How colonial violence came home : the ugly truth of the first world war | News

How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war | News | The Guardian
►https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-home-the-ugly-truth-of-the-first-world-war

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How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war

The Harlem Hellfighters

View of African American troops of the 369th Infantry, formerly the 15th Regiment New York Guard, and organized by Colonel Haywood, who were among the most highly decorated upon its return home, 1918. They were also known as the Harlem Hellfighters. (Photo by Interim Archives/Getty Images) Photograph: Interim Archives/Getty

The Great War is often depicted as an unexpected catastrophe. But for millions who had been living under imperialist rule, terror and degradation were nothing new. By Pankaj Mishra

Fri 10 Nov 2017 06.00 GMT
Last modified on Thu 30 Nov 2017 19.44 GMT

‘Today on the Western Front,” the German sociologist Max Weber wrote in September 1917, there “stands a dross of African and Asiatic savages and all the world’s rabble of thieves and lumpens.” Weber was referring to the millions of Indian, African, Arab, Chinese and Vietnamese soldiers and labourers, who were then fighting with British and French forces in Europe, as well as in several ancillary theatres of the first world war.

Faced with manpower shortages, British imperialists had recruited up to 1.4 million Indian soldiers. France enlisted nearly 500,000 troops from its colonies in Africa and Indochina. Nearly 400,000 African Americans were also inducted into US forces. The first world war’s truly unknown soldiers are these non-white combatants.

#congo #belgique #pgm #première_guerre_mondiale 1914-1918

Grande Guerre : les batailles oubliées de l’Afrique - RFI
▻http://webdoc.rfi.fr/grande-guerre-afrique-colonies-1914-1918

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Souvent méconnues, les batailles de la Première Guerre mondiale dans les colonies africaines allemandes ont pourtant fait de nombreuses victimes. Du Togo au Sud-Ouest africain allemand, en passant par le Cameroun, le Congo belge et l’Afrique orientale allemande, des Africains sont enrôlés pour se battre sur leur propre continent et servir une guerre qui n’est pas la leur, une guerre d’Européens. Si le nombre de soldats présents sur les fronts africains et le nombre de tranchées creusées paraissent dérisoire comparés à ceux des fronts européens, les affrontements sont d’une extrême violence et déciment aussi des civils, colons et colonisés. Enjeux stratégiques, riches de matières premières et de ressources minières, les colonies allemandes sont convoitées, dès le début du conflit, par les Alliés.

#pgm #première_guerre_mondiale #1914-1918

The Great War is often depicted as an unexpected catastrophe. But for millions who had been living under imperialist rule, terror and degradation were nothing new.

How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war
▻https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-home-the-ugly-truth-of-the-first-world-war?C

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With more than eight million dead and more than 21 million wounded, the war was the bloodiest in European history until that second conflagration on the continent ended in 1945. War memorials in Europe’s remotest villages, as well as the cemeteries of Verdun, the Marne, Passchendaele, and the Somme enshrine a heartbreakingly extensive experience of bereavement. In many books and films, the prewar years appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with the summer of 1913 featuring as the last golden summer.

But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.

At the time of the first world war, all western powers upheld a racial hierarchy built around a shared project of territorial expansion. In 1917, the US president, Woodrow Wilson, baldly stated his intention, “to keep the white race strong against the yellow” and to preserve “white civilisation and its domination of the planet”. Eugenicist ideas of racial selection were everywhere in the mainstream, and the anxiety expressed in papers like the Daily Mail, which worried about white women coming into contact with “natives who are worse than brutes when their passions are aroused”, was widely shared across the west. Anti-miscegenation laws existed in most US states. In the years leading up to 1914, prohibitions on sexual relations between European women and black men (though not between European men and African women) were enforced across European colonies in Africa. The presence of the “dirty Negroes” in Europe after 1914 seemed to be violating a firm taboo.