THE EFFECTS OF WORLD WAR ONE ON SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUES
World War One put our country into a state of emergency.
I write this article as America (and the world at large) stands in the midst of an onslaught of national emergencies. The corona virus has taken control of our thinking and new ways of helping people are now being implemented by our President.
Among these are new regulations guaranteeing people’s jobs, protecting the economics of families, assisting healthcare, looking after the elderly, providing extra research, allowing schools and public institutions to experience temporary close-downs as precautions and offering financial help for struggling businesses.
These new regulations are designed to be temporary in order to help the population in this state of emergency and to keep the common people from suffering. Most of the policies are covering and implementing subjects and funds that would never have gone over well during normal times. However, the good part of this issue is that the new government help seems to be going to help those entities who actually help to make very needed and functioning contributions to the overall national interests and the good of our own people; instead of following the paths of many current social justice issues that go only to help those outside our own national interest at the expense of our own people.
National emergencies always require rational decisions.
The welfare of the people always comes to the forefront in times of emergency. In normal times; the people are all required to pull their own weight and help themselves as much as possible. In emergencies things are out of an individual’s ability to control. The issues we will discuss in this article today are also things that stemmed from times of national emergencies.
Today, as has been the pattern of the past, in times of emergency and whenever people are on the brink of panic, they tend to turn to their government and demand that something be done to relieve their suffering.
The government typically reacts by implementing laws that will give temporary relief to those who have not had employment, or cannot find food, or do not have childcare, or have high medical costs associated with the outbreak of a virus.
For awhile everyone is simply relieved and grateful.
Then those costly laws, which never would have been accepted during normal times, tend to stay on the books. They become the “norm” instead of emergency measures. People become accepting of governmental help in the way of emergency regulations; and find themselves slowly progressing into a more socialistic type of government without even realizing what has happened.
In SOME cases, one day the people of the land wake up and find that they no longer have the same individual freedom, rights and liberties that they once possessed. Their laws have changed; but they didn’t even notice. While they were all busy panicking; their governments decided how they would live from here on out and doled it out to them in the way of “helps.”
This is one type of “social justice.”
This slow progression of change such as many are experiencing even now, actually first began with another type of national emergency.
It was the time that we call World War One.
When we look at the world as a whole to see the history of the patterns that the social justice system is based upon today, we can also see some very influential social justice movements that took place during the time of World War One.
The war started on July 28, 1914 and lasted through November 11, 1918.
This major world crisis began from a very strange mix of various people groups seeking different types of social justice.
The first group was made up of Serbians who had the matter of their nationalism at work when they became angry over the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. This was the act that first sparked the war. Austria was exercising its power over Serbia. The “weaker” nation was being exploited by the “stronger” nation.
Militarism was a huge factor that contributed to the making of World War One.
As more and more countries joined in with this war; nations began to experience needs and many experienced a lack of food and shelter for their people because the main breadwinners were off at war instead of making a living at home.
Social needs for every country became dire and urgent in different ways.
These situations begged for government interference and help.
After all; the breadwinners were fighting for their governments; it seemed only fair that the different governments involved in the war would begin to cover the needs of the citizens who were fighting for them.
Because of the needs of those at war, for the first time, people began to feel they were “owed certain entitlements” from their governments.
This soon became a world-wide problem. Now with the onslaught of a world war all governments of all nations became involved with various new types of social justice movements.
Many of the countries fighting in the war had to ration food.
In almost all countries, it was easier for the rich to obtain food and the poor suffered without any clear answers.
In the winter of 1917 and 18 the working class people of England felt that their food sources were unequally distributed. In other countries farmers were accused of hoarding supplies and leaving city dwellers to starve in the streets. In Central and Eastern Europe the unequal distributions targeted Jews and anti-Semitism was rampant. In those days access to food and the bare necessities of life determined and established all kinds of new social hierarchies.
The middle class people and the poor were hit the hardest.
Because of all of these bleak world conditions; riots and violence broke out everywhere across the globe.
No country was totally free from the suffering. Every citizen turned to their government expecting them to bring about some type of social justice.
THEORIES FOR SOLVING THE PROBLEMS OF THE WORLD
During these dire times E.P. Thompson came up with his theory of “moral economy.” Food riots caused discourse among the nations about the rights in wartime and what was expected in return from the sacrifices of each population.
When people who were trying to achieve political goals to bring changes substituted the word “justice” instead of “food” in relation to the riots, they saw that the concerns of all parties became MORE animated and grew even larger.
The people changed their demands of “we want food” to “we want food and fair play.”
This little rearrangement of words affected many areas beyond the food problems.
In Glasgow the landlords were raising rents while men were away fighting. Women left at home formed rent strikes and didn’t ask for food, charity or money; but instead they asked for “justice.”
Again, a little change in language gave a great advantage toward meeting the sympathy of the general population and the governments in charge.
All kinds of new types of social movements began to take place, and they were often violent. Many of these targeted state institutions or shop owners.
The British riots were fairly peaceful; but the riots of Russia were violent; and the higher levels of violence were noted in the countries that had less food to distribute.
In Japan there were rice riots resulting in a series of demonstrations with incidents of sit-ins, attacks on grain brokers and merchants and even the destruction of rice that eventually forced the merchants with rice to sell at a fair price.
In Vienna people resorted to looting, throwing stones and breaking shop windows.
Later generations who wanted to make gender protests studied these riots of World War One and they used some of their techniques in the 20th century for totally different reasons in totally different social justice movements.
These types of protests, violence and riots became part of the development of the communications and relationships that prevailed between the state and society during wartimes which helped to form the evolution of social justice movements that happened in the modern era.
In Germany, as the state’s responsibilities for the population grew because of war, the people began to realize how deeply the state had become involved in the regulation of society and how it had failed in securing decent nutritional standards for all the population. This fact created a shortage economy and helped to shape what became known as “the black market.” New types of labor relations also came into play because the German unions announced that they would not operate during war time.
The unions often found themselves trapped between the needs of the working class people and the demands of the government. In a time when the number of female workers was rising, memberships in the unions dropped dramatically. Local collective bargaining was still strong; but the national level of effective collective bargaining was almost non-existent.
Tight working-class communities handled their problems on a local level.
Young men and women ran locally active groups for handling and creating solutions for consumer issues. As more and more local consumers became angry, more and more local order was established. It was a practical measure, but it brought forth the idea of a utopia for organizing the neighborhoods. This development was less about abstract and national social transformations and much more about transforming the everyday surroundings of the local neighborhoods.
The workers that were local and regional aimed at safeguarding their income, their working and overtime conditions, and their ability to obtain the needed supplies to do their jobs. Non-local residents were often harassed and stigmatized. There was much anti-Semitism. Women were regulated and told to work at home.
These and more social justice issues rose from World War One.
But you may be asking the expected question. If at the end of all of this looking back at history should we decide that social justice is not the way to settle our issues; why dig it all back up again?
Good question.
Knowing history will help you answer the question as to whether or not social justice works, and in which situations it works and does not work. If you should decide in the end not to employ it; history will help you to explain why.
Mind you too; three are many philosophers out there trying to solve the problems of the world in their heads. They are going to be using all techniques and theories of all the old greatest thinkers, like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Miller, Rawls, Kant, and all of the rest.
You might do well to look at all of these issues, examine them against the theories of all of these great thinkers and ask yourself who thought right in that situation. Which theories can be discounted completely. Which theories would work better next time? In order to live justly you must learn to think justly. If you do that you have to understand how your own feelings relate to other people’s feelings on the same subjects. You need to know and understand a lot about philosophy in order to totally understand social justice
So if you are leaning toward conducting some social justice of your own; I would advise you to educate yourself in philosophy. Another tip would be not to swallow all the theories down like candy; some of them are wrong. You need to know which ones work for what and why. Then come back and talk to the world about your social justice theories; you MIGHT have a leg to stand on.
Who knows if history will not, on the other hand, change your mind about using social justice all together.
We cannot really know any of these answers until we examine all of the facts and history reveals them; all of them. The facts vary in each culture and timeline; and how they do so matters in the end. Important matters of life require whole pictures; not just little snapshots.
Let us continue our search for the “justice” in “social justice” in the next article where we will look at the times of The Great Depression. After that; there will be much more history, but as I said before, history is important here.
I have no intention with this writing to make you begin to accept my own ideas and to think like me. What I want you to do is to learn to think for yourself. We need some new “great thinkers” in America today; and if anything that I wrote sparked that note in anyone; I would feel blessed.