A Peace to End All Peace

This book covers the buildup before WW1, to its end and some post-WW1 scuffles and ends around 1923, focusing entirely on the Middle East.

This is also the longest audiobook I've ever gotten through, so this review is gonna be a doozie. I made lots of highlights in my ebook copy so I wouldn't forget my thoughts. I have attempted to compile the most interesting factoids along with my thoughts in a mildly cohesive narrative. Half of this review is quotes from the book because it's so insane that I don't think anyone would believe me otherwise.

In order to understand the modern Middle East, you must understand how Europe (mostly Britain) carved up the Ottoman Empire after winning WW1. To put it simply, the people who had control of the collapsed Ottoman Empire (France and Britain) had little to no understanding of the regions they had been tasked with carving up. The people who actually lived there did not have input on the decisions made. Their hubris has sent a century-long shockwave through the region that has no sign of getting resolved for the next century or more.

Miscellaneous
• Even before WW1 started, Europe was already conducting corporate colonialism over Ottoman means of production. An empire being colonized. Who would a thunk it? “Europeans also shared in the control of what is at the heart of a political entity: its finances. Because the Porte had defaulted on a public debt of more than a thousand million dollars in 1875, the Sultan was obliged to issue a decree in 1881 that placed administration of the Ottoman public debt in European hands.”
• The German Empire probably could have won WW1 if they hadn't goaded the US Empire into war against them.
• In both WW1 and WW2, the British, French, and Americans were on the same side as Russia. This is really funny since they always hated the Russians and it was just circumstantial “enemy of my enemy” sort of allies. The more things change, etc.
• Any time they mentioned Ibn Saud or Wahhabism, my ears perked up. Watch the documentary “Bitter Lake” (2015) by Adam Curtis to learn why. The Brit's recognized his fanatical faction back then. They supported him, he garnered too much power, they sent their puppets against him and lost. Who knows how different the world might be if European empires stopped the Saudis & Wahhabism from ruling Arabia? More buildings in NYC maybe?
• TE Lawerence, AKA: “Lawrence of Arabia” was apparently a bit of an over-exaggerator. That and British bigotry resulted in the legend of Lawrence expanding well-beyond reality: “Lawrence possessed many virtues but honesty was not among them; he passed off his fantasies as the truth. [...] Lawrence's arrival with the news from Aqaba completed his nine months' transformation into a military hero. Auda abu Tayi, sheikh of the eastern Howeitat, who had in fact won the victory, did not have a name that tripped easily off the tongues of British officers. Instead they said, as historians did later, that ‘Lawrence took Aqaba.'”

White & Christian Supremacy
• The European empires were simply white supremacists & Christian supremacists who believed their form of rule is the only acceptable form and believe they had a divine right to control the Arabic-speaking peoples because “they were incapable of genuine independence” and “the Arabs can't govern themselves”. It's just “the white man's burden - European edition”.
• The European empires didn't care about self-determination. And the Arabs “did not want to be ruled by Christians or Europeans”. Who can blame them?
• Europe's white supremacy blinded them so much that they couldn't even fathom the idea of simply asking the Arabic people what they want. This was recommended by Woodrow Wilson and resulted in the DOA King-Crane Commission. A valiant effort but the European Empires would never let their subjects decide their own fates.

Anti-Semitism
• The most bizarre fact I learned was that pretty much every single person in charge in Europe at the time was extremely anti-Semitic and genuinely believed in a covert global Jewish cabal, so much so that many tried to get said cabal on their side to help win the war. The anti-Zionists were anti-Semitic. The pro-Zionists were anti-Semitic. Everyone in every country.
• This anti-Semitic conspiratorial mindset even resulted in Europeans believing that the Bolshevik revolution in Russia was actually “secret agents called into existence by Germans doing the work of Jews who were devoted to the vengeful destruction of Russia.” Insane.
• The Catholics thought that Zionism and Bolshevism were a part of the same Jewish world conspiracy “seeking the destruction of the Christian world”.
• The anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about “Jewish domination” stemmed from a piece of propaganda called “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” which was first published in 1903 but didn't garner popularity in Europe until 1920. It “purported to be a record of meetings held by Jews and Freemasons at the end of the nineteenth century in which they plotted to overthrow capitalism and Christianity and to establish a world state under their joint rule.” Powerful people in Britain and France genuinely believed this propaganda was true.
• However, the protocols were a forgery concocted by the Czarist Russia's secret police, who plagiarized them from a satire on Napoleon III. So that's fun. Now I know more about the phony globalist Jewish conspiracy theory than I ever did before.

Zionism, Palestine, & Britain
• Zionism became popular amongst Christians in part because of “a powerful evangelical movement within the Church of England that aimed at bringing the Jews back to Palestine, converting them to Christianity, and hastening the Second Coming.” This is especially funny since one of the most powerful pro-Zionist movements in the US today are the conservative evangelicals who believe the same thing.
• The British Empire spearheaded the Zionist movement under the guise of wanting a homeland for a historically oppressed people. They claimed it was “Biblical prophecy to restore the Jews to Zion.” This was a smokescreen.
• The real reason was because of the strategic importance of Palestine to the British Empire. It was a key link on the land route to India. Keeping control of lands between the Mediterranean and India was their primary drive during and after WW1.
• “Palestine gave Britain the land road from Egypt to India and brought together the empires of Africa and Asia. [...] With the addition of Palestine and Mesopotamia [Iraq], the Cape Town to Suez stretch could be linked up with the stretch of territory that ran through British-controlled Persia [Iran] and the Indian Empire to Burma, Malaya, and the two great Dominions in the Pacific—Australia and New Zealand. As of 1917, Palestine was the key missing link that could join together the parts of the British Empire so that they would form a continuous chain from the Atlantic to the middle of the Pacific.”
• The zionists knew their plans to colonize Palestine would result in a geopolitical nightmare even back in 1918. But empires are gonna empire and colonizers are gonna colonize. And here we are over 100 years later with the matter no closer to being solved. Britain is the reason why Israel exists. Britain, and to a far lesser extent France, are the causes of the century-long strife in the entire region.
• “[Aaron Aaronsohn's] work tended to show that, without displacing any of the 600,000 or so inhabitants of western Palestine, millions more could be settled on land made rich and fertile by scientific agriculture.” Jim's at camera [Narrator: that's not what happened]

Jordan & Palestine
• Apparently Palestine also included the country of Jordan, and because the Brits were selling off the Middle East, Churchill inadvertently cleaved the country apart and created a wholly new nation. Insane.
• “The recurring suggestion that Palestine be partitioned between Arabs and Jews ran up against the problem that 75 percent of the country had already been given to an Arab dynasty that was not Palestinian. The newly created province of Transjordan, later to become the independent state of Jordan, gradually drifted into existence as an entity separate from the rest of Palestine; indeed, today it is often forgotten that Jordan was ever part of Palestine.”
• This has been deemed illegal by many folks in the region and overall deemed a dick move by Churchill.

The US Empire
• The US Empire's involvement in WW1 is the most interesting. Woodrow Wilson is undeniably a white supremacist. But he was publicly an anti-imperialist. His fourteen points, while noble, weren't followed through because of Wilson's mediocre negotiating skills and having a stroke. The Allied empires did whatever they could to scoop up more colonies without sparking the US's ire. Or even better, they sicked the US after a former ally for being too colonialist.
• “Lloyd George's Middle Eastern strategy was to direct the Americans' anti-imperialist ire against the claims presented by Italy and France, distracting the President from areas in which he might make difficulties for Britain. Maurice Hankey, British Secretary to the Peace Conference, recorded in his diary even before the conference convened that Lloyd George ‘means to try and get President Wilson into German East Africa in order to ride him off Palestine.'”
• I wish this book had thrown in a sentence or two about how the “staunchly anti-imperialist” Woodrow Wilson refused to meet with Ho Chi Mihn, who was at the Versailles peace talks to lobby for the liberation of Vietnam from French Colonizers. We all know what happened after that....
• The US Empire's failure to back up Wilson's Fourteen Points resulted in Britain and France having complete control over the Middle East's fate.
• After Wilson left office, we got a good modern colonialist in W.G. Harding who didn't give a damn about self-governance and used the power of the state to protect corporate oil interests. Where have I heard that before?

No Honor Among Thieves
• The Brits really won WW1. They won it flat out. They won and did everything they could to secure that imperial land route, including stabbing the French in the back. They were all trying to stab each-other in the back and gobble up the plunder for themselves:
• “The French did not believe that the British were sponsoring Jewish and Arab aspirations in good faith, while the British discussed how, rather than whether, to break their agreements with France. Neither Britain nor France planned to honor wartime commitments to Italy. Neither Britain nor France was disposed to carry out the idealistic program of Woodrow Wilson with which, when Washington was listening, they pretended to be in sympathy.”
• The back-stabbing allies really heated up after the Angora Accord, where the French made a separate peace with Turkey, resulting in a proxy war between British-backed Greeks & French-backed Turks in 1921. Wild
• With the dust settled, their empires garnered these states: “Palestine and Mesopotamia [Iraq] to be kept by Britain; Arabia was to remain independent under British-influenced monarchs, Egypt and the Gulf coast already having been taken by Britain; and Syria, including Lebanon, was to go to France.”
• Britain & France screwing over Italy in the spoils of war inspired an Italian political agitator named Benito Mussolini. Boy I sure hope that doesn't result in anything bad.......

Social Democracy
This was my favorite quote:
“In 1920 and 1921 the British economy collapsed. Prices collapsed, exports slumped, companies went out of business, and the country was gripped by mass unemployment on a scale never known before. [...] it had always been Lloyd George's view that ‘the way to prevent the spread of the revolutionary spirit was to embark at once on large schemes of social progress.' In his view, to give up such schemes was to leave the door open for agitation and violence.”
Bingo. This is exactly what FDR, the “man who saved capitalism,” did with the New Deal. That was the point. Force capitalists to give a little to prevent them from losing it all. Workers win in the short term and lose in the long term. This is one reason why anti-capitalists don't trust Social Democrats.

Backfire
• The reason why European imperialism failed so miserably in the Middle East was because of their fundamental misunderstanding in the millennia-old culture and identity of the peoples. Europe imposed a secular nation-state structure to a people who did not want that.
• “Beneath such apparently insoluble, but specific, issues as the political future of the Kurds or the political destiny of the Palestinian Arabs, lies the more general question of whether the transplanted modern system of politics invented in Europe—characterized, among other things, by the division of the earth into independent secular states based on national citizenship—will survive in the foreign soil of the Middle East.”
• “In the rest of the world European political assumptions are so taken for granted that nobody thinks about them anymore; but at least one of these assumptions, the modern belief in secular civil government, is an alien creed in a region most of whose inhabitants, for more than a thousand years, have avowed faith in a Holy Law that governs all of life, including government and politics.”
• It took Europe 1500 years to resolve the collapse of the Roman Empire and form into the modern nation-state system that exists today. It's been 100 years since the end of WW1. I doubt this'll be resolved within the next 100 years.
• “In a leading article on 7 August 1920, The Times demanded to know ‘how much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavour to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?'”
• Europe didn't care about the minutia around the various religious sects and their millennia-old divisions. Sunnis, Shi'ites, Kurds, none of that mattered to the imperialists. Europe's most prestigious libraries didn't even have to-date information about the region. Britain's leaders made reference to geographic areas from The Bible.
• “An Italian diplomat wrote that “A common sight at the Peace Conference in Paris was one or other of the world's statesmen, standing before a map and muttering to himself: ‘Where is that damn'd...?' while he sought with extended forefinger for some town or river that he had never heard of before.” Lloyd George, who kept demanding that Britain should rule Palestine from (in the Biblical phrase) Dan to Beersheba, did not know where Dan was. He searched for it in a nineteenth-century Biblical atlas, but it was not until nearly a year after the armistice that General Allenby was able to report to him that Dan had been located and, as it was not where the Prime Minister wanted it to be, Britain asked for a boundary further north”. These were the idiots in charge of carving up the Middle East.
• And unsurprisingly, immediately after the war ended and the lines got drawn, the people began uprising against their colonialist oppressors. The British people didn't want to spend the money on maintaining the empire. The government didn't want to commit the troops they needed to maintain their stranglehold.
• Then we come with the greatest quote ever: “Bonar Law argued that if the United States and the Allies were not prepared to share the burden of responsibility, Britain should put it down. ‘We cannot alone act as the policeman of the world. The financial and social conditions of this country make that impossible.'“ Hilarious. Only took another ~3 decades for the US empire to pick up that mantle as world police.

Iraq
• Britain created the country of Iraq. It is the reason why that nation exists. It bankrolled Iraq's first monarch and orchestrated an astroturf campaign to get him into power.
• “In the east, Kurdish, Sunni, Shi'ite, and Jewish populations had been combined into a new Mesopotamian country named Iraq, under the rule of an Arabian prince; it looked like an independent country, but Britain regarded it as a British protectorate.”
• The US Empire's oil oligarchs supported British Hegemony in their puppet state: “Allen Dulles, chief of the Near Eastern Affairs Division of the Department of State, was one of the many officials who expressed dismay at the thought that Britain and France might relinquish control of their Middle Eastern conquests, and who expressed fear for the fate of American interests should they do so.” Fun fact: Allen Dulles went on to run the CIA and orchestrated the assassination of JFK, as well as the coverup. See: “The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government” (2015) by David Talbot


The book stops at 1923, but I really wanted it to keep going and cover the rest of the 1900s. I'll have to find a THIRD book covering that. Not sure what that'll be.

This book is incredible and fascinating and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in history.