The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife by Edward Carpenter
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page 8 of 164 (04%)
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greedy commercial gang--caring not one jot for the welfare of the people
committed to its charge--dragged them into a senseless and ruinous war for the satisfaction of its own supposed interests! It is here and in this direction (which searches deeper than the mere weighing and balancing of Foreign policies and Diplomacies) that we must look for the "explanation" of the wars of to-day. And even race wars--which at first sight seem to have little to do with the Class trouble--illustrate the truth of my contention. For they almost always arise from the hatred generated in a nation by an alien class establishing itself in the midst of that nation--establishing itself, maybe, as a governmental or dominant class (generally a military or landlord clique) or maybe as a parasitical or competing class (as in the case of the Jews in Europe and the Japanese in America and so forth). They arise, like all other wars, from the existence of a class within the nation which is not really in accord with the people of that nation, but is pursuing its own interests apart from theirs. In the second of the following papers, "The Roots of the Great War," I have drawn attention to the influence of the military and commercial classes, especially in Germany, and the way in which their policy, coming into conflict with a similar policy in the other Western nations, has inevitably led to the present embroilment. In Eastern Europe similar causes are at work, but there the race elements--and even the religious--constitute a more important factor in the problem. By a curious fatality Germany has become the centre of this great war and world-movement, which is undoubtedly destined--as the Germans themselves think, though in a way quite other than they think--to be of vast importance, and the beginning of a new era in human evolution. And the more one considers Germany's part in the affair, the more one sees, |
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