Читать книгу Crimes and Mercies - James Bacque - Страница 9

I A PIRATICAL STATE

‘The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.’

GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch

During the century before 1914, the Western democracies began a series of reforms such as the world had never witnessed. All of them abolished cruel institutions – duelling, slavery, religious discrimination and child labour. In Ontario, the first universal, free, long-term education system in the history of the world was begun and perfected within forty years. In the US and UK, cures for diseases were discovered, electricity made useful, aeroplanes invented and hunger abolished among millions of people. All the democracies began the process of electoral reform that brought the polling booths to everyone by 1925.¹ In agriculture, industry and science, advances were made that produced prosperity for the great majority of their citizens, something that had never happened before. The democracies did these things under no threat from enemies, nor to surpass other societies. These things occurred because there was a civilizing genius among the people based on their ancient beliefs.

The rapid improvement of life that seemed inevitable in 1900 was slowed to a walk by the catastrophes of the twentieth century. These were prefigured largely in the century before.

Darwin, Marx and Freud had all invented new beliefs for mankind, which had in common the idea that people must forever struggle against each other. In society, class must fight class; in the natural world, individual must compete against individual; and within the individual, ego must war with libido, or instinct with learned behaviour.

These ideas ignored the fact that the very definition of society is people co-operating to a greater good. Co-operation and trust alone enabled societies to survive, but ideas such as permanent class warfare, the Oedipus complex and survival of the fittest created conflict and mistrust in personal relations, political revolutions, wars between nations and eugenics programs which were a major part of the social catastrophes of this century.

The nineteenth-century spirit of generous reform in England, Canada, Germany, France and the US continued into the twentieth century. But now the powers of the state were being vastly extended by the reformers themselves in order to implement their generous ideals. Under the fascists and communists, the reforming passions were taken over by the state. They animated the state and were controlled by it. In the brilliant phrase of the philosopher Michael Polanyi, ‘The generous passions of our age could now covertly explode inside the engines of a pitiless machinery of violence.’²

What saved the democracies from the fate of these authoritarian states were, largely, traditions deriving from the Protestant Reformation that previously had expressed and limited the faith of people in a central power, whether church, feudal monarchy or modern state. The people had already freed their individual consciences from the priests, aristocrats and bureaucrats who had controlled them through a vast machinery of patronizing moral condescension, the class system, hypocritical imputations of basic guilt, reciprocal loyalties and violence.

Totalitarianism was far stronger in Italy, Spain and Russia, where the Protestant revolution had not occurred, or where it had been curtailed by the older authoritarian traditions, as in Germany. Among the particular traditions that protected the democracies were freedom of conscience, expressed as freedom of speech; mass literacy; habeas corpus; the extended franchise; and the various other constitutional protections of individual rights all proceeding largely from the Reformation and the Enlightenment. That these traditions did not always guide the foreign policies of the democracies was clear to see in Ireland and in the American west. But by far the most spectacular failures were in Europe, after the German wars.

Two men struggled for the soul of the west in London during the First World War. They were Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, the very model of the arrogant, conservative power of the British Empire, and Herbert Hoover. Churchill’s sea blockade, intended to strangle the German war effort, was also starving millions of Belgian children. This pained Herbert Hoover, a mining engineer from Iowa, unknown to politics. He was typical of the reforming, generous, independent spirit of many Americans: opposed to Empire and big government, with a naïve faith in the goodness of democratic peoples.

Beginning only a few months after the declaration of war in August 1914, Hoover met many times in London with the most powerful men in the British Empire – Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, First Sea Lord Winston Churchill and Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, who soon succeeded Asquith as Prime Minister. Hoover was always trying to relieve the miseries of the war, first for American citizens trapped in Europe, then for Belgian and French civilians starving under German occupation.

He wanted to get permission from the British government to ship food from Canada and the US through the British sea blockade to Belgium. Churchill refused. The Germans, having occupied Belgium and northern France, were responsible for feeding the people, Churchill said. Any food imported into Belgium would relieve some of the pressure that the blockade was exerting on the Germans.

Hoover went around Churchill, straight to Germany, to make them promise to all inspectors to supervise the issue of rations directly to the children. He found the Berlin bureaucrats to be ‘automatic and inhuman,’³ but he got them to agree. On his return to London, he found Churchill in alliance with Lord Kitchener, organizing opposition to all relief regardless of the widespread starvation in Belgium, now spreading to occupied France.

The British themselves were under tremendous pressure after the first year of war, because their armies were losing the land battle, the French army was growing mutinous, their ally Czarist Russia was collapsing, and in fact made peace with Germany in 1917. British shipping, including much of their own food supply, was being destroyed wholesale by the German U-boat campaign.

What Hoover was proposing to the worried British ministers could not decide the war, so they were reluctant even to hear him. But Hoover played adroitly on one British hope: they desperately needed American help. No help was likely if the Americans thought the British were deliberately refusing to let Hoover ship food to starving Belgian women and children.

Hoover’s forceful moralizing soon got him into serious trouble with Herbert Asquith, Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1915. Hoover had asked Asquith to release to his control 20,000 tons of Canadian flour stockpiled in England. He wanted this for seven million people ‘surrounded by a ring of steel and utterly unable by any conceivable effort to save themselves.’ As Hoover himself admitted, it was with ‘some abruptness’ that he told Asquith that the Belgians were starving because of the British blockade, yet the British claimed to be fighting to save Belgium. He said that he was not begging for the Canadian flour, but asking permission to buy it. If he were to leave the meeting without the flour, he would be forced to make this public, and the American public, so far sympathetic to Great Britain, would be disgusted. Asquith remarked that it was not customary for him to be addressed in such a tone. Hoover immediately apologized, saying that he was moved by the anticipation of emotions that must come from a negative reply on Asquith’s part.⁴

Churchill was so annoyed at Hoover’s enterprise that he actually went to the Foreign Office to file charges of corruption against Hoover, alleging that he was spying for the Germans. The Foreign Minister Lord Grey referred the charges to a Judge of King’s bench; Hoover was not only exonerated but eulogized by the judge.⁵

For years Hoover struggled until finally he was granted the extraordinary privilege of addressing the British Cabinet on 18 April 1917.⁶ That Hoover should have been invited to address the Cabinet which directed the affairs of the British Empire was in itself astonishing. The war was at a critical stage, the Allies were losing, the British were bankrupt, and he was now asking them for money for the children. But the Allies had been saying that they were fighting the war for the very ideals Hoover advocated. With Hoover, the British were arguing about the whole point of the war as it had been advertised to their troops.

The results were astounding. According to David Lloyd George, a most eloquent man himself, Hoover’s talk was ‘virtually the clearest exposition he had ever heard on any subject.’ Hoover stood before the Cabinet table, one hand in his pocket, the other gesturing slightly as ‘he spoke flawlessly, with not a word too few or too many.’⁷ He said that the Allies were in the war to preserve the rights of small democracies such as Belgium. Victory would be empty if many Belgians starved to death because of the Allied blockade. He begged the ministers to show a magnanimity that ‘would outlast all the bitterness of this war.’ The Cabinet agreed, setting up an International Food Board in conjunction with the Canadians and Americans, and also inviting France and Italy to participate. Lloyd George had encouraged the Cabinet’s approval, saying, ‘I am convinced. You have my permission.’⁸

The reasons that Hoover advanced for saving the Belgians were known in those days as ‘sentimental’, because they were thought to originate in trivial emotions found mainly in the ‘weaker sex’. For many aggressive empire-builders like Churchill, to act on them was ‘ill-advised’. Hoover observed that Churchill believed that the ‘incidental starvation of women and children was justified if it contributed to the earlier ending of the war by victory.’⁹ The whole Belgian relief program was ‘indeed full of sentiment,’ as Hoover said.¹⁰ But the Cabinet turned the sentiment to cash for Hoover, pledging not only passage for the ships, but also the substantial sum of one million pounds per month in donations to the ‘Hoover Fund’.¹¹ Secretly, the French government also put up money for Hoover’s relief ships.¹²

The triumph belonged not to Hoover alone: he had dozens of devoted helpers, who obeyed his instructions to the letter and cheerfully nicknamed him ‘Chief’. The Commission for Relief in Belgium was ‘a piratical state organized for benevolence’ according to one British official. The Commission had its own flag, a fleet of ships and its own communications system; it negotiated agreements like treaties with European states, it raised and spent huge sums of money, it sent emissaries across battle-lines with what amounted to a passport, and when the members thought they might be spied upon, they communicated in their own private language or code: American slang.¹³ Without realizing it, Hoover had more or less invented the idea of universal ‘human rights’. This idea, so familiar to us, was unknown round that Cabinet table,¹⁴ although an act ex gratia to save lives was not rejected unless it was tinged with bolshevism or impinged on some imperial interest.

That was one stage in the birth of a great saviour. Hoover was a wealthy man with a fascinating career when war broke out. But the Quaker faith of his Canadian mother and American father made him immediately sympathetic to the North Americans stranded in Europe by the outbreak of war in 1914. Hoover abandoned his profitable business to pour his money and organizing skills into arranging transportation, loans, visas, permits, communications and lodging for the many Americans – still then at peace – who wanted to get out of Europe. In those few weeks of 1914, a passion was born in Hoover that never failed him, or the starving millions who later turned to him when everyone else had failed.

Next came the Poles. They asked him for help to bring in food after the invasion by Germany in 1914. Hoover set up a committee of generous Americans, including many expert on the Polish situation. They collected money and goods, made arrangements for foreign credits and for foreign governments to permit the supplies to travel, and then they sent them.

Hoover proved himself so reliable, energetic, honest, discreet, well-organized, imaginative, common-sensible and well-intentioned during this and the Belgian relief campaigns, that by 1918 the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, was relying on him not only to organize food and relief but also for advice on the political consequences of relief. For instance, after the end of the First World War, millions of Russian prisoners were still in prison camps in Germany. Until the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk ended the Russo-German war in 1918, the Russians had also held many German prisoners. Both sides treated the prisoners relatively well so long as this hostage system was in effect, but with the return of the German prisoners under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the system collapsed, and the Russians still imprisoned in Germany began to starve. After the Armistice ended the fighting in the west in November 1918, the Allies kept up their sea blockade which deprived the Germans both of food imported by sea and of the means to earn cash by overseas trade to buy food. Now German women and children began to starve, which was the purpose of the Western Allies, who wanted to keep up the pressure on the Germans to sign a peace treaty. It mattered not at all to the Western Allies that the Germans had signed the Armistice on the basis of Wilson’s ‘14 Points’ proposal, which included cessation of the blockade. The ‘14 Points’ were supposed to be the framework of the eventual peace treaty, so the Paris Peace Conference, which Hoover attended along with Wilson, should have merely worked out details which had already been agreed in principle with the Germans. But the blockade went on.

This was why the Russian prisoners began to starve, while the Allies wondered what to do about them. If they fed them, they were taking the pressure off the Germans. If the prisoners were allowed to return to Russia, they might be induced or pressed into the Red Army, which terrified the Western Allies. If the Allies did nothing, the men would die, long after the fighting had ended.

Hoover wrote to President Wilson in February 1919 to suggest a plan that might get round a legal restriction on American aid to the Russian prisoners, who were by then starving to death ‘wholesale, by neglect,’ as Hoover said.¹⁵ Because his relief funds were restricted by American law to charity, and because the subject of aid to the prisoners was already assigned to the Red Cross and the holding power (the nation imprisoning the soldiers) under international convention, it was not strictly legal for Hoover to send American aid. But Hoover pointed out to the President that the object of taking care of the prisoners ‘is to prevent them going back to Russia in the middle of the winter and joining in the Bolshevik army, and therefore is solely a military purpose.’ He wondered if it might be the duty of the American army to furnish supplies to save them from both starvation and bolshevism – in Hoover’s mind, the two were synonymous. The army had plenty of supplies, its communications were essential to their distribution, and no questions would be asked if the decision were taken. The food went and the lives were saved. This was the first in a long series of American mercies extended to the Soviets, despite their avowed purpose to overthrow American capitalism by violence.

Hoover did not help communists because he approved of their politics, but because it was wise. He was certain that communism was so stupid that it would ‘fall of its own weight’. In the meantime, he could demonstrate the vast superiority of capitalist democracy while preserving the lives of those who would soon see the light. Soon after the war he travelled around the USA raising money at lightning speed. He raised over one million dollars (about $17–22 million in 2007) in one evening from some of America’s richest men, who paid $1,000 per plate to hear him speak while they stared at the dinner of rice and potatoes that was all the children of Poland could expect for that whole day. He was mainly responsible for persuading the government to give Poland over $159,000,000 in grants and loans, which equals around two and a half to three billion dollars today. In 1920, the American Relief Administration (ARA), staffed largely by volunteers working for little or no pay, was feeding over one million Polish children every day at 7,650 stations. Hoover managed this with a minimum of government help, and great popular support. As he told US Secretary of War Robert Patterson in 1946, there was such popular approval for his measures in 1919 that there was no need to threaten the American people with the spectre of German food riots. In 1919 and in 1946, the popular reaction was the same: feed the starving. And Hoover was prepared to satisfy their desire.

When Hoover visited Poland in 1919, some 30,000 children paraded across a grassy sports field in Warsaw to cheer him. ‘They came with the very tin cups and pannikins from which they had had their special meal of the day … thanks to the charity of America organized and directed by Hoover, and they carried their little paper napkins, stamped with the flag of the United States, which they could wave over their heads … These thousands of restored children marched in happy never-ending files past the grandstand where sat the man who had saved them … They marched and marched and cheered and cheered … until suddenly an astonished rabbit leaped out of the grass and started down the track. And then five thousand of those children broke the ranks and dashed madly after him shouting and laughing …’¹⁶

Watching beside Hoover stood the head of the French Mission, General Henrys, a tough soldier who had survived the First World War, ‘with tears coursing down his face until finally, overcome, he left the stand. He said to Hoover in parting, “Il n’y a eu une revue d’honneur des soldats en toute histoire que je voudrais avoir plus que cette qu’est vous donnée aujourd’hui” [“There has never been a review of honour in all history which I would prefer for myself to that which has been given you today.”]’ Hoover himself wept for joy before that young crowd.¹⁷

In the work Hoover attacked so vigorously, and with such huge success, we see foreshadowed many of the problems that have beset us to this day. The vengeful Versailles peace terms, which he wished to make more reasonable, led directly to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler; the racial conflicts among Serbians, Bosnians and Croats that precipitated the First World War continued for decades; the cruelties and failures of Soviet Russia were only just ending; the communism that triumphed in China in 1949 continued to blight millions of lives; the allegations of anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe foreshadowed Hitler and the fate of the European Jews, right down to reports of ‘a holocaust … in which six million human beings [Jews] are being whirled towards the grave by a cruel and relentless fate.’¹⁸ When he heard these reports of attacks on Jews in 1919, Hoover advised President Wilson to appoint a committee of investigation. Among the members recommended by Hoover was Henry C. Morgenthau, son of a US diplomat and philanthropist, and later Secretary of the Treasury, who helped prepare the report to Wilson ‘exposing falsity and creating a generally more wholesome atmosphere.’¹⁹

Hoover dealt with all these problems, foresaw the consequences and accurately predicted the outcomes. On the prime threat to Europe, bolshevism, he was particularly acute. In March 1919 he told the President, ‘… the Bolshevik has resorted to terror, bloodshed and murder to a degree long since abandoned even amongst reactionary tyrants. He has even to a greater degree relied upon criminal instinct to support his doctrines than even autocracy did. By enveloping into his doctrine the cry of the helpless and downtrodden, he has embraced a large degree of emotionalism and has thereby given an impulse to his propaganda comparable only to the impulse of large spiritual movements … I have no fear of their propaganda in the United States …’

Bolshevist propaganda did not move him because he knew that the system had inherent defects which would destroy it without any outside pressure. He told Wilson that, ‘Sooner or later the Bolshevik government will fall of its own weight or it will have swung sufficiently [to the] right to be absorbed in a properly representative government.’²⁰ Hoover advocated ‘large financial and moral support of the Allied governments’ to help ‘establish a new government.’²¹ In every detail of his analysis of the Bolshevik problem and of its future, Hoover was absolutely correct; his prediction has come true to the letter. Only Stalinist cruelties such as the world had never imagined, the failure of Christian Russians to resist and the mistakes of the Europeans and North Americans kept the regime in power decades longer than Hoover anticipated.

He saw the world’s hope in his own country. He told Wilson that ‘It grows upon me daily that the United States is the one great moral reserve in the world today and that we cannot maintain that independence of action through which this reserve is to be maintained if we allow ourselves to be dragged into detailed European entanglements over a period of years. In my view, if the Allies can not be brought to adopt peace on the basis of the 14 Points, we should retire from Europe lock, stock and barrel, and we should lend to the whole world our economic and moral strength, or the world will swim in a sea of misery and disaster worse than the dark ages …’²²

On Germany he was darkly prescient: ‘The blockade should be taken off … these people should be allowed to return to production not only to save themselves from starvation and misery but that there should be awakened in them some resolution for continued National life … the people are simply in a state of moral collapse … We have for the last month held that it is now too late to save the situation.’²³ In the midst of terrific pressure to bring food to the starving, when another man might have acted unilaterally to save time, Hoover scrupulously observed the limits of the rather vague mandate given him by Woodrow Wilson. Whenever he thought he was nearing the fringes of his power, he warned Wilson that he could not cope with the problem he had been given without further powers. He then pointed out the consequences of inaction and advised as to the solution. Very often President Wilson took his advice without checking it with anyone else. He often wrote on the bottom of Hoover’s letters ‘Approved, Woodrow Wilson.’²⁴ According to Henry L. Stimson, who had a brilliant career in American government in the 1930s and ’40s, ‘Hoover has the greatest capacity for assimilating and organizing material of any man I ever knew.’²⁵

In all this, Hoover was personally disinterested; in all this he always saw clearly the interests of the unfortunate and downtrodden. In all this he was first a humanitarian, without ever ceasing to be gladly American; in fact, his feeling for the United States was founded partly on the ability of the United States to rise above its own preoccupations to succour the world.

Because of his supranational goals, he saved millions of people while other leaders – especially those at the Paris Peace Conference – had no idea what to do after the crash except to glue the wings back on. They believed they were practical, realistic men, but according to one brilliant British observer at the conference, A. J. Balfour, the chief Allied leaders were ‘three all-powerful, all-ignorant men sitting there and partitioning continents with only a child to take notes’.²⁶ The ‘system’ they devised was as crude as a stone axe, truce pinned in place by the threat of slaughter. It lasted only as long as fear was stronger than resentment. Hoover saw the consequences of their decisions, he described them clearly, and he acted successfully on his views, within his own mandate. He could do so because he saw before anyone else that in those days, it was in the national interest to rise above national interest.

In 1923, Hoover received the thanks of three of the highest officials in Soviet Russia for his relief work. In a letter dated from the Kremlin, Moscow, July 10, 1923, L. Kamenev, Acting President of the Council of People’s Commissars, and N. Gorbunov and L. Fotieva, also members, wrote:

Unselfishly, the ARA [American Relief Administration] came to the aid of the people and organized on a broad scale the supply and distribution of food products and other articles of prime necessity.

Due to the enormous and entirely disinterested efforts of the ARA, millions of people of all ages were saved from death, and entire districts and even cities were saved from the horrible catastrophe which threatened them.

Now when the famine is over and the colossal work of the ARA comes to a close, the Soviet of People’s Commissars, in the name of the millions of people saved and in the name of all the working people of Soviet Russia and the Federated Republics, count it a duty to express before the whole world its deepest thanks to this organization, to its leader, Herbert Hoover, to its representative in Russia, Colonel Haskell, and to all its workers, and to declare that the people inhabiting the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics will never forget the help given them by the American people, through the ARA, seeing in it a pledge of the future friendship of the two nations.²⁷

And indeed, that friendship continues today. In the 1990s, they were still in need of food, and we in the West joined with the Americans in sending it to them. Now, in 2007, we understand that Hoover in 1920 spoke the truth when others were dumb. In those days so long ago and so different from now, he was an accurate prophet. Yet he was simply carrying out one of the basic Christian precepts of Western society, to forgive your enemy, and do good to those who hurt you. One could say there was no prescience at all. The ideas of Hoover, as Gandhi said of his own ideas, are as old as the hills and so endure.

In 1919, Hoover was in Brussels to attend a conference to present to the Germans a formula he had devised for solving the blockade problem. A British Admiral, Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, was the head of the British delegation. He saw Hoover in the hotel lobby one day, and said brusquely, ‘Young man, I don’t see why you Americans want to feed these Germans.’ To which Hoover immediately replied, ‘Old man, I don’t see why you British want to starve women and children after they are licked.’²⁸

From Brussels Hoover went on to Paris, where he helped President Wilson negotiate the details of the German peace treaty. He was still struggling against his nemesis, Winston Churchill, who energetically advocated continuation of the blockade in the House of Commons: ‘Germany is very near starvation,’ Hoover believed, ‘… [there is] the great danger of a collapse of the entire structure of German social and national life under the pressure of hunger and malnutrition. Now is therefore the time to settle.’²⁹ Churchill was opposed not only by Hoover and Wilson, but even by his former ally, Francesco Nitti, Prime Minister of Italy, who said, ‘It will remain forever a terrible precedent in modern history that against all pledges, all precedents and all traditions, the representatives of Germany were never even heard; nothing was left to them but to sign a treaty at a moment when famine and exhaustion and threat of revolution made it impossible not to sign it …’³⁰

Hoover protested to the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who immediately criticized him for failing to send in the food. Hoover let him have it, in ‘a torrent that he ought to remember even in his grave,’ slamming the British and French officials who were obstructing his relief work. To the Prime Minister’s face, Hoover denounced the ‘grasping attitude of your trickster minions.’ The British navy was even preventing the German fishing boats from going out to catch fish. Hundreds of thousands of tons of food were lying on the docks at Rotterdam waiting to go up-river to Germany, while Germans starved.

As Hoover dryly noted after, Lloyd George was an overworked but a reasonable man.³¹ Lloyd George later quoted Hoover’s words in a speech of his own, demanding that the French in particular cease their obstructionism, otherwise they ‘would rank with Lenin and Trotsky among those who had spread bolshevism in Europe.’³²

Somewhere between half a million and a million Germans starved after the war. These deaths were largely caused by the British blockade, or so the Germans believed. But they also had been deceived by their own Kaiser. Early in the planning for the war, the Kaiser’s Cabinet, foreseeing a food shortage, decided that to preserve the potato crop essential to feed the population, the harvest should be stored not in clamps* in the field as was the custom, but in the basements of schools and other public buildings across the nation, to reduce the losses caused by rain, frost and animals. So in 1914 and in 1915, the potatoes were stored in basements. The basements were too warm, and the potatoes rotted, spreading a disease known as phytophthora infestans (the terrible plant destroyer). The cure for this was known, copper sulphate, invented in Germany several decades before. But Germany’s supply of copper was scarcely enough for munitions. The Cabinet decided for the munitions. Uncontrolled, the disease infected seed potatoes, spreading devastation across the countryside. Civilians began to starve en masse, and soldiers home on leave in 1917 and 1918 saw their relatives dying. They began to doubt their leaders, and the war.

The doubt spread through the army like the terrible destroyer through the fields. In the summer of 1918, the collapse of the soldiers’ morale caused General Erich Ludendorff to advise the Kaiser to make peace.

The mass deaths from starvation became part of the culture of resentment fomented and exploited by Hitler, as the communists had done. Most Germans came to believe that the army had not been defeated at the front in 1918, as Hitler repeatedly said in his speeches during his campaigns for power from 1919 onwards. Largely victorious during the war, holding enormous tracts of enemy territory at the Armistice in 1918, the army, and corporal Hitler with it, felt betrayed by ‘plutocrats, Jews, profiteers and communists’ on the home front. It can scarcely be believed that the people who eventually voted for Hitler were indifferent to the memory of their own hunger and those who caused it, or to the deaths of millions of people, and those who starved them.

So, although Hoover was right to criticize the British for attempting to starve German women and children, even he was not aware that infesting the lies and errors that caused the war, and prolonged it to 1945, there was a terrible destroyer spread by Germany’s own leaders.

* Shallow trenches filled with root crops, then covered with earth.