Thoughts on the Great European War (1914-2014)
Introduction: The European Wars
On the recent 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War there was considerable debate about the origins of that war. Given this and the deaths within the last year of the very last French and British veterans of the First War and the imminent 95th anniversary of its outbreak, many are connecting the two wars. People are starting to look again in a broader perspective at the history of the whole tragic twentieth century, which led to our own age.
Many historians, following Churchill, have always considered that the First and Second World Wars were in reality one war, but with an interruption. However, it can also be said that neither ‘World War’ was a World War at all, but both were European Wars, which Europe spread to Non-European countries.
Thus, European Powers in the First World War dragged in colonial troops (Moroccans, Senegalese, Australians, Canadians, Indians etc) and, from 1917 on, and decisively, troops from a former British colony - the USA. It is also true that other parts of the world outside Europe were affected – thus the Palestinian problem began as a result of the British encouragement of Zionism with the Balfour Declaration
Equally, its is true that the term ‘the Second World War’, includes wars other than the European War. These are the closely linked largely Anglo-German war for access to oil in North Africa and the quite separate Sino-Japanese War and the Pacific War (Japanese Imperialism versus Anglo-American Imperialism).
Thus, the two World Wars can be seen not only as one war, but even as one Great European War. But if we accept this view, can we actually affirm that the Great European War ended in 1945? The second half of the twentieth century was also greatly troubled as a result of this Great European War. Let us first look at the causes of the First and Second European Wars.
The First and Second European Wars
The pretext for 1914 was the German invasion of Belgium. This is an artificial country drawn up by Great Britain in 1831 as a buffer state to separate France and Prussia, which later became Germany. However, that was not the real reason for the outbreak of the war. That was in the Austro-Hungarian oppression of 60% of its Empire’s population, the Slavs. This is what triggered the assassination of the Austrian Archduke by an embittered Bosnian-Serb terrorist - or freedom fighter, according to one’s point of view.
Then followed the Austrian revenge invasion of Serbia, even though the Serbian government did its utmost to avoid war. In reality, Austro-Hungary undertook the invasion, which sparked off the war, only because Berlin keenly supported and encouraged it. So it was that in 1914 the Austro-Hungarians opened the first concentration camps in Europe, with the mass captivity and deaths of ‘Ruthenians’, Carpatho-Russians, in the camps at Theresin and Talerhof. This Fascist approach to other races was where the Austrian corporal, Adolf Hitler, completed his apprenticeship. Already the second phase of the Great European War was in preparation.
The pretext for this came in 1939 with the German invasion of Poland. It was a strange pretext, since when Czechoslovakia had been invaded the year before, nothing had happened. Then France and Great Britain had cowardly backed down in the face of Nazi bullying, thus sacrificing the three peoples of Czechoslovakia, Czechs, Slovaks and Ruthenians, to Austrian-led oppression once more. However, it is also argued that this act of unprincipled moral cowardice occurred because the governments of Great Britain and France needed more time to arm for the war which by then they realised was inevitable. Even if that is the case, Czechoslovakia is still the country which they were selfishly willing to sacrifice.
Poland was a strange pretext because for two decades semi-Fascist Polish governments had behaved extremely badly towards their very large German and Slav minorities. Notably, it had dynamited 250 Orthodox churches of its eight million Orthodox Slavs, who lived in eastern ‘Poland’, but only because of Poland’s invasion and occupation of large parts of Belarus and the Ukraine after the Russian Revolution. It was a strange pretext because Poland had ignobly taken part, together with Germany and Hungary, in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Some indeed have even suggested that the German invasion of Poland could almost be seen as a defensive war, given Polish plans, or perhaps rather delusions, to invade Germany. Though we find this suggestion very exaggerated, the history of the Polish State between the First and Second Wars is still an infamous history of national pride, delusions and oppression of large minorities.
Some have described the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland two weeks after the Nazi invasion of western Poland as stabbing Poland in the back. However, it must be said that the Soviet invasion was largely about reclaiming conquered Non-Polish territory from the vengeful post-First War Polish State. And whatever the later horrible and inexcusable crimes of the Soviets in Poland (at Katyn and in the Warsaw uprising, for example), eastern ‘Poland’ would otherwise have been invaded by the Nazis in any case. Moreover, it is argued that the Soviets were only playing for time to prepare against Hitler, giving themselves a buffer zone. In this way they were acting in the same selfish way as the French and British governments had done, when they had sold out Czechoslovakia a year before.
Nazism and Communism
We must also place in this general context the current debate about which of the two evil dictators of the time was worse, the National Socialist Hitler or the State Socialist Stalin. After all, both had begun their blood-soaked reigns well before 1939 and both would never have existed, if it had not been for the First World War.
Although this debate comparing Hitler and Stalin is somewhat futile and has been likened to debating which of two demons has a longer tail, if we are to compare them, then we must admit that although there are some similarities, there are also many differences between the two dictators.
The similarities are firstly that both were demonic madmen, motivated by Western ideologies, and responsible for the deaths of tens of millions. Secondly, both were outsiders from the poorer south, Hitler was Austrian and Stalin was Georgian. (Like, long before them, the blood-soaked megalomaniac Napoleon, who was Corsican and not French).
There are many differences. Firstly, Hitler’s demons were racist, Stalin’s were ideological. Thus, Hitler wanted to keep only thirty million Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian slaves alive. Their homelands would become a vast German colony, ‘Lebensraum’, for the ‘Aryan’ master race. The rest of these peoples would either be ‘scientifically’ slaughtered or else sent to live in Siberia. Although not judged politically correct, the truth is that Hitler’s greatest racist holocaust by far was not even that of the five million plus Jews he slaughtered, but his genocide of thirty million Slavs.
A second difference is that that in order too carry out his genocide, Stalin, unlike Hitler, used blind terror, as Lenin and Trotsky had done before him. He slaughtered all those who opposed him and his ideology, or those whom, in his paranoia, he imagined opposed him and his ideology. Hitler, on the other hand, used carefully planned, Teutonic, systematic killing on an industrial scale. Thirdly, both Hitler and Stalin were masters of propaganda (‘spin’), but Hitler was democratically elected and Stalin was not. Fourthly, Hitler lost the war, whereas Stalin won it, so Hitler gained territory and then lost it, but Stalin regained East Slav territory lost by the Communists before him and kept it. Finally, Hitler was in power for twelve years and Nazism began and ended with him. Stalin, however, was in power for nearly thirty years and the ideology that he represented had already killed millions under Lenin and Trotsky before him and would oppress millions more after him. Hitler was an ideology; Stalin was only part of one.
The Third and Fourth European Wars
The Soviet bandits who usurped power in Russia and slaughtered the Royal Family and millions of others could never have done so without the ‘First World War’. Similarly, Nazism grew out of the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles, which concluded the German Kaiser’s ‘First World War’. And, apart from the Jews, the main enemy of Nazism, or National Socialism, was the Communism, or State Socialism, of the Soviets, ironically planted in Russia by the German Kaiser who had sent Lenin there by sealed train. In other words, the catastrophe of 1914-1918 made the catastrophe of 1939-1945 inevitable. But what happened after 1945? Did it all end there?
Twenty-five years after 1939 came 1964. We would call this the ‘Third European War’. Symbolically, this date marked a whole period, but not only of the East-West Cold War, with its millions of dead in mainly proxy ‘hot wars’ all around the world. It also marked an anti-spiritual and so anti-moral social revolution, which led to the rejection of spiritual values and directly to the abortion holocaust, family breakdown and the 25 million victims of AIDS. In Europe, it also marked the affirmation of what is now called the ‘European Union’ (EU). This is yet another elitist and anti-democratic Euro-American project to unite Europe by bribery and stealth into a ‘Union’, which divides Europe into two and inevitably suppresses all European spiritual and moral identities.
Twenty-five years after 1964, came 1989. We would call this the ‘Fourth European War’. This date is the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution, the culmination of ‘The Endarkenment’ and which many would see it as the beginning of this whole cycle. 1989 marked the end of the Cold War with the fall of the Communist Empire. However, it did not mean the end of the anti-spiritual and so anti-moral social revolution of the 1960s, or the end of the European Union. Rather it meant the spread of the anti-spiritual and anti-moral values of the 1960s to the ‘Second World’, which includes not only the old Soviet Union, but also pseudo-Communist China. And it also spread the forced unification of Europe through the EU towards the east.
The resulting process has been called ‘globalisation’ – the worldwide spread of technology and trade, directed at the development of consumerist materialism and narcissism, with all its economic, political, social, military and ecological consequences. This period has involved attempts to encircle and take over the Russian Federation and ex-Soviet countries, with their rich natural resources, and also wars against Islam. For with the globalisation of China, Russia and the Islamic world are now the only two bastions of independence which still resist the globalist onslaught. Together with globalisation came the consequences of illimited consumerist materialism, the ecological scare of ‘climate change’. This period will end in 2014, marking the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of the Great European War.
In 1945, after twelve years of Nazism, Germany was occupied and quickly ‘denazified’ (= Americanised). However, in 1991, after seventy-four years of Communism, Russia was not occupied and is still only slowly being ‘decommunised’ (= Americanised). Unlike Germany, it is by no means clear that Russia is going to accept Americanisation as a substitute to the dying embers of Communism. It certainly rejected the hordes of American Evangelists who tried to convert it to their utterly alien and unhistorical brands of sectarian Protestantism. The question for Russia today is, given that failed Communism is finished except among nostalgic pensioners, what is the alternative to Americanisation? Only Russia can answer that question.
Conclusion: Towards a Second Treaty of Versailles?
In conclusion, it can be said that what we call the ‘First European War’ was the beginning of the whole process which has led to the contemporary situation. It is also clear that the First European War broke out because of the inherent injustices in Europe in 1914, injustices replaced by other injustices with the Treaty of Versailles in 1919.
That Treaty did not end the First European War, but guaranteed the outbreak of what we call the ‘Second European War’. Moreover, it can be said that the great transformations of the 1960s, the ‘Third European War’, and then the fall of Communism in 1989, the ‘Fourth European War’, were all consequences of the same process, which began in 1914.
All agree that Europe, and the world, has never been the same since 1914, when Europe effectively committed suicide, a world was lost and the USA took control of world affairs. Looking at the four European Wars in a much longer and continuing perspective as one Great European War, which has not yet ended, perhaps we can see possible solutions to the ongoing problems of Europe and the world.
It could be argued that that the Great European War which began in 1914 and has still not ended, will not end until the demons that caused it are exorcised. They must be cast out of the body and soul of Europe, and therefore from the world that Europe has, consciously and unconsciously, created, in the last five hundred years.
If we are to find peace and justice in Europe, and therefore in the European-moulded world, what we require is a Second Treaty of Versailles, a Versailles II, perhaps by the end of 2014. Until then Europe will suicidally fight on against its own soul, as is proved in the refusal of the European Union to accept Christianity as its basis in its Constitution. Until the day of peace and justice in Europe dawns, it seems that Europe is destined to remain divided into a European Union and a Non-European Union, which is in Russia and neighbouring territories, lands which dwarf the EU. If this is the case, the European Union is destined to become less and less important, ultimately nothing more than a cultural museum run by Muslim colonists.
Archpriest Andrew Phillips
24 August/6 September 2009
St Maximus of Gorlice, Protomartyr of the Lemkos,
Martyred by the Austrians in 1914
