{"id":1062,"date":"2019-03-11T16:21:39","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T16:21:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsm.prolerat.org\/?page_id=1062"},"modified":"2019-10-21T13:44:41","modified_gmt":"2019-10-21T12:44:41","slug":"the-balkan-conspiracy","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/the-balkan-conspiracy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Balkan Conspiracy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
November 1912, U.K.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
To arms! To arms! Thus once again is the “Eastern Question” answered.\n Turk and Bulgarian, Mohammedan and Christian, are at one another’s \nthroats in a frenzy of blood-lust. The clash of arms and the roar of \nguns once more shake the hills and mountains of the near East, and the \ncries of wounded and dying men fill fair valleys with horror.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nWhat does it all mean? What has it got to do with us of the working class?\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nAlthough some say it is no affair of ours, we emphatically hold \notherwise. Before almost all else we Socialists are internationalists. \nWe belong to the international working class. Our grievance is \ninternational; our only hope is international, and our enemy is \ninternational also. Hence we are interested in every activity that \nhurts, hinders, or helps our fellow workers anywhere and everywhere.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThe Press, the politicians and the parsons are quite certain the war is \nthe fight of Christian martyrs against the infamies of the Turk! We hear\n from them much of the gross barbarities, the murders and the miseries, \ninflicted upon helpless Macedonia by the Terrible Turk. But we are \nunconvinced. It may all be true. The Christian may be as meek and mild \nas he is usually painted. All the provocation may be on the side of the \nunspeakable Turk. But the information is suspect. Black and bad as the \ncrimes of the Turks may be, criticism comes with little grace from \nRussia, reeking with the blood of butchered workmen, or from Spain, dank\n yet with her blood-feast of Barcelona, or from Italy, washing her hands\n after her callous inhumanities in Tripoli, or from France or Germany \nwhere as late as this year even, peaceful gatherings of unarmed workers \nhave been ruthlessly crushed with the sword, or from Belgium with her \nCongo record, or from Britain whose capital has almost blotted a people \nout in the Putomayo district of Peru, with every fiendish cruelty that \ncould be cheaply inflicted.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nTo mouth the horrors of Armenia, to point to the infamies of the Sultan \nin Macedonia, as do those who are trying to find excuses for this \nstupendous waste of working-class life, it is quite obvious, is nothing \nbut the sheerest humbug. Why, then, this war?\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nMontenegro was the first with its declaration of war\u2014a country with \nunder 250,000 inhabitants\u2014not, in that respect, the equal of the London \nsuburb, West Ham\u2014and as poor as the oft-quoted church mouse. Where did \nshe get her armaments? Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, every one of them \npoor\u2014who backed them and why?\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nWhy did Russia take up the Montenegrin war loan? Why did “The Powers” \ntake up the Bulgarian loan? Were they moved to do so by the promptings \nof humanity? Read the cynical answer in the story of past wars.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nJapan fought Russia for the forests of Manchuria. Korea helped Japan\u2014now\n Korea belongs to Japan. The United States fought Spain ostensibly on \nthe ground of the Cuban “horrors”, and the Yankee Eagle has his beak in \nthe hearts of the Cubans and the Phillipinos.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThe English Government “sought neither gold nor territory” in South \nAfrica, but the Transvaal and the Orange Free State went the way of \nZululand and the Basutos’ country\u2014and it was the wrongs of the \nUitlanders, who hadn’t got the vote, that justified the war!\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nEvery brutal and bloody gang of rulers, sitting armed on the backs of \ntheir groaning, bleeding and starving multitudes, have sobbed and \nslobbered and shed crocodile’s tears over the suffering subjects of the \nSultan. Austria was so shocked by the miseries of the poor people of \nBosnia and Herzegovina that she had to soothe her feelings by “annexing”\n both these countries. Britain also has been sorely troubled over the \nhorrors perpetrated in the Ottoman Empire, so the Cross relieved the \nCrescent of Egypt and Cyprus. Russia wrung her hands in agony, and then \nlaid them on Bessarabia. That monument to Garibaldi’s genius, A United \nItaly, itched to stop the villainies of the Porte, so she seized Tripoli\n at the admitted cost of 9,000 Italian workers’ lives, and goodness \nknows what cost to “the enemy”, if we are to believe the Italian boasts \nof slaughter.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nHave we answered the question of why this war? It is the old story of \nGrab! The monopolists of the means of life are out for plunder. Already \nthe Daily News and Leader (U.K.) has published a possible division list \nof the spoils\u2014of the division of Macedonia\u2014the filching of Turkish \nterritory.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThe world’s financiers, the world’s brigands, are seeking wider fields \nfor exploitation. The owners of the New World are grasping at the old. \nBulgarian peasants, Servian toilers, Grecian slaves, are to sacrifice \ntheir lives to provide plunder for the moneyed tyrannies of Europe. \nWomen of our class are to be widowed, children to be orphaned, homes to \nbe desolated, to make a masters’ holiday. Hence the war fever is \naroused, religious rivalries stirred up, racial hatreds and jealousies \nfanned to fury by judicious but unscrupulous lying\u2014and all that \nMacedonia may go the way of Persia.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nWe counsel our toiling brothers of the Balkans, be their religion what \nit may, to seriously ask themselves who really is to benefit by this \nwar. The “Powers”, who so applaud their “heroism”, who affect such \npained surprise at each new enormity of the Porte, could have prevented \nthose enormities, could have prevented this war, if they had been in \nagreement upon anything else than the desire for plunder. But they were \nnot. For a generation they have been sitting like vultures on the \nmountain tops waiting for a beakful of carrion. For a generation they \nhave carefully treasured every discordant element that could possibly \nengender strife and evolve into “atrocity” because they knew that out of\n that strife and “atrocity”, sooner or later, would come the \ndismemberment of the Turkish Empire, and the attendant rich pickings for\n whoever was strong enough to take them.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nMake no mistake about it\u2014the “Powers” wanted war. Just as the Christian \nreligion has been the stalking horse of European diplomacy for the last \nhalf century, preserving ever fresh the excuse of “Turkish misrule”, so \nnow the Balkan States are the stalking horse of that same callous \ndiplomacy. If that diplomacy has not entirely overreached itself; if it \nhas not set up in this Balkan League a power it is afraid to tackle; if \nthe fruits of  its machinations have not developed into something beyond\n its control, then the plums of the Turkish cake will find their way \ninto the insatiable maws of the “powers” at last.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThe lesson of it all for the workers is that nothing in the world is \nsacred that stands in the way of capitalist aggrandisement\u2014which is \nspelt: “Profits”. In pursuit of profits no crime is too stupendous to be\n undertaken. We have examples of this everywhere, from the supplying of \npoisonous provisions to American troops by American contractors during \nthe War of Independence to the deliberate raising of the load line of \nships by the present British Government.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nSome years ago a novel was published, the essence of which was the \nsituation of a man who had a great fortune within his reach if he would,\n by the mere pressure of an electric button, slay an unknown man many \nthousands of miles away. The book created something of a sensation\u2014which\n shows how very ignorant are the average man and woman of the obvious \nfacts of the world about them. The situation depicted by the author \npresented nothing new. It just reduced to the private individual the \nsituation groups of the dominant section of society are always finding \nthemselves in, with, of course, different details\u2014the situation they use\n all their diplomatic forces to place themselves in. In the pursuit of \nthis end every known means is exploited without compunction. Religion, \npatriotism, greed\u2014any human emotion will serve. Hence the Jameson raid \nas a prelude to the South African War\u2014it roused the “patriotic” fervour \nof the “bull-dog breed” to frenzy. Hence religious strife has been \nfostered in the Near East by the great European powers, in order to \nprovide the excuse that it was the Cross against the Crescent.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nIt doesn’t need the inducement of a great fortune for the button of \nmurder to be pressed in our modern civilisation… The silk hats of \nThrogmorton Street have manipulated the button which sent a Peruvian \nnative to death for\u2014guess what\u2014two hundredweight of rubber! In the Congo\n human beings were much cheaper. Every fourteen pounds of Congo rubber \nproduced under the auspices of that moral turpitude, the late King of \nBelgium, cost one human life.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nFor the mines of Morocco hundreds of French soldiers went to their doom.\n The armies of Russia and Japan died on account of forest concessions in\n Manchuria in the hands of a few Russian nobles. An English court of \nenquiry has just found that 23 British seamen were sacrificed for the \nfreightage of 160 tons of overload cargo. The chairman of the \nConsolidated Mines spoke volumes when he told his shareholders some \nthirteen years ago that a victory for the British arms in the war then \nraging (S. Africa) would mean \u00a34,000,000 a year in extra profits.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nWorkers of the world, it is necessary for you to understand these things\n in order that you may penetrate the curtain of excuses behind which it \nis endeavoured to hide the real reasons for this new butchery. You see \nfrom the above how much value the rulers anywhere set on the lives of \nthe workers. What, then, think you, are the sufferings of Macedonian \nChristians to them? They would press the murder button on the lot for \nthe sake of a concession to run a railway over their corpses.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThe working class of the world has only one enemy\u2014the master class. We \ncall earnestly upon all working men and women to join with us for the \noverthrow of that enemy.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nTo arms!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
Back to the History Index<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n\n\n\n
Back to the World Socialist Movement home page<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
November 1912, U.K. To arms! To arms! Thus once again is the “Eastern Question” answered. Turk and Bulgarian, Mohammedan and Christian, are at one another’s throats in a frenzy of blood-lust. The clash of arms and the roar of guns once more shake the hills and mountains of the near East, and the cries of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"magazine_newspaper_sidebar_layout":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1062","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1062"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2640,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1062\/revisions\/2640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}