Conservative revisionism of WW1

This is half political and half historical, but thought i would stick it in here.

Its mainly UK based, but opinions from around the globe are, of course, welcome.

The Education secretary in the UK, Michael Gove, amongst other conservatives, have called for a reappraisal of how the first world war is viewed in contemporary Britain. They say that the prevailing view of "lions led by donkeys" and that the war was a waste of life cheapens the sacrifice made by the millions of servicemen who lost their life. He also claims that these left wing myths clear Germany of blame.

This is set against the contemporary view of the first world war, which is perhaps best summarised by black adder (watch an episode if you have not yet done so, as its quite revealing about British psychology in regards to the first world war). Basically it amounts to mocking the war as totally futile and enhances the view that the military leadership were moronic, aloof, and lived totally separate existences from the lives of the soldiers.

So i suppose the question is: "Is world war 1 due a revision in contemporary thought"?

My answer would be categorically "no"!

I have a problem with this view advanced by the likes of Gove that we in Britain were fighting for good reasons, and others were fighting for bad reasons. I believe quite sincerely that combatants on all sides: German, French, Russian, British etc were all fighting for a perceived sense of freedom. The debating point then comes down to whether the freedom they thought they were fighting for was real or not. Gove clearly thinks Britains was real, and the Germans, Austrians and Turks was not. In Goves world, he wishes to enhance the legacy of all the British soldiers that were killed by blackening the legacy of all the central powers soldiers. I actually find this morally reprehensible. I simply dont think it adds up. Its dubious if we were really engaged in a conflict that was much more moral than that of germany. Germany wanted its main ally of Austria to be territorally and politically secure against the balkan states, and in particular Serbia. It also felt threatened itself by the alliance of russia and France (Russia being an Autocratic monarchy at the time). Why did Britain go to war? Over the violation of Belgian neutrality! Is 21 million servicemen dead on all sides a price worth paying for any of these reasons? My answer is an indefatigable no!

I also resent the charge that I might be unpatriotic in prosecuting this view. I would even go as far to say that perhaps i love my country more than Mr Gove, because i dont want to see 1 million of my fellow countrymen lose their lives to a war that essentially achieved nothing, and led as a direct consequence to the horrors of the second world war.

I think the first world war is a human tragedy shared by all. It is not up to me and certainly not a politician to play politics with the past and try to revise established views. The appalling cost suffered by all sides is the only memory that people should take away with them. All that is left to those who are left behind, and i include current generations in this equation, is to ensure that it never ever happens again.

WWI is due for historical revisionism, but certainly not because it is lacking in black and white thinking, on the contrary.

Both sides had democracies and dictatorships. Both sides engaged in ethnic cleansing. And so on.

THIS ROW ISN’T REALLY ABOUT THE FIRST WORLD WAR



Somehow, the First World War has come alive. Suddenly, everyone in Britain seems to have strong views about its causes, meaning and the way it is taught in schools and represented by the entertainment industry.

Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, is certain that the Germans started the war. Michael Gove, the Conservative secretary of state for education, concurs, insisting that the ‘ruthless social Darwinism of the German elites’ and their ‘aggressively expansionist war aims’ made ‘resistance more than justified’. Gove, who believes Britain fought a ‘just war’ back in 1914, has denounced ‘left-wing academics’ and cynical TV shows like Blackadder for mocking Britain’s role in the conflict.

The Labour Opposition has dutifully done what it always does – attack Gove. Labour’s shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt, said in response to Gove that ‘few imagined that the Conservatives would be this crass’. He also reminded his opposite number that the left played an honourable role in the Great War. Labour activist Sir Tony Robinson, who played Baldrick in Blackadder, also joined the fray, accusing Gove of ‘slagging off teachers’.

Hunt claims Gove is using history for political ends. No doubt he is right. However, Hunt himself, and other Labour-supporting critics of Gove, fail to acknowledge their own complicity in the politicisation of the current debate on the meaning of the First World War. When they depict Gove’s attack on media cynicism about the war as just another example of him ‘slagging off teachers’, what they’re really doing is continuing today’s education debate under the guise of talking about the past.

...That is why we need to take a step back and explore the Great War as an historical event that needs to be understood in the context of its own time. Otherwise we are in danger of confusing the present with the past, and losing an opportunity to understand what is unique about our own world.

This is why I was pleased to hear that spiked’s editor Brendan O’Neill is commissioning a series of major essays on the First World War for this centenary year. The first, by me, will be published on spiked tomorrow, and will ask why we only seem capable of seeing the war as little more than incomprehensible slaughter.

The problem with WW1 is that the public view is derived entirely from watching Blackadder which is a comedy programme and has no reason to be truthful. Whenever the topic comes up someone says "lions led by donkeys" and everybody nods ther heads and agrees. The general view is a cariciture, it isn't very helpful.

I don't know enough about the conflict, or the way it is taught to make a judgement on whether its being departed in a politicised way in schools but I think any debate is good debate. Thats exactly what history is all about.

Quackers said:

The problem with WW1 is that the public view is derived entirely from watching Blackadder which is a comedy programme and has no reason to be truthful. Whenever the topic comes up someone says "lions led by donkeys" and everybody nods ther heads and agrees. The general view is a cariciture, it isn't very helpful.

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I don't know where you're getting the idea that Blackadder Goes Forth, a series which didn't air until 1989, introduced this narrative to a general audience. Aside from anything else, it's not really clear to me how a sit-com introducing a previously-marginal interpretation of the war should have become popular enough for that interpretation to become widely accepted. As you say, it's not as if sit-coms are generally taken as sound historical authorities.

edit: Doubly confusing, when I think about it, given that Blackadder doesn't even really depict "lions lead by donkeys", because while Melchett certainly fits the stereotype of the "donkey", of the "lions" only the naive George is consistently enthusiastic about the conflict, and in the final episode finds his patriotic courage waning rapidly when faced with the prospect of being machine-gunned to bits. Darling is basically indifferent to the war beyond the edge of his desk, while Baldrick and Blackadder are actively hostile to the whole business, consistently attempting to shirk their patriotic duties out of self-preservation. Flasheart could be seen as a "lion", but he's also a testosterone-drenched aristocratic sociopath, hardly a sympathetic portrayal. If anything, Blackadder is very much a post-"lions" portrayal of the war, which could only have been produced by a generation which didn't carry its predecessors' uncritical attachment to an idealised image of the noble Tommy. It required that the image of "lions lead by donkeys" was already popularly understood, so that it could take the piss out of it.

The way I read it Mr Gove's and his colleague's plan is to
celebrate the centenary of the outbreak of WW1 to:

(a) undermine the campaign for Scots independence, by stressing
what England and Scotland achieved together

(b) to capture votes from potential defectors to the UKIP,
by appearing super-patriotic

(c) reconcile the general public to health rationing and job experience
conscription, by comparing current developments with something far worse

And it provides them with the oportunity which they cannot resist to:

(d) swipe at liberal democrats

(e) swipe at so called lefties and the blob


I have the feeling that it will merely annoy other countries and
that there may ultimately be an economic price to pay for that.

Frankly I would very much prefer to wait four years and
celebrate the armistice's centenary in November 2018.

I am unclear how the notion of military leaders being idiots helps to understand the "meaning" of the war. Or is it some sort of allegory? I.e. just as the fighting itself was pointless because the generals were donkeys the whole war was pointless because the political leaders were donkeys...?

It's a shame that the incredible amount of attention given to the subject in Britain hasn't translated over to the US very well. The Great War is kind of my pet topic, and I'd love to have an opportunity to talk about it at more length.

On one level, the Furedi piece that Glassfan put up is correct: the debate really didn't start as a historical debate at all. Gove and the other members of the Conservative establishment are openly using the war's outbreak to try to score political points, and their critics are more or less staying within that already-framed debate. Does anybody seriously think that Gove is conversant in, say, the Sonderweg argument, or that he's looked at any of the scholarship on the actions of Sir Edward Grey? Of course not. One might seriously doubt his ability to be conversant in any scholarly discussion at all.

It's not wrong to say, as Furedi does, that the matter of the outbreak of the war is still under serious debate. Broadly speaking, there are two main camps into which historians might fall. The first is a sort of neo-Fischerite group, which clings to the thesis that Fritz Fischer advanced back in the 1960s: that the war was the product of German aggression, a sort of "grab for world power" (Griff nach der Weltmacht), and that other concerns were secondary. The other is decidedly more inchoate, but the historians in it tend to emphasize the roles of other powers in starting the war as no less culpable than Germany, to point out the flaws in Fischer's argument, and to shift the terms of the debate from seeking blame to showing how and why the war happened.

Both schools are represented in recent publications, as well. Max Hastings, a British historian of the Second World War, recently published Catastrophe 1914, which follows Fischer in laying the blame entirely at Germany's feet. On the other side of the discussion, we have historians like Christopher Clark (The Sleepwalkers), Sean McMeekin (The Russian Origins of the First World War; July 1914), and Hew Strachan (The First World War Part I: To Arms) who bring up alternative interpretations.

The problem is that scholarship isn't just about how many people publish in favor of a given interpretation. It's also about whether those interpretations logically follow from the evidence, and whether they make use of all the evidence at a historian's fingertips. Signally, the neo-Fischerite school tends to ignore either the former point or the latter one. Fritz Fischer's studies delved to considerable depth into German politics and policy; his goal was to show that the exigencies of domestic politics brought Germany's leaders to a point at which they considered a war of world conquest a legitimate option. What Fischer, and his epigones, failed and fail to demonstrate is a causative link between German domestic policy and German foreign policy. And what they failed to notice are the far more plausible and demonstrable connections between domestic and foreign policy in Austria-Hungary, Russia, Britain, Serbia, and even France.

People like Gove and even Furedi can plausibly point out that a debate exists. There are certainly historians in this day and age who are willing to focus blame on Germany as the primary, be-all end-all cause of the First World War. But even though these people aren't exactly the Holocaust deniers of the profession (or even the Daniel Goldhagens) their argument still rests on academically unsupportable grounds. This doesn't really matter to the average politician, news reader, or voter. They don't care about things like pre-mobilizations, blank checks, Zustand der drohenden Kriegsgefahr, or the Period Preparatory to War. Those are issues of grave importance to the historical topic, but nobody who hasn't spent a big chunk of her life studying the July Crisis would or should know about them.

Another key reason is the usual lag between scholarship and public perception. Back in the 1960s, all the big-time books that were published were about how Germany started the war, as a sort of push-back against the "flaccid" notion that the whole war was an accident. Barbara Tuchman won a Pulitzer Prize for it; she combined an insistence that statesmen retain control of a given crisis with a clear effort to lay the onus of beginning the war on Germany and Germany (virtually) alone. The Guns of August remains a perennially well-read book. Hell, it was famously recommended by JFK. At the same time, in West Germany, Fischer and his disciples kicked off one of the biggest and most contentious historical debates in history, armed with the rather unfair advantage of claiming that anybody who denied German culpability in the war was basically justifying Hitler - as though 1939 had caused 1914, instead of the other way around. They obviously won the argument. It takes time for scholarship to leak out into everyday discourse like that. You'll still find people defending Tuchman's book as history on this very forum.

"Revisionism" is an awfully loaded word to throw around in popular discourse. When applied to history, it often has extremely negative connotations: we already figured out what this thing meant, and now these historians are trying to change it around and make a new story out of it. That complaint doesn't even make sense, for one thing. As people discover new information, or come up with new ways of looking at the evidence, of course a given "story" should change. You change theories to suit facts, not facts to suit theories. Not every new historical interpretation is a nefarious conspiracy to change the past. This isn't to say that such "conspiracies" don't exist - again, look at the Holocaust deniers. But Holocaust deniers are wrong because they ignore facts and rely on implausible explanations for the ones they don't ignore, not because their interpretation lends itself to uncomfortable implications.

And it's not really like you can claim that the, uh, "anti-Fischerites" have invented some new history that nobody back in the day saw. One of the works most consistently praised by the likes of Clark or McMeekin is Luigi Albertini's three-volume history of the July Crisis. Albertini had barely finished the books when he died in 1941, and they were published in 1943. The series was based on an exhaustive search of the evidence at hand, combined with personal interviews of many of the participants. Although Albertini didn't exactly anticipate something like the aforementioned "Period Preparatory to War", he amassed a vast collection of facts, discarded most of the ones that were obviously misinformation from national archivists, and then explained those facts in a coherent and consistent way without emphasizing blame for any particular party. Even though the book was published during the war in an Axis country, you can't really say that Albertini was trying to exculpate Italy's ally Germany, because Albertini was an ardent anti-fascist who left politics when Mussolini came to power. Of course, Albertini has never been a household name; his book is massive, for Chrissakes, and his English translators certainly didn't do him any favors.

Gove's goal, obviously, is to draw a pat lesson from the war and make a play for British national sentiment by remembering a time when the country came together to defend itself against a menace to civilization. If the war's causes were highly complex and difficult to explain, then that all gets much murkier, obviously. The likes of Hastings offer an easy way out: it was Germany's fault, and since they wanted to rule the world any number of casualties would be justifiable in trying to stop them.

The whole "donkeys leading lions" thing is a separate, albeit related, issue. I think that the scholarship there is, if anything, even more unequivocal than it is over the causes of the war. But it also has a significantly smaller footprint in popular perception. And this post is way too long and meandering already.

What's depressing to me is that our apparent choice is between "lions lead by donkeys" and "lions lead by lions", or at most some position between the two. The assumption of the common soldiery as "lions" is never brought into question, despite the overbearing mass of evidence suggesting that, at least from 1916, that a lot and perhaps even most of them really didn't want to be there, and that they frequently acted like it.

But in a political culture still deeply invested in the narrative of "people's war" handed down from 1945, it would be unthinkable to question the patriotism of the essentially heroic Tommy, so we are limited to questioning the motives and competence of his generals. And that's just dumb.

Secondary school history lessons being used as some kind of proxy battleground for the tedious bickering of blindly-partisan politicos?

I never thought I'd see the day...

Traitorfish said:

What's depressing to me is that our apparent choice is between "lions lead by donkeys" and "lions lead by lions", or at most some position between the two. The assumption of the common soldiery as "lions" is never brought into question, despite the overbearing mass of evidence suggesting that, at least from 1916, that a lot and perhaps even most of them really didn't want to be there, and that they frequently acted like it.

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Well, these days a lot of the BEF's historians (especially the school that Tim Travers has dubbed the "realists") don't frame the discussion in terms of lions and donkeys at all, for precisely that reason.

Just commenting on the blatant politicizing: The "donkeys leading lions" narrative doesn't cheapen the efforts made by the soldiers in the war. It's the leaders who are the ones being criticized and often quite legitimately (bringing in the "think of the soldiers" argument is meant as a distraction from what the argument is trying to do).

Then again, this is also nothing new. There were massive amounts of casualties on Armistice Day before the 11th hour as Entente soldiers tried to take territory by force they could take peacefully later that day. There are reports of German soldiers aghast at the charging soldiers and the fact that they had to fire back. I know the British had a very specific goal in mind (take back the city they lost the first day of fighting). But the United States participated in this completely unnecessary campaign just as willingly. However, when there was an outrage that led to a Congressional investigation, it suddenly became about the Republican Party trying to discredit the success of our boys in Europe rather than about the completely senseless waste of life.

While we are at it - this whole idea of honoring those who died is IMO wrong, as it is just a paraphrase for glorifying death and killing from what I can see. Sure we can mourn those who gave their life, but honoring them? War is at best a tragic necessity, nothing to be proud of. Be proud of the good this may have done, but not the way it was done.

Also a question: I read a main reason for the British to want to continue WWI until victory was so they could burden someone else with the huge war dept.
How much truth is there to that?

Terxpahseyton said:

Also a question: I read a main reason for the British to want to continue WWI until victory was so they could burden someone else with the huge war dept.
How much truth is there to that?

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That was a relevant concern to all parties in the war, not just the British.

I didn't mean to suggest that the British were particular evil, I just happened to have read it about the British in the context of their stance towards peace efforts.
Though can it be that the British purse was particularly tight?

Terxpahseyton said:

I didn't mean to suggest that the British were particular evil, I just happened to have read it about the British in the context of their stance towards peace efforts.
Though can it be that the British purse was particularly tight?

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Britain was under considerably greater financial strain during the war, because the British effectively bankrolled all their allies until the Americans showed up. This was exacerbated by the British governments' failures to control war costs (although again, every government in the war willingly abdicated fiscal responsibility, not just Britain). But the British also possessed far greater capability than any other country to sustain the war's expenditures. I'd say those things amounted to a wash.

apologies for being present in a serious discussion with all the unseriousness of me , but it could come handy , this "We were Right and they were not." attitude , if the world explodes this summer or so . Out of the three bads one still would be outta there .

The "lions led by donkeys" line reminds me of another line, by a good French sketch artist of the 19th century. In a work titled "Scenes from the private and public life of the Animals", there is a part which presents the "revolution of the Animals". In the end, in a lonely sketch, an insect sets to write down the history of that revolution, and the comment inserted in the drawing is:

"A fly writes down the history of the Revolution".

I think that Grandville was correct in this nice bit of sarcasm.

Edit: I couldn't fast-google the specific drawing, but here is another quite characteristic one from the same collection:

Dachs said:

Britain was under considerably greater financial strain during the war, because the British effectively bankrolled all their allies until the Americans showed up. This was exacerbated by the British governments' failures to control war costs (although again, every government in the war willingly abdicated fiscal responsibility, not just Britain). But the British also possessed far greater capability than any other country to sustain the war's expenditures. I'd say those things amounted to a wash.

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Would you say that in hindsight, the British entry into WWI was a major mistake? I know you support the hypothesis that Britain entered to prevent an escalation of the ethnic tensions in Ireland, but would that still compare in terms of costs to WWI?