Vithal Rajan – 

By 1917, a hundred years ago, millions of men had already been killed in war-torn Europe, and hundreds of French villages and towns destroyed. When the war ended in November 1918, the Allies were almost on the point of surrendering but Germany succumbed first. Field-Marshall Foch called the Treaty of Versailles an ‘armistice,’ and so it proved, for another global war came within twenty years claiming several million more lives.

When the European Economic Commission was created in 1957, there were still living old French soldiers who said Germans were inherently bad people, but economic cooperation between the two European giants soon erased the hundred-year old marks of hatred, leading Charles de Gaulle to remark in 1962 that the traditional antagonists to the French were the British, not Germans!

Proud Empires, the Austrian, the Russian, and the German, bit the dust after the Great War. At the end of the Second World War, Averell Harriman informed President Truman ‘the British are finished.’ The historian, Barbara Tuchman, shows in her masterly account of the first war, ‘The Proud Tower,’ that no irreconcilable differences divided the empires of Europe, except imperial ambition. In fact, the Kaiser was out yachting when he heard of the mutual exchange of war ultimatums. He rushed back to Berlin to prevent war but was advised that it was too late for peace! Germany’s ‘High War Lord’ was unable to stop a war he did not want, a terrible war brought about by the ingrained training and attitudes of the men who ran the chancelleries of Europe!

____________________________________________

Vithal Rajan, Ph.D. [L.S.E.], worked as a mediator for the church in Belfast; as faculty at The School of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, and as Executive Director, the Right Livelihood Award Foundation. He has founded several Indian NGOs, is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment.