It comes as little surprise to anyone who was witness to
last year’s shameful show of glib and tasteless remarks made by the president and
vice president of ULU as to why they would not be sending an official ULU
representative to the University of London’s memorial service on remembrance
Sunday that the same insult is to be repeated once again. The ULU senate, on which sits Vice President Cooper,
member of a Trotskyist group which last described the 2 minutes silence as ‘an
orgy of militarism’, have decided once again to spit in the face of all those
members of their union who believe that it is in no way unreasonable to demand
that they have an official ULU representative at the service which commemorates
the millions who gave the ultimate sacrifice in the cause of liberty and
freedom. Could they perhaps be as gracious to acknowledge that without these
great sacrifices their right to make such absurd remarks wouldn’t now exist? Or
on a more pragmatic level could they tell us why they think it such a wise
strategy if they are trying to defend ULU from closure why they think
infuriating so many of its members is a wise course of action? Perhaps they
should take heed of comrade Lenin’s remarks that you can’t build socialism on a
dead corpse because similarly you can’t defend a union by first alienating its
members and giving them a potent reminder of why they really could do without
you as well as your Monty Python-esque socialist values.
However to try and use this space for other purposes than
just repeating the words of the already numerous students who are quite rightly
outraged at their union’s activities, I would like contest the particular point
upon which this debate revolved around last year, which was the respective
morality of Britain’s entry and participation in the First World War. Daniel
Cooper’s infamous published explanation last year for his refusal to lay a
reef, which can still be found on line and should be read by all, centres on
the conflict and deserves a reply addressing several points about which Cooper
flat out wrong .
Firstly the conflict is framed in his letter as one fought
by the working classes of Europe on the command of their evil rulers who were
little more than armchair spectators to the slaughter. Understandably this is
an image one might pick up from watching Black Adder but going to historical
facts this image can be quickly identified as the popularised nonsense which it
is. Members of all of Britain’s social classes fought and died in the First
World War in equal proportions and without any significant differentiation in
the proportion of deaths sustained by each class grouping. This is historical
fact. It might also be illuminating to note that one of the social groups which
suffered the greatest proportionate casualty rate were Oxbridge alumni . The
reality is that this was not class war but one fought and inflicted upon an
entire nation. However even with this put to one side surely it is abhorrent to
mourn or prioritise members of the war dead on the basis of class as it would
be to do so by race or gender? But this wouldn’t be the first time that the far
left has sought to disqualify suffering on its pseudo religious worship of
class differences.
Secondly Cooper trots out the old and worn out argument that
the war was fought for the interests of capitalism seeking colonies and markets
around the world as the rich in Britain sent the poor to die to protect their
interests and profit margins against the encroachment of the Kaiser’s Germany. If
Mr Cooper or any of his Marxists-Leninist-Trotskyite-people’s-front-of-Judea-ist
following would care to look at the academic opinion on the conflict from the
last 50 years they would realise how thoroughly discredited this argument is,
let alone the economics that underlies it, but then again ignorance is bliss.
One doesn’t have to do too much reading to find out how horrified global
capital was at the prospect of a war in Europe, even a limited one. Walter
Cunliffe the then governor of the bank of England pleaded with the British
government to stay out of the war along with big business which was horrified
the destruction of capital and trade it would cause along with the taxes and
inflation that would be required to pay for it. Big business, apart from the
very small amount which is concerned with arms production, does not like war,
as was manifestly shown by the forced closure of stock market exchanges all
over Europe as the threat of war spread in 1914.
Equally the conflict was not caused by the scramble for
Africa or a conflict for colonies. This is because despite Lenin’s theorising
that new colonies were of the upmost importance to European imperialists and
capitalists to exploit new sources of surplus labour, colonies were of no great
importance whatsoever in the strategic decision making of 1914. In fact the
economic insignificance of owning huge swathes of Africa owed to the decision
that the British took to gift the Germans large African territories in the
preceding decades before the war. This is because Marx was completely wrong
about the tendency of profits to fall, meaning that only diminishing returns
could be gained from investing in already industrialised economies, eventually
leading to the inevitable collapse of capitalism. Economist Thomas Sowell has
shown that despite the spurious and confused figures presented by Lenin in his
book on imperialism, advanced capitalist economies invest in each other at a
substantially greater rate than they do in developing ones. Because profits
don’t irretrievably fall and capitalism is a fluid yet stable system, which
creates great prosperity for all social classes, capitalist economics meant
that in 1914 the maintenance of empires was not the cause of the war. Such non-vital issues of national interest had
always been resolved by peaceful diplomacy and had never been deemed worthy of
risking a world war over.
Instead the British war effort in 1914 was one reluctantly
conducted against the militarism of the German monarchy which had, despite the
peaceful desires of the German people, launched an aggressive war against
France and Belgium in order to gain military mastery over the continent. To not
enter the conflict would have been to see the destruction of the French and
Belgian democracies at the hands of such a reactionary force which in the words
of one of its own commanders was prepared to risk the destruction of the whole
of European civilisation to achieve its own dominance and ascendancy because
even if Germany went down in flames it would still be a beautiful accomplishment.
The Kaiser’s Germany might not have been as archetypally menacing as Hitler’s
nor the political institutions of Britain and the other allied powers of 1914
as liberal and progressive as the ones we enjoy today but the success of the
allies in this horrific and tragic conflict is something that we should be
proud of. Although the peace was definitely bungled, it was fought to protect
the core principles which have helped the long arch of history continue to
progress towards justice instead of suffering a dramatic reverse and I see no
shame in affirming that belief.
So in conclusion unless the leaders of ULU can provide
credible historical arguments to back their objections then they should be
silent about which they cannot speak and about which we are all too tired of
hearing them do so.
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