Contraband definition ww11/9/2023 In this respect, the British were very much more successful than the Germans, and their masterly portrayal of the "Huns" as the diabolical enemies of civilization, perpetrators of every imaginable sort of "frightfulness," 1 served to mask the single worst example of barbarism in the whole war, aside from the Armenian massacres. The German Kriegssozialismus that became a model for the Bolsheviks on their assumption of power is well known, but, as Vincent points out: "the British achieved control over their economy unequaled by any of the other belligerent states."Įverywhere state seizure of social power was accompanied and fostered by propaganda drives unparalleled in history to that time. … Every sword that is drawn against Germany is a sword drawn for peace." Wells later coined the mendacious slogan "the war to end war."Īs the conflict continued, the state-socialist current that had been building for decades overflowed into massive government intrusions into every facet of civil society, especially the economy. Wells, for instance, gushed: "I find myself enthusiastic for this war against Prussian militarism. The socialist and positivist utopian H.G. While Germans were overcome by an almost mystical sense of community (the economist Emil Lederer declared that now Gesellschaft had been transformed into Gemeinschaft ), the British gave themselves over to their own patented form of cant. Vincent tellingly recreates the atmosphere of jubilation that surrounded the outbreak of the war that was truly the fateful watershed of the twentieth century. Paul Vincent, a trained historian and currently library director at Keene State College in New Hampshire, deserves our gratitude for recalling it to memory in this scholarly and balanced study. (Similarly, who now remembers the tens of thousands of Biafrans starved to death during the war of independence through the policy of the Nigerian generals supported by the British government?) Thus, C. This hunger blockade belongs to the category of forgotten state atrocities of the twentieth century. Seldom, however, can the consequences of such an effort - the obvious immediate results as well as the likely long-range ones - have been as devastating as in the case of the Allied (really, British) naval blockade of Germany in the First World War. States throughout history have persisted in severely encumbering and even prohibiting international trade.
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