The slaughter of the First World War would have been impossible without the indoctrination of nationalism – a notable product of the French revolution – into each schoolboy and reader of newspapers. Novels, like Manzoni's The Betrothed, were deployed in this effort.
There was no rational reason for the war: in 1898, Ivan Bloch, a Russian banker, wrote a book that was published in English as Is War Now Impossible? Yes, he answered, because war was too destructive to be sustainable. In 1909, Norman Angell argued that it was a "great illusion" to think that any industrialised nation could benefit from war. A Lloyd's underwriter told the Committee of Imperial Defence that, were a German ship sunk by the Royal Navy, he would have to pay compensation. "Britain, France and Germany were all industrialised countries with highly educated populations and more or less universal male suffrage," observes Richard Vinen. "Why should states that were so well placed to calculate their interests rationally embark on a war that was to bring such destruction?" Answer: precisely because they had educated populations with the vote, and newspapers, for language does not merely inform, but persuades.
Those who argue that America went to war with Iraq for rational reasons – like oil - are wrong: most wars have been fought for irrational 'reasons' (Yes, Bush sought votes – but the people?). As Vinen said of the Great War: "The fact that the war proved so long and so destructive was the result of the 'sophistication' of western European societies, not the 'primitive' nature of east European ones." Sophistication permitted indoctrination; indoctrination required sacrifice; and sacrifice demanded that millions lay down their lives for 'la patrie', when it would have been rational to surrender or desert, as the bucolic east Europeans did. In fact, there has been a great deal written about the 'cause' of the First World War.
A.J.P. Taylor best summed up the anguish of historians in their fruitless search for 'a cause': "Wars are much like road accidents. They have a general and a particular cause. Every road accident is caused in the last resort by the invention of the internal combustion engine...[But] the police and the courts do not weigh profound causes. They seek a specific cause for each accident - driver's error, excessive speed, drunkenness, faulty brakes, bad road surface. So it is with wars."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
