali began on Friday evening. Divali is a Hindu festival of the New Year and of the victory of light over darkness. I was in India, 1971, and was there for the Divali celebration. I was still there shortly afterwards for the war with Pakistan. The conflict was quite a distance from where I was, so I saw none of it. It was the separation of the peoples at the time of independence for India that brought about the most rage and violence, and that in turn engendered even more rage and violence. Communal violence and wars between nations intensify when we decide that “you belong over there and we belong over here”, and the actions that take place then leave long lasting bitterness. It is when we attempt to separate ourselves, it is when we insist upon loyalty to smaller entities, that we bring about the greater likelihood of war and violence. Yugoslavia did not initially experience the kind of ethnic slaughter that it later saw in the 1990’s when separation was in the air.
The leaders of the world in the early part of the last century did not recognize that their focus on ethnic nationalism actually worked countered their hopes for an international order.
The second issue is vengeance: Whether as a nation in our dealings with other people; or as a people in our dealings with groups or individuals within our country, or as individuals interacting with others, vengeance and punishment usually create only more problems.
One of the ideas behind punishment is that the person or people involved will learn their lesson and change their ways. I would ask you whether you think that actually happens. The reality is that most often the people or the person being punished either think to themselves, “Well, I won’t get caught again”; or they think to themselves, “I am the victim here; I will have my revenge; I will punish those who now victimize me and then they will have learned their lesson”. That is what happened in Germany following World War I. The heavy punishment which the allies inflicted upon Germany only engendered the desire for return vengeance. The lesson is that Vengeance merely begets vengeance, and the more severe the punishment the more desire for vengeance there is.
The third lesson is the more difficult for me, and that is the limits of idealism.
Human beings are imperfect, and we have not yet been able to build a perfect society. Because we are imperfect, we need to have some humility about our ideals, to connect our idealism to reality and realism.
The sad truth is that that human efforts to attain perfection fail, either because they end up using inhuman practices—as has been the case in many nations driven by either ideological or theological beliefs—or because people have failed to think through the consequences of unbridled idealism. Among the failed idealisms of thee last century were Stalinist Communism and Fascism, both destructive of human beings and both dismissive of human rights.
If human beings are imperfect and cannot create a perfect system, what hope is there for the future of humankind? How can we fix that which is wrong n the world?
Eastern religions tend to teach acceptance of what is as perfect in its own way. The world does not need our fixing of it, it needs our adapting to it.
In the monotheistic religions at least one strand of belief is that we must wait for God to fix the world and that to believe that we can do so is a form of blasphemy.
Another says that while we may be imperfect, God is not, and with the help of God all things are possible, so we should act, but know that things will happen in god’s time, not in ours.
The Humanist tradition believes that if the world is to improve, it is human beings who will make that happen, but it must be done with respect for human life and for individual rights.
Different people here will draw our viewpoints from those different traditions, but our Unitarian Universalist heritage is one of action, not of acceptance of injustice and not waiting for God or some other divine power to act.
Personally, I do have hope that we can make the world a better place. But when it comes to doing so, whether on a National or a personal level, I believe we must have a sense of humility about our ability to determine what is wrong, about our ability to find a solution and about our ability to enact the solutions we create.
And so my list of lessons learned from World War I, both for the individual and for nations:
1. Do not lie, do not cheat or manipulate others;
2. Maintain connection with your own basic values;
3. Have some humility about the ideals you hold;
4. Think through the consequences of those ideals; and
5. Temper the temptation to impose vengeance with the virtue of magnanimity.
Finally this morning, I am saddened by the failed hopes of 1918 that war was at an end. May it finally be, and be soon, that war does end, that peace fills the world, that peace fills our hearts and the hearts of all people. When peace finally enters into all human hearts, we will no longer need to think keeping ourselves from manipulating others, or about cleansing vengeance from our souls, or stopping the pounding beat of war drums. When peace finally enters into our hearts, when love finally triumphs over self interest and greed, over hatred and oppression, over vengeance and the lust to punish others, then humanity will have triumphed. May that day come soon.
So let it be.
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