The Great War is often depicted as an unexpected catastrophe. But for millions who had been living under imperialist rule, terror and degradation were nothing new.
Today on the "Western Front," the German sociologist Max Weber wrote in September 1917, there "stands a dross of African and Asiatic savages and all the world's rabble of thieves and lumpens." Weber was referring to the millions of Indian, African, Arab, Chinese and Vietnamese soldiers and laborers, who were then fighting with British and French forces in Europe, as well as in several ancillary theatres of the first world war.
Faced with manpower shortages, British imperialists had recruited up to 1.4 million Indian soldiers. France enlisted nearly 500,000 troops from its colonies in Africa and Indochina. Nearly 400,000 African Americans were also inducted into US forces. The first world war's truly unknown soldiers are these non-white combatants.
Ho Chi Minh, who spent much of the war in Europe, denounced what he saw as the press-ganging of subordinate peoples. Before the start of the Great War, Ho wrote, they were seen as "nothing but dirty Negroes ... good for no more than pulling rickshaws".
But when Europe's slaughter machines needed "human fodder", they were called into service. Other anti-imperialists, such as Mohandas Gandhi and WEB Du Bois, vigorously supported the war aims of their white overlords, hoping to secure dignity for their compatriots in the aftermath. But they did not realize what Weber's remarks revealed: that Europeans had quickly come to fear and hate physical proximity to their non-white subjects - their "new-caught sullen peoples", as Kipling called colonized Asians and Africans in his 1899 poem The White Man's Burden.
Comment: With studies like these it is a wonder that mainstream science can't let go of what was labelled 'manmade global warming'. Clearly our planet's climate is cyclical in nature and humanity's impact is rather negligible. We see what was reported to be happening to the weather back then is happening to us now: