GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE GIVING WAR A CHANCE, THE NEXT PHASE: THE WAR TO END WAR — THE GREAT WAR “They fight and fight and fight; they are fighting now, they fought before, and they’ll fight in the future.... So you see, you can say anything about world history.... Except one thing, that is. It cannot be said that world history is reasonable.” — Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevski NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND “Fiddle-dee-dee, war, war, war, I get so bored I could scream!” —Scarlet O’Hara “Killing to end war, that’s like fucking to restore virginity.” — Vietnam-era protest poster HDT WHAT? INDEX THE WAR TO END WAR THE GREAT WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1851 October 2, Thursday: Ferdinand Foch, believed to be the leader responsible for the Allies winning World War I, was born. October 2, Thursday: PM. Some of the white Pines on Fair Haven Hill have just reached the acme of their fall;–others have almost entirely shed their leaves, and they are scattered over the ground and the walls. The same is the state of the Pitch pines. At the Cliffs I find the wasps prolonging their short lives on the sunny rocks just as they endeavored to do at my house in the woods. It is a little hazy as I look into the west today. The shrub oaks on the terraced plain are now almost uniformly of a deep red. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE WAR TO END WAR THE GREAT WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE 1914 World War I broke out in the Balkans, pitting Britain, France, Italy, Russia, Serbia, the USA, and Japan against Austria, Germany, and Turkey, because Serbians had killed the heir to the Austrian throne in Bosnia. Austria declared war on Serbia, joining the hostilities that had been going on in the Balkans for two years. Shortly Bulgaria, Portugal, and Romania also joined the fray. Mobilization of the militia of the Isle of Jersey, for home defense. The defunct St. Helena Volunteer Corps was re-established, and the island’s flax industry flourished. Dr. Arnold Chaplin self-published A ST. HELENA WHO’S WHO OR A DIRECTORY OF THE ISLAND DURING THE CAPTIVITY OF NAPOLEON (London: 3 York Gate). ST. HELENA WHO’S WHO Charles Doolittle Walcott identified fossil bacteria in Cryptozoon-like structures (stromatolites). Peyrony discovered the remains of a Neanderthal baby in southwestern France. Because no one appreciated that the bones were Neanderthal, they would not be examined closely and would later be believed lost (they were to be rediscovered and described nearly 90 years later). A note on the humble beginnings of modern aerial warfare: in this year Japanese aviators flying off the decks of converted merchant ships fired their pistols at a lone German aviator circling above Tsingtao. (Practical night-fighting dates to the installation of radar sets on twin-seat Beaufort fighters in 1940. Practical night bombing dates to 1942, when the British started using radio signals to guide Lancasters and Stirlings to the Ruhr. While bombing was certainly possible without such assistance, it was grossly inefficient. One 1946 study conducted by Group Captain F. C. Richardson discovered that just 5% of the bombs dropped by unassisted night bombers were falling within five miles of their intended targets.) During his World War I internment in Budapest as a prisoner of war, Milutin Milanković was able through connections to study undisturbed in the library of the Hungarian Academy of Science and the Central Meteorological Institute. With ample free time and no distractions, he prepared a mathematical explanation of this planet’s long-term climate cycles in terms of changes in the position of the Earth in comparison to the Sun, now known as “Milankovitch cycles.” The Earth’s orbit about Sol is an ellipse rather than a circle, simply because it isn’t the sole planet, or even a very significant one. The gravitational fields of monster planets such as Jupiter and Saturn have a far greater influence, the net effect being that every 413,000 years we find ourselves farther from Sol and receiving less warmth. This factoid provides our 1st real explanation for the “Ice Ages” that have occurred in the geological past of this planet — and offers a forecast of climate changes that are to be anticipated in the future. OUR MOST RECENT GLACIATION HDT WHAT? INDEX THE WAR TO END WAR THE GREAT WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE The Fellowship of Reconciliation was founded as World War I began, pledging to “keep the bonds of Christian love unbroken across the frontier.” CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE Dr. Bernard Weil mobilized into the French army soon after the outbreak of World War I. The family, including André Weil, born in 1906, would move each time he was transferred. SIMONE WEIL During the “Great War” Otto Frank would be serving in the German Army and would reach the rank of lieutenant (later on, he would have occasion to discover that this having been a good soldier wouldn’t really serve to obtain for him or for his family any particular credit as “good Germans” — go figure). ANTISEMITISM ANNE FRANK ESSENCES ARE FUZZY, GENERIC, CONCEPTUAL; ARISTOTLE WAS RIGHT WHEN HE INSISTED THAT ALL TRUTH IS SPECIFIC AND PARTICULAR (AND WRONG WHEN HE CHARACTERIZED TRUTH AS A GENERALIZATION). The War to End War “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX THE WAR TO END WAR THE GREAT WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Welch’s Concord grape Juice has another publicity windfall when Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy, forbade the use of alcoholic beverages aboard Navy ships and suggested instead Welch’s Concord Grape Juice, giving rise to the term, “Daniels’ Grape Juice Navy.” By this point Cadbury’s Dairy Milk had become the firm’s biggest line. During World War I this formerly Quaker firm would proclaim itself in support of its nation’s war effort, entirely disregarding the Quaker Peace Testimony. More than 2,000 of its male employees would enlist in the British armed forces –or so it would brag– and the firm would send books, warm clothes, and of course chocolates to the front lines. The company would augment the Government’s allowances to the Dependants of its workers who had become warriors. At the end of the war the former employees who had become warriors would either be invited to return to their previous jobs, or be sent for education, or be looked after in convalescent homes at company expense. (That the firm was on a morally slippery slope should have been apparent — for during World War II it would become a weapons contractor, and afterward it would brag about such warlike activity.) THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY Marijuana smoking had been appearing in the United States, among laborers in towns along the Mexican border, and was spreading along the Gulf Coast. Between this year and 1931, 29 states, most of them west of the Mississippi, would be prohibiting its nonmedical use. However, this anti-drug legislation would initially receive only limited media attention. US forces occupied Vera Cruz and a fleet arrived off Tampico in consequence of hostile acts by Mexicans. After pressuring the Mexican President to resign, Vesustiano Carranza attempted to supplant him but became engaged in a civil war with one of his former lieutenants, Pancho Villa. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS In the US, 27 state and city laws prohibited the smoking of opium. The federal Harrison Act treated cocaine as more dangerous than opium, classifying it (incorrectly) as a narcotic. Fears over cocaine use, particularly by blacks, had led by this point to regulatory laws in 46 states of the United States of America — whereas only 29 states had enacted such regulatory laws in regard to opiates. In result of this legal situation, cocaine use would become surreptitious, and the substance would be used primarily by bohemians and musicians, and in the urban ghettos. Ostensibly a tax measure designed to control the marketing of opium, this required all persons authorized to handle or manufacture narcotic drugs to register, pay a fee, and keep a record of the drugs in their possession. The act did not prohibit the supply of opiates to users by registered physicians “in the course of their professional practice.” Subsequent Supreme Court decisions and government enforcement policies would, however, restrict the right of doctors to prescribe opiates. HDT WHAT? INDEX THE WAR TO END WAR THE GREAT WAR GO TO MASTER INDEX OF WARFARE Bertrand Russell wrote an article on “The Ethics of War” for The International Journal of Ethics. As has been well expounded by the biographer Ray Monk in BERTRAND RUSSELL: THE SPIRIT OF SOLITUDE (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996, pages 383-4), this was not the pacifist tract one might have expected of “Better Red than Dead” Bertie: WORLD WAR I [Bertrand Russell] told Ottoline before he began the paper: “I don’t think war always wrong.... I think our [Brit] Civil War & the American Civil War were justified on one side. I thing it is always wrong when it is for mere national self-interest. But I find I can’t take Tolstòy’s extreme position.” In fact, the position he took justifies a surprising amount of bloodshed. Categorizing wars into four main types –wars of colonisation, wars of principle, wars of self-defence and wars of prestige– he argued that, when war furthered civilisation it was justified but otherwise not. This, according to him, justified most wars of colonisation and of principle, some wars of self-defence (those against an inferior civilisation), but no wars of prestige.