When it comes to WW1, most people in UK think it ended in victory for the "allies", the word "armistice" doesn't seem to register. What really brought an end to that particular imperialist bloodbath, was the collapse of discipline. Mutiny and rebellion were breaking out everywhere, troops had had enough, orders were ignored, officers were ridiculed, and the various states were anxious as to their survival. It was a class thing that finally put a nail in that particular psychopathic imperialist endeavour.
The following is an excellent article on
libcom, posted by Jared, well worth reading in full, as we head into the hypocritical pomp and ceremony of establishment's charade of caring, that will be on display in the next few days. That babbling brook of bullshit, our mainstream media, will wallpaper our lives with banal, patriotic jingoism and empty rhetoric, which we are supposed to swallow. Those who engineer and benefit from wars, will take the stand with bowed heads, who knows, perhaps thinking of the next great plunder and how they can get away with it all.
I make no excuse for posting this in full, it should be writ large in the minds of this generation, as we stand looking at bloody war after bloody war, with the high possibility of even more devastating conflicts looming.
The untold history of armistice
and the end of World War I
‘The best antidote to ideology is detail,’ writes Paul Mason. And the
detail that’s missing this Armistice Day is that working people, when
they take power into their own hands, can end whatever catastrophe is
imposed on them.
In 1918, after four years of slaughter, deprivation and hardship, the Central Powers of Austro-Hungary and Germany were rocked by strikes and mutinies.
In February, a naval mutiny broke out at Kotor and sailors shot their
officers; by October, the Austro-Hungarian army had collapsed from mass
desertions and political upheaval. Soon afterwards a mutiny by German sailors at Kiel
merged with other uprisings and quickly escalated into a full-scale
rebellion against the imperial state, sparking the abdication of the
German Kaiser and the proclamation of a workers’ republic on 9 November
1918.
Preferring peace to full-scale revolution, an armistice
with the Allied powers was signed two days later, on 11 November 1918.
Working-class revolt had helped to end the First World War.
Not that you’d know this from New Zealand’s centennial commemoration of armistice Day, Armistice 100.
People across the country will take part in a number of sanitised
official events, from joining the ‘roaring chorus’ to texting the
Armistice Beacon. They’re unlikely to learn much about the strikes,
mutinies and resistance from below that toppled both generals and
governments.
I’ve searched the program resources
in vain for any reference to how and why armistice came about. Among
messages of peace and the standard script of sacrifice and loss, there
is a notable silence when it comes to the masses of working men and
women who contributed to the war’s end. Instead, peace seems to fall upon the war like a happy sun-shower. The surrenders of the various Central Powers seem to just … happen.
Why is there such a gap in the historical narrative? Surely it is not
for lack of time or information. We’ve had four years of commemoration
and some big spends to go with them (although not as much as Australia, whose $1.1bn dwarfs the $31m spent in New Zealand). It’s not as if the date crept up on us.
Perhaps I’m being far too critical of the Armistice 100 program and the
small pool of public historians working on WW100-related events. After
all, I’ve been one of them, although if I’m honest, the feature on censorship and its marginal references to dissent during the First World War was possibly too little, too late.
It would be wrong to see this glaring omission as some devilish scheme
designed to serve the interests of capital and the state. There’s no
conspiracy at play here. Instead, official historians are often
hamstrung by codes of conduct and the mythical stance of neutrality, or
by what is or isn’t palatable to their managers and their manager’s
managers. Histories of social revolution, radical ideas, and the agency
of everyday, working-class people are hardly the thing of monthly
reports or ministerial press releases. And despite the big-ticket items
of commemoration, the long, hard slog of quality, in-depth research is
like the work of any modern workplace – of trying to do more with less.
Perhaps, too, there’s something in the turn away from class as a
framework of analysis – that is, if class was ever a frame of analysis
in the first place (we have, after all, had numerous historians tell us that New Zealand was a classless society, free of a bourgeoisie and proletariat). As Paul Mason notes,
‘the termination of war by working-class action fits uneasily at a
deeper level: for most of history the existence of a workforce with its
own consciousness and organisations is an afterthought, or an anomaly.’
Instead of exploring the final months of the war through the experience
of class or capitalist social relations, we have instead been fed a
discourse that historian Charlotte Macdonald believes ‘has come to be strongly characterised by rather too neatly drawn themes of consensual patriotism, duty and sacrifice.’
Yet if we centre class, and class conflict, in our reading of
armistice, the history it reveals is somewhat different to the official
account on offer.
A few examples will suffice. On 16 October 1918, 14 men of the 1 New Zealand (Divisional) Employment Company were charged with mutiny
after ‘combining together not to work in the NZ DIV laundry when it was
their duty to do so.’ The men, most of whom were labourers, were all
sentenced to six months imprisonment with hard labour for their
collective work-refusal. That their sentences were later remitted does
not negate their struggle.
Three days after armistice, on 14
November 1918, a riotous throng of men from the New Zealand Division
gathered in the town square of Beauvois, France. Monty Ingram, a bank
clerk from Whakatāne, recorded the event in his diary. ‘A great
gathering of troops were harangued by a chap in the Dinks, who, standing
on a box in true labour agitator style’ called on the military
authorities to send them home. After a Padre was physically prevented
from speaking and a staff officer was howled into silence, the men, now
in their thousands, marched on Division Headquarters ‘and swarmed over
the place like bees around a honeycomb.’ When Major General Andrew
Russell finally appeared in the doorway, he was ‘badly heckled by all
sorts of interjections thrown at him and by being called all the b-b-b’s
under the sun.’ Russell’s speech fell on deaf ears. Instead, the crowd
ordered their general to get in touch with the War Office and cancel any
orders sending them to Germany. According to Christopher Pugsley,
appeals to the honour of the Division and the threat of dire punishment
prevented further action. Still, Russell recorded in his diary: ‘must
watch for Bolshevism.’
This temporary levelling of rank was triggered by frustrations about demobilisation, but class was ever present. As Dave Lamb notes,
the widespread mutinies across the Allied forces broke out too soon
after armistice for delay in demobilisation to be the sole cause.
‘Antagonism towards officers, hatred of arbitrary discipline, and a
revolt against bad conditions and uncertainty about the prospect of
being sent to Russia all combined with the delay, confusion and
uncertainty about demobilisation.’
Observed William Wilson, a
farmer: ‘Codford [Camp] the last few weeks has been unbearable,
discipline has gone to the pack and the troops don’t care a damn for
officers and NCOs.’ Strikes by British dockers and seamen caused further
delays, and further examples of direct action. There was conflict in
Bulford and Sling camps, where New Zealand troops were charged with
‘endeavouring to persuade persons to mutiny’ and sentenced to hard
labour. And on the transport ships home, unpopular officers found
themselves victim to collective justice. In these moments, when the
soldiers took power into their own hands, the generals were powerless to
act.
Back in New Zealand, the sudden end to the war, coupled
with the influenza pandemic, also tested the home front military
command and their ability to enforce discipline. Two weeks after
armistice, the Chief of General Staff, Colonel Charles Gibbon, found
himself rushing to Featherston Military Camp, where the troops were
mutinous. 5000 men had staged a ‘violent’ demonstration in front of camp
headquarters and presented a list of demands to the commandant. Gibbon
and Defence Minister James Allen endured a stormy confrontation with the
men’s delegates. In the face of mass protest, Gibbon and Allen gave in
to some of the soldiers’ demands around demobilisation. By December, the
recruits were marching out of Featherston at the rapid rate of 500 a
day.
The militant self-activity of working people – whether they were soldiers, industrial workers, or both – was a deeply entrenched concern for the New Zealand government.
The upheavals of 1918, home and abroad, fed into a developing ‘red
scare’. By 1919, red scare rhetoric came to dominate the public sphere.
Prime Minister William Massey urged his Reform Party faithful to ‘secure
good men to stem the tide of Anarchy and Bolshevism’. Allen believed
‘there was so much lawlessness in the country that the only thing that
could save [it] from going to damnation was the drill sergeant.’
Wartime regulations were extended into peacetime. The power to deport undesirables
was legislated in 1919. Distributing revolutionary books or pamphlets
remained seditious. And now that soldiers trained in killing had
returned to their jobs and their pay disputes, firearm acts were passed
allowing the state to clamp down on whole working-class neighbourhoods.
Fear of working-class resistance strengthened the apparatus of state
surveillance. Meetings of radicals were secretly attended by police and
fortnightly reports were sent to Police Headquarters. Detectives in each
district systemised this work by compiling an index of individuals who
had ‘extreme revolutionary socialistic or IWW ideas’. This signaled the
formation of New Zealand’s first ‘Special’ Branch and laid the
groundwork for all future spy agencies in New Zealand. The unrest
unleashed in the final months of the war directly influenced the
monitoring of dissent in New Zealand for years to come.
This
is a small taste of the untold history of armistice and the end of the
First World War. Instead of learning about it, the turbulent events
leading up to and after armistice are turned into joyous celebration.
Cloaked in the language of peace, Armistice Day becomes an official
exercise in justifying the insane loss of life.
We might even
be tempted to see Armistice 100 as an example of what Pulitzer
Prize-winning novelist and scholar Viet Thanh Nguyen calls the
‘industrialisation of memory’. In his book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam
and the Memory of War, Nguyen also examines the ‘memory industry’ – the
museums we take our children to visit, the sculptured grounds of Pukeahu
National War Memorial, the Armistice Day parades at sunset. For Nguyen,
at the root of this industry is the industrialisation of memory.
Quote:
Industrialising memory proceeds in parallel with how warfare is
industrialised as part and parcel of capitalist society, where the
actual firepower exercised in a war is matched by the firepower of
memory that defines and refines that war’s identity.
In
other words, memory and the memory industry are weaponised. And while
the memory industry produces kitsch, sentimentality, and spectacle, the
industrialisation of memory ‘exploits memory as a strategic resource’.
It is how bodies are produced for current and future wars.
‘The best antidote to ideology is detail,’ writes Paul Mason.
And the detail that’s missing this Armistice Day is that working
people, when they take power into their own hands, can end whatever
catastrophe is imposed on them.
First published by Overland Literary Journal.
Jared Davidson is a labour historian and archivist based in Wellington,
New Zealand. His forthcoming book, Dead Letters: Censorship and
subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920 is out March 2019
Posted By Jared
Nov 10 2018 04:20
