Chaos and Identity: from World War I to Today

By Mr. Philip Souers and PhD

In 1914, by complete accident, the rulers of Western Eurasia started a suicidal war, with a eastern battle line running from Finland four thousand miles to Iran. The book recapitulates the Great War from 1911 to 1923, but it is really about what the War did. Based on nationalism that nobody knew existed, people bid for recognition and independence and most of them failed; their countries were proclaimed dead but many have come back to life in our time. The underdogs, who refused to lose their identity, are back seeking their place in the sun. This history book covers all the countries in the contested zone, what happened to them and why we should care a hundred years later. The author is a Cold War weapons scientist with his particular bias toward Russia. The narrative is pepped up with color pictures of flags, postage stamps carrying the propaganda of the time, old-time photos, maps, newspaper articles and accounts by great 1920 s travelers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: Apr 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781634134590

Book preview

today.

Chapter 1. The Battle Line in World War I (1911-1923)

For over a thousand years, kings and emperors ruled the European peninsula of the greater Asian continent. In 1914, by complete accident, these rulers started a suicidal war that destroyed their way of life and cast hundreds of millions of people into a new world.

A hundred years have past since World War I and people will commemorate the battles one by one, even though it has lain hidden behind World War II and there is nobody alive to remember it directly. This is not about the war but about what it did. Based on nationalism that nobody knew existed, people bid for recognition and independence and most of them failed; their countries were proclaimed dead but many have come back to life. The underdogs, who refused to lose their identity even though they weren’t sure they had one, are back seeking their place in the sun. A hundred years ago, World War I was the greatest shock wave ever in the West, taking down four huge, old empires. Our world began then, from machine guns to super totalitarianism to rampant nationalism to ethnic cleansing to the destructive excitation of the Near East.

West and East

There has always been a West and an East in Eurasia. Karl Wittfogel (1896-1988) suggested the idea of hydraulic civilizations, which, long ago, were all in the Near East in dry areas with large rivers. It was possible to build up large population densities but only if massive water distribution projects were constructed, which required a huge top-down bureaucracy and absolutist rule. Hence, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia created the first civilizations about 2500 B. C. with rulers possessing complete power and with featureless subjects like electrons, which are all the same in quantum theory. This has never changed in this part of the world.

The West-East border has been in contention from the first moment of written history. Europe was different from Asia with many fewer people scraping out their existence in cold valleys between mountains and forests, with no great rivers to bring yearly floods of rich soil.

In ancient Persia the construction of the largest empire then known accelerated under Cyrus the Great (600 or 576 B. C.-530 B.C.), with the Golden Age coming under Darius the Great (550-486 B. C.), who built his capital at Persepolis, and who attacked Greece, where rational thinking and suspicion of authority was beginning to take root. He failed and strange, new Greek ideas got more time to develop. A few Athenians created the famous core of Western Civilization by themselves while fighting everybody around them.

Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) captured all the territory of the East, much of which became the industrial base of the Roman Empire. The Romans, even more than the Greeks, displayed the ability to write down the merciless truth of what really happened, no matter how embarrassing it might be, whereas the East never told the truth. But the East rallied under the Parthians (247 B. C.-224 A. D.), who fought the Romans to a standstill on their border, and they were followed by the Sasanid Empire (224-651), with their capital at Ctesiphon, south of today’s Bagdad. Heraclius (575-641), Emperor of Constantinople finally defeated the Sasanids for keeps, the ultimate goal of the Romans. But at that instant of triumph, Islam came boiling out of the desert to finish off the ancient Western world.

Every day, our world is affected by the coming of Muhammad (570-632) from the remote town of Mecca in the Hejaz (now Saudi Arabia) with a vision of the one god Allah, which led to an explosive outward invasion of the Arabs, who ran over every army they met for over a hundred years. In an incredibly short time, the Arabs conquered as much as the Roman Empire had gotten over centuries- an empire to top even Alexander. They believed the Arab conquest was successful because Allah wanted them to win in a historical age that was made for them.

In 674-678, the Arabs under the successful Muawiyah I at the height of their powers went against the last bastion of the West. Muawiyah had beaten the Arab system, which sought to keep generals from profiting so much from their conquests that they became independent rulers. Now, with all the religious energy that had earned the Arabs the greatest empire in the shortest time, he turned toward the last great city of the West, Constantinople. The Emperor of the Byzantines was Constantine IV (652-685), who prepared far ahead of time for what was coming. Greek fire was introduced in the naval battles. Every year the Arabs came back from their winter quarters, but they could not take the city after five years of siege.

In 717, the Arab Umayyad Empire made their second assault on Constantinople, whose Emperor was Leo III the Isaurian (685-741). Both sides had prepared for years for the battle and the Turks brought 100,000 soldiers. The Byzantine navy, using Greek fire, neutralized the Ottoman fleet and the Bulgarians from the west came to help. After a year’s siege, the Arabs gave up, never to try again for over seven hundred years, during which time Europe grew up. Had the Byzantines lost, perhaps most of Europe might have become Muslim in the Dark Ages. Unlike the usual zero-sum battles found in history, the stand at Constantinople was a strategic win for the West over the East.

In the European Dark Ages, barbarian tribes elected their leaders who had to perform. In the Middle Ages, the Catholic church never gained complete control, and no king ever conquered a huge empire for long. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), at the height of the Early Middle Ages, felt he had to use philosophy to justify his religion, whereas Abu al-Hasan al-Ash’ari (874-936) trashed the philosophic approach and turned Islam back to readings of the Koran and the Hadith.

The Ottoman Empire was the last super-empire in the Near East, lasting from 1299 to 1923. The Ottomans had started as an Asiatic band and slowly built up strength by taking the Anatolian peninsula piece by piece from the Byzantines. They first put a capital at Bursa to the east of Constantinople, then crossed the Dardanelles to put it at Hadrianople (modern Edirne) in Thrace. The Golden years were 1453–1566, starting when Mehmed the Conqueror (1432-1481) took Constantinople and made it his capital. Selim the Grim (1470-1520) then conquered lands around the Mediterranean non-stop. His son, Suleiman the Magnificent (1494-1566) conquered much of Hungary and Mesopotamia (Iraq) but the empire had reached its zenith, with magnificent and gigantic mosques built by the architect Sinan the Great. The harem was invented and the court reached new degrees of splendor.

Luckily, the West by complete chance missed being overrun by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. However, one of the Mongol vassals until 1480 was the Grand Duchy of Moscow (1283-1547), which expanded north of Moscow to the Arctic Ocean, a bleak beginning. The successor state was the Tsardom of Russia (1547-1721), which continued to expand using all the grim techniques it had learned from the Mongols. It was brought together as an empire by Peter the Great (1672-1725), who created the Baltic capital of St. Petersburg. The empire stretched from Europe to the Pacific and south to the Black Sea and to the south edge of the Caspian Sea. In Europe, Russia controlled modern Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the Caucasus, the Baltic states including Finland, and a section of Poland and northeast Turkey. The empire reached its greatest extent in 1866, just when the U. S. had ended its Civil War.

The Ottoman Empire continued to expand across the Balkan peninsula into Hungary and arrived at the gates of Vienna in Austria with at least 120,000 men in 1529 under Suleiman the Magnificent at the very height of power. He was at the end of a long supply line but determined to make the final push. The commander for the Austrians was Nicholas, Count of Salm (1459-1530), who set up his headquarters in St. Stephens Cathedral. Heavy rain, followed by snow, hampered the Ottomans, who gave up after the month of October, never to come so close again. Nicholas died of his wounds but twenty-three thousand men had held Vienna.

Over a hundred years later, in 1683, the Turks came again. For three months, the city held out against 90 to 300 thousand Turks until the 84,000-man relief force from Poland, the Holy Roman Empire (Germany), Bavaria, Saxony and Hungary arrived. A single day with a great cavalry charge and it was over. The losing Ottoman general, Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha (1634/1635-1683) had put up a weak defense and was strangled by his masters with a silk cord. This was the end of Ottoman expansion, but the Empire hung on in place for the next 240 years.

It was in Florence, Italy, where the idea of the individual, always latent in Western civilization, was given a boost. This was picked up again in the Enlightenment at the end of the seventeenth century. The Enlightenment began with an incredible idea: the idea of Progress, that somehow mankind was destined to move ahead and make things better. This amazing idea, first put forward in 1683 by Bernard de Fontenelle (1657-1757), had never been thought of by the Greeks, Romans, or anybody else, who believed that history was either running downhill from the Golden Age or cycled though the same old thing over and over. Armed with this potent thought, which underpins everything we do today, the West took off, slowly turning experimental science on and then jetting into the Industrial Revolution. Starting in England, the idea arose that the king was accountable to his people, who would be represented by a parliament with enough power to stop the king. This took centuries to evolve and got a boost when English values were transferred to the United States. The expansion of these ideas eastwards has not been so easy.

New Countries

More boundaries moved and more new countries were created after WWI than any other time. WWII killed more people, but boundaries changed only a little, and that was followed by the Cold War against the U.S.S.R. The American policy was that the Soviet Union would eventually collapse by itself, but the Americans were astounded when it did.

A hundred years ago, four enormous and long-lived empires, German, Russian, Hapsburg and Ottoman, fell apart and all their holdings either demanded independence or were seized by someone else – a vast laboratory where new things could happen.

From Finland to Iran, the battlefields of World War I separate Europe and Asia. One northern combatant was Austria-Germany (blue) and the other Russia (crinkled brown). The battle line (gold/light brown) lies in between, running from Finland in the north to Hejaz in the south.

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The giant countries attacked other across the lands of lesser people that they considered expendable. A hundred years ago, before the internet, how did expendable people make their presence known? They declared a provisional government, sent out emissaries to international meetings, created a flag and if they lasted long enough, put out postage stamps with their message. After WWI, the number of new postal entities exploded. This was one way of letting the world know of their presence, as long as the country held together long enough to print and distribute them.

New entities, large and small, important and forgettable, that put out stamps after World War I.

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Pan-States

Nationalism can promote a single country but also groups of countries. In fact, states don’t have to exist to cause trouble. Pan-states are imaginary states to be created by combining or expanding existing real states. Three of these imaginary countries figured heavily in WWI.

Pan-Germanism started with the unification of Germany in 1871 with the grim prodding of Bismarck (1815-1898). It would seem that all it could do would be to add Austria, the only other German-speaking country. But Usher did not think so in 1915, and his definition of it was the German desire to conquer Europe and maybe part of Asia. He realized that these dreams were way beyond being German. He saw all the German agitation as a way of working themselves up to making the supreme bid and using the preliminary wars as a means of getting there. So Pan-Germanism, to him, was a state of mind for conquest. Supporting this idea was the creation of the Pan-German League, formed in 1891, which added ideas like racial purity and anti-Semitism, which would later be picked up by Hitler to make Germany seem even more special. Pan-Germanism was enough to provide the fuel for two world wars. Following Germany’s total defeat in 1945, pan-Germanism is dead.

Pan-Slavism was the idea that all Slavs should unite. Slavs speak languages that came originally from an Indo-European source possibly in Ukraine. Supposedly they also have some common ethnic background, but different national histories have muddied this. The idea first came from Juraj Krizanic (1618-1683), a Croatian Catholic missionary who spent many years in Russia. He wanted to unite not only Slavs but also the Catholic and Orthodox churches. He traveled with the Polish army to the battle of Vienna in 1683, where he died at the moment of victory. His idea was picked up in 1848 at a Pan-Slav congress in Prague, which was shut down by the Austrian army. When the Serbs gained independence in 1878, they turned to Russia, who has consistently supported them over the decades, despite getting nothing in return. The ultimate Pan-Slav act was Russia going to war when Austria invaded Serbia in 1914. Had Russia concluded that the Balkans were too far away, WWI might never have escalated, but pan-Slavism decided otherwise. After WWI, the Serb-driven formation of Yugoslavia, combining Slavic groups that had never gotten along, was yet another pan-Slavic act. Poland never got into it, because they figured correctly that Russia would dominate such any Slav union. All the experiments failed because the parts had different histories and one part always sought to dominate the others. Today, pan-Slavism is not dead, because Vladimir Putin believes that Ukraine, Russia and Belarus naturally belong together.

Another version of pan-Slavism was Czechoslovakism, the idea that Czechs and Slovaks were the same and could be combined with no problem. This idea appeared in WWI as the Czechs plotted their own independence. The Slovaks, who had no representation in the post-war arguments, had little choice and probably preferred the Czechs to the Hungarians. The inevitable breakup caused by differences that were there all along came in 1993.

Not quite dead either is pan-Turkism, the idea that people speaking the Turkic languages should unite because they have a common ethnic background. However, the main Turkish groups are in Anatolia, central Asia and faraway northeastern Siberia. It started with Ghabdennasir Qursawi (1776-1812), an imam and headmaster of a madrasa in the central Asian part of Russia. His remarkable idea was to refresh the moribund Islamic peoples by incorporating new knowledge from Europe including critical thinking and equality of sexes, all the things that much of the Islamic world still refuses to accept. The program, called Jadidism, added nationalism and for some people, drifted toward Turkish cultural unity.

The idea came alive in 1908 in Turkey, when the Committee of Union and Progress, the Young Turks, seized the government and led the country into WWI, while carrying out massacres of the peoples in eastern Anatolia. Some had the idea of creating a super-Turkish state, but Kemal Pasha settled for what he could get: a Turkish state for the Turks as a replacement for the Caliphate. The modern Pan version is the Turkic Council, which was created with the azure flag in 2009. The members are Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan remaining outside. So far, the organization appears mild, being mostly an incipient economic union.

Pan-Arabism is the idea of uniting all Arab countries for real, because their religion already states that all Arabs are united under Islam. The West gutted this idea after WWI, and the Arabs have never managed much of it on their own. A pulse of interest appeared under Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970), who got the Russians to build him his big dam and appeared to embrace Socialism in the dark period when it looked like America might be losing the ideological battle of the Cold War. All that emerged was a three-year unification with Syria, which soon broke down. The closest thing today is the Arab League, formed in 1945 in Cairo with six members, which has grown to 22, which covers North Africa and Arabia plus Eritrea. It is a forum to discuss policy positions, but it has never taken a serious stand on anything. The pull of nationalism, with every country doing their thing, even if their borders were decided by Westerners, has been too great.

Pan-Iranism was a reaction to Pan-Turkism and Pan-Arabism, started by Mahmoud Afshar in the 1920’s. After years of Western interference in Iran, he was afraid Turks or Arabs might get inspired, so Pan-Iranism was a circling of the wagons on the Iranian Plateau. Unlike the other Pans, it was not linguistic or ethic but just geographic. The Pan-Iranist Party formed in 1941 at Teheran University and created a flag with an inequality sign, to indicate how others had misused Iran. With the coming of the Revolution, the party has struggled to exist but still is there as an opposition party with little clout. Perhaps it would have led to something had not the Islamic Revolution occurred.

Top Left: The Pan-Slav flag was proposed about 1848. It reminds you of the flags of Russia and Serbia, both, of course, being Slavic. The connection of the two countries was a cause of WWI.

Top Right: The Turkic Council (2009) is a vague combination of Turkish people too spread out across Asia for anything serious to work.

Bottom Left: The Pan-Iranist Party (1941) has the only flag ever with a mathematical symbol. The unequal sign indicates how Iran is doing against the West and the pan refers more to Iranians than outsiders. The party still exists, even in today’s theocracy, and their imagery is still correct.

Bottom Right: The Arab League created this flag with Islamic green in 1945. The League is a United Nations of the Arabs.

Chapter 2. World War I- What Happened?

One side was made up originally of Great Britain, France and the Russian Empire and was called the Triple Entente. As the war went on, they were joined by Japan, Belgium, Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, Romania, and the United States. The name Entente really applies during the war. After that, it is called the Western Powers or Western Allies, because Russia became Communist and dropped out. The other side in WWI was the Central Powers, made up of the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and later, Bulgaria.

A series of events happened where little things got bigger and bigger until it went out of control and destroyed the aristocrats who started it, much like the ebola virus that kills its host and itself. Each next-step didn’t have to happen but they all did, one after another. Europe had experienced a hundred years without a major war following the downfall of Napoleon, and people thought that final stability had been achieved. From 1880 on, the First Period of Globalization began with international business booming for thirty years. Many people believed that nobody would be so stupid to fiddle with the super-successful market economy that Western Civilization had created from the Industrial Revolution. As industry ramped up, so did massive military spending, with many new inventions, like machine guns and airplanes. The Europeans sent observers to the American Civil War, who reported that the huge scale of things made war completely different, and a war might end up with long sieges in trenches. But in Europe nobody listened, because America was a faraway place. The buildup of weapons went on, especially the creation of a German High Seas Fleet for no particular reason other than to outrage the British.

The Great War in a Capsule

In 1911, Italy invaded Libya to show that they, too, could acquire colonies. The Turks who controlled Libya seemed so feeble that the Italians thought they would walk in, but the actual war took a year before the Turks gave in. A young officer, Mustafa Kemal (1881-1938, called Kemal Pasha in the 1920’s and later Ataturk), was there and would reappear to transform the remains of the Ottoman Empire. Although this adventure cost Italy big time, it looked to others like the Ottoman Empire was ready to be taken down easily.

What started it all: Italians at Tripoli in Libya, 1911.

* * * * *

The Turks had also controlled all of the Balkan Peninsula but had slowly been losing parts of it during the 19th century, so that Greece, Montenegro, Serbia, and Bulgaria had become independent. By 1912, the Turks controlled only Rumelia, a band of land running across the peninsula from Albania to Thrace. As a result of observing the outcome in Libya, the four independent Balkan countries now attacked Turkey in the First Balkan War, threw it out of the peninsula and drove almost to Constantinople. The major European powers then stepped in to prevent Turkey from losing even more and a treaty was signed, creating the new Muslim country of Albania. Bulgaria was a major winner, having acquired much of Thrace, the area west of Constantinople and leading up to it.

Top Left: Libya, 1912-1917. In the North African desert is where the mega-wars of the Twentieth Century began. The Italian eagle is overprinted Libia.

Top Left Center: Rhodes 1912-1924. After taking Libya, the Italians grabbed all the islands in the Mediterranean, and Rhodes was the biggest. The Italians built them their first power plant, but the inhabitants still wanted them to leave. The picture is of Italian King Victor Emmanuel III.

Top Right Center: Saseno, 1923. The Italian stamps gave this miserable island off the Albanian coast more fame than it deserved. The island’s darkest secret- a Soviet chemical warfare plant was yet to come in the future. The King again appears on the stamp.

Top Right: Cararno/Fiume, 1920. Gabrielle d’Annunzio, the poet, set up a anarchic and short-lived government in the city of Fiume, and influenced the upcoming Fascist world by creating the necessary theatrics. The Latin inscription says Here we’ll stay wonderfully.

Bottom: Italy, 1941. Mussolini set the early standard for European Fascist leaders, and he cast his lot with Hitler forming the Rome-Berlin axis commemorated here. D’Annunzio told him that associating with Hitler was a bad idea. Hitler set the final standard for fascism.

* * * * *

Throwing out the Ottomans was not enough for Bulgaria, who attacked Serbia and Greece in order to get more. All the other countries counter-attacked in the Second Balkan War and