INTRODUCTION
TO “RIGHT OR WRONG, MY COUNTRY”
Page iv. (first 3 pages missing)
… Even
among the English historians quoted in the present, where is the war of King
Philip II of Spain against England shown in its true light? Where are
our youth informed that Spain only sent its “Invincible Armada”
in self-defense, to obtain relief from decades of plundering and pillaging
inflicted on the Spanish coasts and colonies by English privateers, in
peacetime, but with the approval of their Queen? Did the wars conducted by
Cromwell, Charles II and William III against Holland Spain, Holland and France spring from any more justifiable
motives than the wars of conquest of Louis XIV? It will be objected that even
Seeley says something similar in his work The Expansion of England. That
is correct. But is it not remarkable – explicable only on the grounds of
pro-British prejudice, which used to be quite general -- that none of our
school editions of Seeley’s book contains the chapter “War and Commerce”, which
is so descriptive of the spirit of English power policy? Why do all our
English-language reading books contain chapters on Wilberforce and the
abolition of slavery,
praising the work of this noble humanitarian, while hushing up
the fact that the aim to which he dedicated his life’s work was only achieved
when the slave trade was no longer profitable to English merchants? Why haven’t
we long ago helped to destroy the Big Lie that England is the “protector of
oppressed peoples”, when the contrary is proven by the physical and
intellectual pauperization of the Irish; the rape of Denmark (1807); the
spoliation of Holland (Cape Colony), and the exploitation of Portugal, to cite
only a few of many examples? It may be objected that all this may well have
been true during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, perhaps even during
the first half of the nineteenth century, but that the England of the last
fifty years cannot have conducted such a ruthless policy, in violation of
international law and human rights. On the contrary! These ignoble
characteristics of English policy have become even more pronounced with the
increasing democratization of the country. Where these policies used to be
paraded openly and brazenly, they are now “tartüffiert”
[covered up with hypocrisy]. Over the years, English statesmen have succeeded
in bringing the art of “cant” (or shameful hypocrisy, as the word may perhaps
best be translated, with Tönnies (* F. Tönnies, Englische Weltpolitik in englischer Beleuchtung, Berlin 1915, Springer), to absolute perfection,
and have been successful in draping a religious and philanthropic, or at least
patriotic, mantle over even the grossest violations of international law and
human rights. These policies have often elicited protests from many
right-thinking and unprejudiced thinkers of the English nation. Thus, with
regards to this “cant”, which filled even Lord Byron with reluctance and
bitterness, Sidney Whitman in 1887 published a book which remains refuted (Conventional
Cant, Its Results and Remedy), and preceded his remarks with a chapter on “Phariseeism”. Sidney Whitman considered “cant” to be the
English national defect, one which -- even more widespread than English bigotry
and drunkenness -- is directly or indirectly related to almost every form of
selfishness and vice in England. Carlyle (according to Froude, his biographer) is said to have called “cant” the
art of making things appear to be what they are not -- an art so toxic to the
souls of those who practice it that, in the end, they come to consider their
own, originally deliberate, falsifications to be true; and may thus be said to
have become “dishonest with a clear conscience”.
By its
very nature, “cant” is practiced with particular luxuriousness in the foreign
policy and in the wars of England; as early as the year 1913, one of the most
highly prominent men in the Kingdom, Lord Comer, raised to an Earldom in 1901
for his services in Egypt, (in his Political and Literary Essays, p. 9)
called the term “British spirit of fair play” the cant phrase of the day
(Tönnies, Englische Weltpolitik, etc.).
Although
occasionally clearly seen for what it is, and condemned by writers and
politicians, “Right or Wrong! My Country!” remains, as before, the underlying
principle of English policy.
The aim of
the present school edition is to expose, before the eyes of our youth, this
principle of English policy, so obsequiously concealed by English statesmen and
the overwhelming majority of English historians, on the basis of testimonies by
outstanding English authors.
Derived
from such sources, the present selection will, we hope, protect us from the
reproach that of having intentionally set out to stitch together a black image.
If we have only included a few, and not even the crassest, cases of the
unscrupulousness and egotism of Albion’s policies, this was made necessary by the scope of
this little volume. Tönnies’ above mentioned book, to
which we are grateful for many references, shows the abundance of the available
material. Due to lack of space, however, we have been compelled to abridge the
selected texts to some extent.
As a
prologue, we have included an article from Herbert Spencer’s collected works, “Facts
and Comments” (London 1902), showing the distress with
which the old philosopher viewed England’s increasingly cavalier and
shameless imperialism and jingoism. A rara avis!
Seeley, the most prominent of the imperialistic
flag-waving historians of England, with his two books The
Expansion of England and The Growth of English Policy,
is too well-known to need an introduction. It should simply be noted that
reading his books today, when our eyes have been opened where England is concerned, is truly a
revelation. If Seeley’s excerpts describe England’s rise to world power and its
struggle with already declining or rival sea powers, and English power
politics, which found ruthless, unscrupulous as well as astonishingly generous
and tolerant expression in these wars, the excerpts The Rohilla
War from Macauley’s Warren Hastings, The Opium
War, from J. McCarthy, History of Our Own Times, and The Boer War
from the little volume Greater Britain by M.H. Ferrars,
included in this collection (English Authors Series, Order No. 123) also
contain serious accusations against English policy, dedicated to the interests
of its greedy and acquisitive merchant class.
But these
accusations fade to nothingness in comparison with England’s guilt where Ireland is concerned. Who can read the
chapters drawn from W.H. Lecky, A History of
England in the Eighteenth Century, from Green, A Short History of the
English People and Jonathon Swift, A Short View of the State of Ireland
without indignation?
Through
the extremely skilled employment of expedients and subtle tricks of diplomacy, England succeeded -- before the First
World War -- in bringing about the deletion from American anthologies of all
trace of the atrocities committed by British troops and their savage [American
Indian] auxiliaries during the American War of Independence. It therefore appeared all the more necessary to us to cast light upon the
English attitude towards the customs of war and humanity by means of an excerpt
from The American Revolution by G.O. Trevelyan
(Macaulay’s nephew and biographer).
Richard
Price’s essay, On Liberty, which in its day was highly significant, offers
an excellent, contemporary, and revealing description of the position of
level-headed circles in England on the American struggle as
against the small-mindedness and shortsightedness of leading English statesmen.
The manner
in which the English mentality, allegedly striving for the full flowering of
personal liberty and the freedom of the individual becomes, in reality, an
instrument threatening and crushing the life and liberty of non-English peoples
with the greatest cruelty wherever the economic interests of Englishmen are
concerned, is revealed by the last two extracts, England’s Share in the
Slave-Trade (from W.H. Leekey’s above named
work), and English Atrocities in Jamaica (from the likewise already
mentioned work by J. McCarthy, A History of Our Own Times).
The
comments accompanying the mentioned texts are intended to serve a dual purpose.
They are first of all intended to clarify the text, and then, in addition, to
place the individual extract from English history in the more general context
of world history. Our objective in so doing is to broaden the minds of our
youth while introducing them into an understanding of world politics.
The little
volume is suited to the higher grades of all institutions of higher education,
both boys and girls.
We now
have another, more agreeable, task to fulfill: through its unhesitating and
rapid procurement of the necessary source material, the publishing house of Velhagen & Klasing
contributed quite considerably to the completion of this little work, for which
we wish to express our warmest thanks.
Berlin,
The Editor