The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their StrifeCarpenter, Edward
History
The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife
Carpenter, Edward
World War, 1914-1918
It is this Class-disease which in the main drags the nations into the
horrors and follies of war. And the horrors and follies of war are the
working out and expulsion on the surface of evils which have long been
festering within. How many times in the history of "civilization" has a
bigoted religious clique, or a swollen-headed military clique, or a
greedy commercial gang--caring not one jot for the welfare of the people
committed to its charge--dragged them into a senseless and ruinous war
for the satisfaction of its own supposed interests! It is here and in
this direction (which searches deeper than the mere weighing and
balancing of Foreign policies and Diplomacies) that we must look for the
"explanation" of the wars of to-day.
And even race wars--which at first sight seem to have little to do with
the Class trouble--illustrate the truth of my contention. For they
almost always arise from the hatred generated in a nation by an alien
class establishing itself in the midst of that nation--establishing
itself, maybe, as a governmental or dominant class (generally a military
or landlord clique) or maybe as a parasitical or competing class (as in
the case of the Jews in Europe and the Japanese in America and so
forth). They arise, like all other wars, from the existence of a class
within the nation which is not really in accord with the people of that
nation, but is pursuing its own interests apart from theirs. In the
second of the following papers, "The Roots of the Great War," I have
drawn attention to the influence of the military and commercial classes,
especially in Germany, and the way in which their policy, coming into
conflict with a similar policy in the other Western nations, has
inevitably led to the present embroilment. In Eastern Europe similar
causes are at work, but there the race elements--and even the
religious--constitute a more important factor in the problem.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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