 Failed to End,’ “as civil wars overlapped with revolutions, counter-revolutions and border conflicts between emerging states without clearly defined frontiers or internationally recognized governments, ‘post-war’ Europe between the official end of the Great War in 1918 and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 was the most violent place on the planet.” “Well over four million people,” he estimates, “more than the combined wartime casualties of Britain, France and the United States, died as a result of armed conflicts,” with “hundreds of thousands” more civilians, from Beirut to Berlin, starving “as a consequence of the Allied decision to keep up the economic blockade beyond the end of hostilities.”
By the time of the armistice, the ‘Starvation Blockade,’ imposed primarily by the British Royal Navy, had already killed millions, with most German civilians “subsisting,” as Tim Cook notes in his study of Canada’s comparatively well-fed ‘Shock Troops,’ on “800 calories a day, the amount of nutritional energy needed to sustain a three-year-old.” And while the suffering was drastically worsened by the gluttonous demands of the military dictatorship in Berlin, the siege from the outset was designed to destroy vast numbers of infants, children, women, the infirm and the elderly.
In ‘Ring of Steel,’ his landmark study of the German and Austro-Hungarian home fronts, Alexander Watson argues the blockade “placed Britain outside the pre-war moral consensus on how naval warfare should be conducted” and, in its “erosion of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants,” did “more than any other action to radicalize the conflict.” Though British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith claimed in March 1915 “there is no form of economic pressure to which we do not feel ourselves entitled to resort,” American Secretary of State Robert Lansing was right to conclude, in October that year, that “the methods employed by Great Britain … are without justification,” that “the blockade upon which such methods are founded is … illegal and indefensible,” and that “in many cases” British “jurisdiction is asserted in violation of the law of nations.”
And for seven long months after the armistice, as retired British naval officer Nigel Hawkins documents in ‘The Starvation Blockades,’ the siege was imposed on the “socialist and democratic” government in Berlin, creating the “worst famine since the Thirty Years War” (1618-48) and forcing Germany to finally sign the ruinously humiliating Treaty of Versailles.
“If suffering were a communicable experience,” Hawkins quotes Arnold Foster, a British observer in Germany in 1919, “another such blockade would be impossible.” Instead, philosopher Jonathan Glover argues, the blockade shattered “the moral barrier against the mass killing of civilians,” creating a “precedent for the ‘conventional’ bombing of civilians in the Second World War and then for the use of the atomic bomb.”
By November 1918, economist John Maynard Keynes wrote, the “Blockade had become” a perversely “perfect instrument,” “Whitehall’s finest achievement:” its “authors had grown to love it,” it boasted “some recent achievements, which would be wasted if it came to an end,” and “a vast organization had established a vested interest” in its continuation.
The question this November is, do we have a vested interest in a truer, fuller remembrance of the armistice, in confronting what it did and didn’t stop?
Sean Howard is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University and campaign coordinator for Peace Quest Cape Breton.