1916 letter: ‘Just war’ theory a skewed one that rules out all forms of rebellion

Northern Ireland Attorney General, John Larkin, recently had a pop at the Easter Rising — the usual stuff about it failing the ‘just war’ theory test and having no democratic mandate.

One of the pre-conditions for a just war, according to just war theory, is that it must be fought by a legal recognised authority, that is, a government.

Since this effectively rules out all forms of rebellion anywhere, it’s arguable that the so-called just war theory is a skewed theory, ideal for propping up existing forms of authority without question, regardless of their colonial provenance.

Perhaps John Larkin can now show some balance and train his forensic right-wing moralising on the undemocratic bout of vicious imperial jostling that was WWI.

Over 2.5 million men, few of whom would have had the right to vote, were conscripted into the British army in World War I.

So much for “democracy”.

Their role was to pursue a bloody imperial fiasco on behalf of the colonial classes.

Pope Benedict XV described World War One as “pointless carnage”.

This isn’t entirely correct.

Pointless from the standpoint of the brave ordinary men who died in their thousands, but far from pointless from the perspective of the elite.

Sir Maurice Hankey, secretary of the British war cabinet, in a letter to the then foreign secretary Arthur Balfour, noted that “control of these [Mesopotamian] oil supplies” was a “first-class war aim”.

And as Lloyd George later noted, Britain came out of the war with “a nice fat profit”.

We’ve all heard the usual PR flannel about “poor little Belgium” — the same Belgium that, even after 1908, was still responsible for running a vicious colonial regime in the Congo.

Despite the cause of Belgium, it’s revealing to note that some of the first British troops deployed in WWI were sent, not to Belgium, but to Basra, in modern-day Iraq.

Of course, shortly before WWI, the British Navy had switched from using coal to oil (partly for engineering advantages, partly out of Churchill’s wish to outmanoeuvre domestic mining unions).

Go figure.

Come on, John — let’s hear what specific just war justifications you can dredge up for Irish involvement in the invasion of, for example, the Ottoman Empire / Turkey in WWI.

Seán mac Cann

Trillick

Co Tyrone