Real0ne
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Seems most people are quite clueless, not surprising since they are after all mushrooms which grow best when fed manure behind western societies iron curtain.
The Blockade and Attempted Starvation of Germany
[The Politics of Hunger: Allied Blockade of Germany, 1915-1919 • By C. Paul Vincent • Ohio University Press (1985) • 185 pages. This review was first published in the Review of Austrian Economics 3, no. 1.]
States throughout history have persisted in severely encumbering and even prohibiting international trade. Seldom, however, can the consequences of such an effort — the obvious immediate results as well as the likely long-range ones — have been as devastating as in the case of the Allied (really, British) naval blockade of Germany in the First World War. This hunger blockade belongs to the category of forgotten state atrocities of the twentieth century. (Similarly, who now remembers the tens of thousands of Biafrans starved to death during the war of independence through the policy of the Nigerian generals supported by the British government?) Thus, C. Paul Vincent, a trained historian and currently library director at Keene State College in New Hampshire, deserves our gratitude for recalling it to memory in this scholarly and balanced study.
Everywhere state seizure of social power was accompanied and fostered by propaganda drives unparalleled in history to that time. In this respect, the British were very much more successful than the Germans, and their masterly portrayal of the "Huns" as the diabolical enemies of civilization, perpetrators of every imaginable sort of "frightfulness,"1 served to mask the single worst example of barbarism in the whole war, aside from the Armenian massacres.
This was what Lord Devlin frankly calls "the starvation policy" directed against the civilians of the Central Powers (particularly Germany),2 the plan that aimed, as Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty in 1914 and one of the framers of the scheme, admitted, to "starve the whole population — men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound — into submission."3
The British policy was in contravention of international law on two major points.4 First, in regard to the character of the blockade, it violated the Declaration of Paris of 1856, which Britain itself had signed, and which, among other things, permitted "close" but not "distant" blockades. A belligerent was allowed to station ships near the three-mile limit to stop traffic with an enemy's ports; it was not allowed simply to declare areas of the high seas comprising the approaches to the enemy's coast to be off-limits.
This is what Britain did on November 3,1914, when it announced, allegedly in response to the discovery of a German ship unloading mines off the English coast, that henceforth the whole of the North Sea was a military area, which would be mined and into which neutral ships proceeded "at their own peril." Similar measures in regard to the English Channel insured that neutral ships would be forced to put into British ports for sailing instructions or to take on British pilots. During this time they could easily be searched, obviating the requirement of searching them on the high seas.
This introduces the second and even more complex question: that of contraband. Briefly, following the lead of the Hague Conference of 1907, the Declaration of London of 1909 considered food to be "conditional contraband," that is, subject to interception and capture only when intended for the use of the enemy's military forces. This was part of the painstaking effort, extending over generations, to strip war of its most savage aspects by establishing a sharp distinction between combatants and noncombatants. Among the corollaries of this was that food not intended for military use could legitimately be transported to a neutral port, even if it ultimately found its way to the enemy's territory. The House of Lords had refused its consent to the Declaration of London, which did not, consequently, come into full force. Still, as the US government pointed out to the British at the start of the war, the declaration's provisions were in keeping "with the generally recognized principles of international law." As an indication of this, the British admiralty had incorporated the Declaration into its manuals.
The British quickly began to tighten the noose around Germany by unilaterally expanding the list of contraband and by putting pressure on neutrals (particularly the Netherlands, since Rotterdam more than any other port was the focus of British concerns over the provisioning of the Germans) to acquiesce in its violations of the rules. In the case of the major neutral, the United States, no pressure was needed. With the exception of the beleaguered secretary of state, William Jennings Bryan, who resigned in 1915, the American leaders were amazingly sympathetic to the British point of view. For example, after listening to complaints from the Austrian ambassador on the illegality of the British blockade, Colonel House, Wilson's intimate advisor on foreign affairs, noted in his diary: "He forgets to add that England is not exercising her power in an objectionable way, for it is controlled by a democracy."5
The Germans responded to the British attempt to starve them into submission by declaring the seas around the British Isles a "war zone." Now the British openly announced their intention of impounding any and all goods originating in or bound for Germany. Although the British measures were lent the air of reprisals for German actions, in reality the great plan was hatched and pursued independently of anything the enemy did or refrained from doing:
The War Orders given by the Admiralty on 26 August [1914] were clear enough. All food consigned to Germany through neutral ports was to be captured and all food consigned to Rotterdam was to be presumed consigned to Germany. … The British were determined on the starvation policy, whether or not it was lawful.6
The effects of the blockade were soon being felt by the German civilians. In June 1915, bread began to be rationed. "By 1916," Vincent states, "the German population was surviving on a meager diet of dark bread, slices of sausage without fat, an individual ration of three pounds of potatoes per week, and turnips," and that year the potato crop failed. The author's choice of telling quotations from eye witnesses helps to bring home to the reader the reality of a famine such as had not been experienced in Europe outside of Russia since Ireland's travail in the 1840s. As one German put it: "Soon the women who stood in the pallid queues before shops spoke more about their children's hunger than about the death of their husbands."
An American correspondent in Berlin wrote:
Once I set out for the purpose of finding in these food-lines a face that did not show the ravages of hunger. … Four long lines were inspected with the closest scrutiny. But among the 300 applicants for food there was not one who had had enough to eat for weeks. In the case of the youngest women and children the skin was drawn hard to the bones and bloodless. Eyes had fallen deeper into the sockets. From the lips all color was gone, and the tufts of hair which fell over the parchmented faces seemed dull and famished — a sign that the nervous vigor of the body was departing with the physical strength.
Vincent places the German decision in early 1917 to resume and expand submarine warfare against merchant shipping — which provided the Wilson administration with its final pretext for entering the war — in the framework of collapsing German morale. The German U-boat campaign proved unsuccessful and, in fact, by bringing the United States into the conflict, aggravated the famine.
"Soon the women who stood in the pallid queues before shops spoke more about their children's hunger than about the death of their husbands."
"Wilson ensured that every loophole left open by the Allies for the potential reprovisioning of Germany was closed … even the importation of foodstuffs by neutrals was prevented until December 1917."
https://mises.org/library/blockade-and-attempted-starvation-germany
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