The Crime Against Europe: A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914Casement, Roger
History
The Crime Against Europe: A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914
Casement, Roger
Irish question; World War, 1914-1918 -- Causes
Hemmed in by Russia on the East and the new Southern Slav States on
the South-east, with a vengeful France being incited on her Western
frontier to fresh dreams of conquest, Germany sees England preparing
still mightier armaments to hold and close the seaways of the world.
The Canadian naval vote, the Malayan "gift" of a battleship come as
fresh rivets in the chain forged for the perpetual binding of the
seas, or it might more truly be said, for the perpetual binding of the
hands of die German people.
We read in a recent London periodical how these latest naval
developments portend the coming of the day when "the Imperial navy
shall keep the peace of the seas as a policeman does the peace of the
streets. The time is coming when a naval war (except by England), will
be as relentlessly suppressed as piracy on the high seas." (_Review of
Reviews_, December, 1912.)
The naïve arrogance of this utterance is characteristically English.
It is, after all, but the journalistic echo of the Churchill Glasgow
speech, and the fullest justification of the criticism of the
Kreuz Zeitung already quoted. It does not stand alone; it could be
paralleled in the columns of any English paper--Liberal as much as
Conservative--every day in the week. Nothing is clearer than that
no Englishman can think of other nations save in terms of permanent
inferiority. Thus, for instance, in a November (1912) issue of the
_Daily News_ we find a representative Englishman (Sir R. Edgecumbe),
addressing that Liberal journal in words that no one but an Englishman
would dream of giving public utterance to. Sir R. Edgecumbe deprecated
a statement that had gone round to the effect that the Malayan
battleship was not a free gift of the toiling Tamils, Japanese,
Chinese, and other rubber workers who make up, with a few Malays, the
population of that peninsula, but was really the fruit of an arbitrary
tax imposed upon these humble, but indifferent Asiatics by their
English administration.
Far from being indifferent, Sir R. Edgecumbe asserted these poor
workers nourished a reverence "bordering on veneration" for the
Englishman. "This is shown in a curious way by their refusing to
call any European 'a white man' save the Englishman alone. The German
trader, the Italian and Frenchman all are, in their speech coloured
men."
After this appreciation of themselves the English cannot object to the
present writer's view that they are non-Europeans.
Thus while the Eastern question is being settled while I write, by the
expulsion of the Turk from Europe, England, who leads the cry in the
name of Europe, is preparing the exclusion of Europe from all world
affairs that can be dominated by sea power. Lands and peoples held
for centuries by Turkey by a right not less moral than that by which
England has held Ireland, are being forcibly restored to Europe. So be
it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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