French politicians spoke about their “civilising mission” in Algeria. This was a monstrous lie. In 1834 a French general reported that virtually all the native population could read and write, with schools for boys and girls in each village. A century later only a quarter of the Muslim population could read Arabic. Less than one in ten could read French.
(...) [Setif:] But now the settlers wanted to assert their power. Large numbers of troops were brought in, including Senegalese soldiers, who unfortunately did not make common cause with the local population... Probably at least 15,000 died, though some claim as many as 50,000. Even on the lowest estimate, the Europeans killed 50 Muslims for every European life lost.

lecture 15, "the home front"
john merriman

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1917 and 1918--the mutinies.

the mutinies have to be seen in the context of all this, but in particular they have to be seen in the context of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, which was the darkest period in four years of dark days.

began on July 1st, 1916--on the first day, almost 40,000 British soldiers were wounded, 20,000 were killed. there was a casualty for every half-meter of the front line. there were more British soldiers killed in the first three days of this battle than there were Americans killed in WWI, Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq combined(!). those are phenomenal losses.

it's easy, perhaps, to poke fun at Oxbridge class society--but, in WWI, the flower of British youth perished in these battles.

1917 is the crucial year in determining the outcome of a war that seemed like it was going to go on forever. by the end of 1917 and into March 1918, the military planners begin to think that they'll win the war by 1920, 1921. as so many people died, to win a few kilometers, there were wags who said we'll reach the Rhine by 2007(!).

but two things happen in 1917, that are crucial.

(1) Bolshevik Revolution, after the February 1917 overthrow of the Tsar--people wake up and discover that the Emperor has no clothes. Kerensky's provisional government keeps Russia in the war. But by October the Bolshevik's take power, and withdraws Russia from the war by March 1918 at the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (there was a deceleration in the war effort before this; and there were any way quite a number of desertions, though less than you might have thought.) (2) the other thing that happens is that the Americans enter the war. they were officially neutral, though the majority of the population supported the Allies, but it's not really that that brings the US into the war. the German High Command had decided that the only way they could win was to knock Britain out of the war. and the way they were going to do that was to sink ships supplying munitions, etc. to the British (a submarine campaign). they placed warnings at ports in US and Philadelphia. sunk the Lusitania on her maiden voyage on 1915, killing 1,200 civilians. (in the 1960s/1970s divers found that the ship was carrying munitions, and that was the German claim). over the long run, the man that was going to keep the US out of the war, Woodrow Wilson, ends up taking the US into WWI (despite widespread domestic opposition--Wilson couldn't get the Treaty of Versailles ratified by Congress, after returning home).

what did the entry of the Americans really mean? not so much troops--troops don't really make the difference, really. the big difference is that the curves cross--the ability of the Germans to supply their own war-machine cannot compete with the combined power of American industrial might. factories easily transformed into the production of arms. and it's at that point when many people in the French and British High Command realize that they will win the war--though they're still unsure at what cost.

all this helps set up March 1918, when the Germans decide that "it's now or never"

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what about the mutinies?

most people in France did not want war in 1914. but because it was easy to portray Germany as the aggressors, the vast majority of the population recognized the urgency of the fight.

to be sure, there are tensions within French society re: the war. there was tremendous resentment. at the Opera, they distributed coal as per rations--as people waited in line, they saw the fancy people in their big cars going off to the restraunts (people who had profited tremendously from Big Business' role in war). so there is class tension fueled by the War.

more than that, you have tensions felt by peasants, who are conscripted without any real possibility of refusing (unless they've already had two brothers killed!).

you have refugees, as well--refugees from the North (sometimes even German-speaking, and Flemish), settling in other areas, as a strain on local resources. you have grumbling, then, about these "Germans" of the North.

many women and men also go on strike in 1917 (689 strikes, affecting 300,000 workers--as compared to 98 strikes in 1916)--not defeatist strikes, but they're agitating for better conditions. why should you work in terrible conditions when the "Big Hats" are simply getting more wealthy?

there are attempts to break these strikes.

but, in sum, 1917 is a year when morale on the home front is lower than ever. (prof just noting that conditions are worse in Berlin than they are in Paris; better in London than in either place)

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what about the mutinies? how serious?

there were probably only two totally reliable divisions standing between Paris and the Germans, after these mutinies.

nobody on the home front really knew about them (part of this is that letters sent home were censored, remember). nor did the Germans, nor did the British.

it's not too hard to say why these mutinies take place when they do. or why they take place at all. it is not defeatism, but these tactics of trench warfare were killing hundreds of thousands of people for nothing--for no reason. there isn't any hope, in this sense.

the mutinies were, indeed, widespread--refusals to "go over the top" simply spread like wirefire. soldiers say they don't want to get killed any more for five cents a day (in some places red flags go up--in some places black flags). though remember socialists had joined the war effort (jules guesde ends up a minister in 1915).

two regiments decide that they're going to march on Paris, and convince the Chamber of Deputies to stop the war. most of the Generals foolishly claim Bolshevik propaganda behind this.

in May and June about 40,000 soldiers were involved in collective acts of refusal (other statistic goes as high as 70,000). the first signs that the soldiers supposed to go "over the top" started ba-ing like sheep on their way to the slaughterhouse. there was socialist and anarchist literature that had gotten into the trenches, but it was obviously not a Bolshevik conspiracy.

a General ends the policy of these mad attacks, over the tops. there were some people who were put up against the wall and shot, for sure, but we don't know. there were 3427 condemnations--about 10% of the people who were court-martialed. 49 were condemned to death, which were carried out immediately.

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in the Spring of 1918, the Germans launch a major offensive (Ludendorf Offensive)--their first since 1914.

at the same time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire is having all sorts of problems (Franz Joseph I, Emperor-King since 1867, dies in 1916). all the predictable cracks are opening up--the Germans are quite unsure whether the Austrian-Hungarian Empire will be able to hang on, fighting against the Italians, for example.

the Americans have, by the Spring of 1918, 325,000 soldiers.

so Ludendorf decides on a massive offensive. encouraged by the fact that there are younger soldiers, barely 18, that have newly arrived in the ranks. and older troops have arrived, as well. so on the 21st of March, 1918, after a relatively brief bombardment of 5 hours, 1.6 million men attack the allied defenses in five separate offenses across a front of 40 miles. and they do break through--some pass 40 miles to the other side.

on Easter Sunday, shells fall on Paris, and they begin taking lives.

but what happens, is predictable. as on a small scale, the Germans begin to outrun their cover and supplies. they begin to encounter stiff resistance at all of these five points. in July, they try a final offensive, they fail, and know that they're simply not going to win.

at that point, morale plunges dangerously in Germany. in January 1918, 250,000 workers had anyway defined the government by going on strike. in July, the British, French, Americans counter-attack quite effectively, using tanks. on the 8th of August, 1918, the German army's darkest day, a British force moves 8 miles(!). at this point, Ludendorf tells Wilhem II that "it's all over but the shouting."

and, at the end, Willhelm the II will slink over the Dutch border, and sign an armistice in a railroad car north of Paris. the war ends on the 11th of November, 1918 (people were killed, afterward, because they didn't know that the armistice had come along).

and, alas, the Spanish Flu comes on the tail of the War. the biggest pandemic since the Black Death.

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the statistics, which are simply staggering:

Russia (1.8 million dead, 5 million wounded--nothing like WWII, of course, when 25 million died)
France (at least 1.4-1.5 million dead, 4.3 wounded)
British, including the Empire (908,000 dead, 2 million wounded)
Italy (508,000 dead)
Serbia (208,000 dead)
Belgium (38,000 dead)

Germany (2 million dead, 4 million wounded--how do you explain losing this many and losing the war? well that's something that the Right would latch on to, in the war's aftermath. it was the socialists, of course)
Austria-Hungary (1.1 million dead, 3.6 million wounded)

in France, there are 36,000 communes, and there were only 12 that didn't have somebody killed. that's why you see war memorials everywhere.

"if God exists, how could he let this happen?"

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culture conundrum:
Ever since the early 19th century, culture or civilisation has been the opposite of barbarism. Behind this opposition lay a kind of narrative: first you had barbarism, then civilisation was dredged out of its murky depths. Radical thinkers, by contrast, have always seen barbarism and civilisation as synchronous. This is what the German Marxist Walter Benjamin had in mind when he declared that "every document of civilisation is at the same time a record of barbarism". For every cathedral, a pit of bones; for every work of art, the mass labour that granted the artist the resources to create it. Civilisation needs to be wrested from nature by violence, but the violence lives on in the coercion used to protect civilisation - a coercion known among other things as the political state.

mamdani on islam:
The public debate that followed 9/11 was defined by two prominent semi-official intellectuals, Samuel Huntington of Harvard University and Bernard Lewis of Princeton University. As in every debate, their disagreement unfolded within a common frame. The ground they shared has come to define political “common sense” in the United States. This common sense is driven by a presumption that the world we live in is divided in two: between those modern and those pre-modern. It is said that those modern make their culture; they have a reflexive attitude to it; they can separate the good from the bad, build on the good and correct the bad; their culture develops historically; and the story of that historical development is what we call progress. The pre-modern peoples, in contrast, are said to be born into a culture; they are said to have a tendency to internalize their culture rather than have a critical attitude to it. Rather than make their culture historically, they seem condemned to live it uncritically, and content to pass it on from one generation to another. Pre-modern peoples are said to wear culture as a badge, or to suffer from it, like a twitch, even a fever. That fever used to be thought of as tropical, now it is more likely to be imagined as desert fever. Prior to 9/11, Africans were considered the quintessentially pre-modern people; now the characterization is more likely to be use with regard to Muslims. It is said that except for a founding prophetic moment and some monuments, Muslims tend to live their culture as a destiny. The claim is that you can read the politics of Muslims from their culture.
(...) The Iraq war was supposed to be a realization of this inspiration. It was said that once bad Muslim were overthrown good ones would rise to the occasion, as indeed Eastern Europeans had done; they would garland American soldiers and that would be the dawn of democracy in Iraq. But, lo and behold, the history of Iraq since 2003 is testimony to thousands, even millions, of so-called good Muslims turning bad overnight. Anybody who followed the public discussion in the US about good and bad Muslims soon realized that good and bad were not adjectives describing the attitude of Muslims to Islam. They were actually adjectives describing Muslim attitudes to Western power. They were not cultural adjectives; they were political adjectives.
(...)This, then, is my first point: all culture, like all politics, is historical; all, without exception. It is not a particularly profound point. Rather, it is simple, and should be obvious, but is not. One would have thought this was settled with the struggle against colonialism. That it is not shows that the power of ideas does not simply flow from their internal consistency and explanatory power, but also from their relationship to the world of power.
(...) There is also no doubt of the existence of political Islam, nor about the
existence of a tendency in political Islam – called jihadi Islam – that has embraced political violence as the way to change the world. So is culture unimportant? I don’t think so. What I want to dispense with is not the notion of culture but the idea that the culture of some peoples is historical and that of other peoples is not. I simply think that culture has to be understood historically.
(...) When I read Sayyid Qutb’s book, Signposts, I was struck by the kind of
resonance it produced in a person like me, that is, one who came of political age in the 1960s and 70s. Sayyid Qutb says in the introduction to Signposts that he wrote this for the Islamist vanguard; I thought I was reading a version of Lenin’s What is to be Done. And when I read the text and encountered Sayyid Qutb’s main argument that you must make a distinction between friends and enemies, because with friends you use persuasion and with enemies you use force, I thought I was reading Mao Zedong on the correct handling of contradictions amongst the people.
(...) Are we to accept Huntington’s and Bernard Lewis’ contention that the history of thought is best understood as developing inside containers called civilizations; one Islamic, another Hindu, another Confucian, another Christian?
(...) Was not Mawdudi’s disillusionment with Islam as a social project and his embrace of a statist project part of a larger shift that had occurred in different types of nationalism, religious and secular? Was not Sayyid Qutb’s embrace of political violence in line with a growing romance with armed struggle in movements of national liberation in the ‘50s and ‘60s – many driven by a presumption that armed struggle was not only the most effective form of struggle but also the only genuine mode of struggle? The fact is that both Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb were involved in multiple conversations: they were in a debate not only with Islamic intellectuals, whether contemporaries or of previous generations, but also with contending intellectuals anchored in other modes of political thought. And the main competition then was Marxism-Leninism, a militantly secular ideology which influenced both their language and their method of organization and struggle.
(...) We may be able to speak before 1491 of civilizations as separate containers, with transactions at their borders, but no longer after 1491. Globalization begins with modern colonialism, for modern colonialism break the levies of cultural life. Even if European intellectuals – those born and working in European languages – could continue to function exclusively in European languages and think of the European experience as universal, this luxury was not available to intellectuals from the colonized world. For the colonized intellectual, it became a matter of necessity, indeed of survival, to function in languages other than one’s native tongue. The colonized intellectual had no choice but to go universal, which meant to work in more than one family of languages, and become immersed in a deterritorialized culture. We need to distinguish between culture and politics. Politics is overwhelmingly territorial, as in the expression geopolitical. But not culture. The rupture between culture and territory has always been there, but it has been particularly radical since 1491.
(...) Both were non-religious intellectuals; Mawdudi was a journalist; Sayyid Qutb
was a literary critic. It is worth noting the fact that none of the key intellectuals of contemporary political Islam – from al-Afghani to Mawdudi to Said Qutb to Ali Shariati in Iran – have come from the religious domain. In this they resemble key intellectuals that have shaped contemporary political Hinduism, even political Zionism. How does one explain this? To understand why it was so easy for non-religious intellectuals in Islam to come into the religious domain, we have to understand that we were dealing with a religion organized differently from Christianity. Western Christianity, particularly Catholicism, has historically been organized on the model of the Roman empire; and Protestantism has been organized on the model of the nation state. There is an institutionalized hierarchy of power inside the Church, from the floor to the ceiling. Organized power in institutionalized religion has historically functioned parallel to organized power in the state. Part of the question of secularism in the West has been that of policing the line of demarcation between two different powers, in the state and in the Church.
There is no such religious hierarchy in Sunni Islam. There is only the prayer leader, not even a priesthood. In spite of attempts by states to create a hierarchy from the top-down there really isn’t one. This was also true of Shi’a Islam until the creation of vilayat-i-faqih by Ayatollah Khomeini. I think of Ayatollah Khomeini’s innovation as preemptive, as a safeguard against intellectuals from the secular domain, intellectuals like Ali Shariati. We may also note that Ayatollah Khomeini’s innovation is no longer universally accepted in Shia Islam. The most,prominent challenge has come from Ayatollah Sistani, who has argued for religious leaders to
function as a moral presence outside the state, and not as a political force in the state.
(...) Bigotry, however, is not blasphemy. Blasphemy is the practice of questioning a tradition from the inside. In contrast, bigotry is an assault on that tradition from the outside. If blasphemy is an attempt to speak truth to power, bigotry is the reverse: an attempt by power to instrumentalize truth. I have argued that a defining feature of the cartoon debate is that bigotry is being mistaken for blasphemy.
(...) Blasphemy was aimed at the Church as an institutional
power, which is why it is more of a European than an American tradition. I have already pointed out that institutionalized religion in medieval Europe was organized as a form of hierarchical power, with an authority from the floor to the ceiling. No earthly place symbolized the Church as an institutionalized power more than Calvin’s Geneva. Every act was governed by rigid spiritual rule: drunkards, dancers and adulterers were excommunicated; a child who struck his parents was beheaded; and men and women who transgressed Calvin’s code were burnt at the stake. R. H. Tawney wrote of it as “a city of glass, in which every household lived its life under the supervision of a spiritual police.” In this context, blasphemy was a weapon against religiously-sanctioned terror.
(...) The problem, according to this point of view, is
that the laws reflect the cultural sensibility of particular countries in a particular historical period, so that blasphemy laws tend to protect the state religion only, such as Anglicanism in England and Lutheranism in Denmark. Europe also has laws against certain forms of bigotry, particularly anti-Semitism. In England, the net is cast a little wider. The Race Relations Act prohibits the use of a language which would incite racial hatred. But it has yet to prohibit the incitement of hatred against groups defined culturally and religiously. Tariq Modood has pointed out that it has not even been 15 years since Britain’s Commission on Racial Equality denied that the vilification of Muslims was a form of racism. In France, laws limit or outlaw debates on certain issues. It is a crime to deny the Holocaust. But French law also makes it compulsory for schools to teach that colonialism was beneficial for those who were colonized.
(...) What is striking about the Dworkin piece is its silence about hate speech and bigotry and how to confront it. Ask yourself: what, after all, is the rationale for criminalizing Holocaust Denial? Clearly, not free speech. Rather, it is the more urgent imperative for peaceful coexistence between Christians and Jews in post-Holocaust Europe. Let us remember that the very notion of a Judeo-Christian civilization is mainly a post-Holocaust political project. Prior to the Holocaust, mainstream politics did not hyphenate Judaism with Christianity, but opposed one to the other.
(...) My sense is that we are now entering a period where Islamophobia is maturing into an ideology of hate, a grand ideology driven by a core explanation of what is wrong with the world: hence the growing claim that there is a clash of civilizations. The clash of civilizations is, in turn, the ideological arm of the war on terror. This is why it is particularly significant that when the Danish cartoons met with protests, the response was to up the ante from that of defense of free speech to a defense of civilization.

on third world theories of imperialism (thomas hodgkin):
[along what lines have these theorists criticised the presuppositions of western imperial historians and apologists in general?] ...against the classic Western (particularly Western missionary) thesis that imperialism has meant the substitution of ´civilised´for ´barbarous´ systems of government, society, values, etc., these theorists asserted the antithesis that imperialism has in fact meant the destruction of valid African, or non-Western, civilisations and the substitution of new forms of Western barbarism. (103)
(...) A second element in this reinterpretation of the civilisation/barbarism antithesis is the proposition that there is no necessary connection between the level of a people´s technological development and the quality of its civilisation. This is, essentially, the cultural relativist view, which Blyden did much to foster, that terms such as ´higher´and ´lower´can be applied to levels of technological or economic development but not to civilisations that no set of criteria exists on the basis of which one can rationally argue that the civilisation of the French bourgeoisie under the their republic was qualitatively superior to, say, the civilisation of the Segu empire under Ahmadu Shehu... This view can be pushed further and developed into a Narodnik theory of the nastiness and undesirability of ´high´ civilizations in general [see Emile Faure] (105)
(...) [How far do the dominant ideas of these African and third-world theorists fit with the broad lines of Marxist, and more specifically Leninist, theory?] One [of 4 themes of disagreement/contributions] is their emphasis on the communal, anti-capitalist (and not merely precapitalist), cooperative, democratic, fraternal values and institutions of African, or non-Western, precolonial societies, ´systematically destroyed by imperialism´; their rejection of theories which assert or imply the idea of unilinear progress from ´lower´to ´higher´stages of social organisation, and thus of those interpretations (or distortions or vulgarisations?) of Marxism which fall within this category. [see Aimé Césaire] (109-110)
(...) A second theme is the notion of the dehumanising effects of imperialism on the colonised societies and the reimportation of the ideas and attitudes and institutions and techniques which have been used by the bourgeoisie of the colonising countries to impose and maintain their domination over the colonised into the metropolitan societies for use against their own people. This idea, of the specially corrupting effects of imperialism on the social and political life of the imperialists, was of course present and important in Marx and his successors... But for third-world theorists like Césaire and Fanon the idea of the terrible feedback effects of imperialism has a new and pivotal significance. (111)
(...) A third theme is the idea of a necessary, continuing, irreconcilable antagonism (in the context of a world in which imperialism remains a dominant force) between the interests of the advanced, Western, and predominantly ´white´, colonising societies and the interests of the proletarian, non-Western, and predominantly ´non-white, colonial and semicolonial societies. In a sense this means taking the contradiction between the imperialist countries and the colonial peoples and insisting that it has priority over all other contradictions, blurring (from a more ´orthodox´ Marxist point of view) the internal contradictions within both colonising and colonised societies. Thus Sultan Galiyev argued that ´since almost all classes in Muslim society have been oppressed formerly by the colonialists, all are entitled to be called proletarian... The Muslim peoples are proletarian peoples.´
(...) Towards the [Leninist conception of the essential interdependence of the interests of the working classes in the advanced capitalist countries and the exploited masses in the colonial and semicolonial countries]...these third-world theorists have tended to take up and attitude of methodical doubt... [expressing] a belief in the necessity for the colonial and former colonial peoples of the world to recover the historical initiative, and for the direction, character, pace and methods of change within the third world to be primarily their responsibility, not the responsibility of even the most radical or revolutionary sectors of the populations of the advanced countries; a new emphasis on the importance of the idea of creating wider alliances among the peoples of the third world. (113)
[in Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, eds. Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe, 1972]