ible,” 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.