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Sir Richard Evans , Regius Professor of History and President of Wolfson College Cambridge asks “How can you possibly claim that Britain was fighting for democracy and liberal values when the main ally was Tsarist Russia? That was a despotism that put Germany in the shade and sponsored pogroms in 1903-6.”
He also pointed out that unlike Germany where male suffrage was universal – 40 per cent of those British troops fighting in the war did not have the vote until 1918.
A view from the actual trenches after the famous Xmas truce and football game.
The English officer R.J. Fairhead saw the evil, but not in the soldiers. They just had to fight. In his statement, he strongly attacked the political structure in Europe and looked above the taught national stereotypes.
“Politicians do not listen to those whom they claim to represent and the failure to take notice of the fragile peace declared for that brief period led to the anti-government revolution throughout Europe.”
His learned hatred for the Germans was converted to a general hate for the whole situation and the system which made a war like this possible.
Lieutenant A.P. Sinkinson describes similar experiences:
“As I walked slowly back to our own trenches I thought of Mr. Asquish’s sentence about not sheathing the sword until the enemy be finally crushed. It is all very well for Englishmen living comfortable at home to talk in flowing periods, but when you are out here you begin to realize that sustained hatred impossible.”
Sinkinson saw that Germans were not worse people than himself. Only the people at home, far away from the cruelties, the brutalities, from death and from the war’s real grimace, could keep their hatred.
That the opinion toward the enemies had changed after the truce is emphasized by Westminster Rifle Man Percy. The new experiences he had with the Germans whom he met made him rethink everything he had heard about them. He wrote that:
“They [Germans] where really magnificent in the whole thing [Christmas Truce] and jolly good sorts. I now have a different opinion of the German. Both sides have now started firing, and are deadly enemies again. Strange it all seems, doesn’t it?”
Obviously Percy recognized how surreal the situation was. He started to rethink his attitude toward the Germans but he did not think about stopping fighting them.
After having met the enemy between the trenches, started thinking about all they had read and heard about them.
For many, the former hatred was vanished. They now recognized the soldiers from the other side of the trenches as human as themselves. They were not mercenaries, no inhuman monsters eager for war, just humans. The stereotypes they know from the time before the war and before they met their enemies did not fit after meeting their enemies.
Not all Germans acted like it was described in the newspaper and were not as arrogant as the German Kaiser.
On the other hand not all the English soldiers were mercenaries fighting for material well-being. These soldiers started to reflect their own experiences and started to compare their experiences with what they knew before about their enemies.
The conclusion they made was that their prefabricated picture and the experiences they gained did not fit together. It was hard for the soldiers, faced with the reality of the war, to maintain the black and white propaganda picture.
Workers have NO country.Abolish the wages system and share the world in common with your fellow workers.
Posts
BBC
When will people wake up to the fact that even when the economy booms 90% of us are waged slaves & will remain enslaved to a anarchic system which will crash again. Time for a global democratic, free access, world society where all goods & services , the means of production& distribution are owned in common without government buying,selling nation states, money, wages & ruling class or politicians.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27204797?postId=119345406#comment_119345406
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Stevo said
"Jumping before they are pushed....don't you just want these 'socialists' running the country!"
The Labour party & Left parties aren't 'socialists'.
Socialism is a global democratic, free access, world society where all goods & services , the means of production& distribution are owned in common without government buying,selling nation states money wages & ruling class or politicians.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-27134730?postId=119312053#comment_119312053
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The Guardian 11/04/2014
The majority of people must sell their ability to work in return for a wage or salary.
If you 'have' to do this you are a member of the working class and your interests are diametrically opposed to those of the capitalist class.
The working class are paid to produce goods and services which are then sold for a profit.
All wealth springs from labour applied to natural resources.
Profit is gained by the capitalist class because they can make more money selling what we have produced than we cost to buy on the labour market. In this sense,of waged-slavery, the working class are exploited by the capitalist class.
As long as capitalism exists, profits will always take priority over our real needs. Some workers welcome reforms; some reforms have improved working class conditions, but no reform can abolish that basic contradiction between profits and need.
No matter how well meaning the politicians, nor how colourful their promises, they are bound to fail because they do not control the system – it controls them.
The governments of the world may well introduce a thousand reforms, but we would still continue to live in a world ravaged by starvation, war, homelessness, unemployment, poverty and every other social ill. We would still live in a two class society, with our real needs subordinated to the wishes of a minority. Why campaign for crumbs when the whole bakery is there to be taken?
We need to collectively establish a post capitalist society of global, democratic, free access,socialism,locally,regionally and globally administered by ourselves without classes and solve the problem of distribution,with an organising tenet of "from each according to their ability to each according to their needs".
Banish wage slavery,abolish the wages and prices system and the need for markets.You have a world to win.
http://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/34218210
The Guardian 30/03/14
http://discussion.theguardian.com/comment-permalink/33741517
Surely if we wish to end privilege, we should abolish the system which grants all privileged access to the wealth produced by the majority of the worlds population to the capitalist class.
Work with 'The World Socialist Movement' (Google it), to end the parasitic capitalist social system and work to establish a ,global,democratic,free access society of common ownership and democratic control of all the means and instruments for creating and distributing wealth by and in the interests of the whole population, without the need for,rationing access to the producers in the form of wages and prices.
At a stroke by abolishing the wages system and prices system, we do away with the parasite classes,governments,nation states,figureheads of states,who bring nothing to the production process anyway.Capital is just wealth already plundered by the wages system.
----------------------------------------- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27099700?postId=119280702#comment_119280702
It doesn't matter.Religion is for slaves ."The cry of the oppressed,.. voice of the damned.."Workers have no country but live in a material world which they have yet to win, to share with fellow workers globally on a materialist basis,"From each according to their ability to each according to their needs", in a free access socialist society, which will laugh at the culpability of slavish believers.