“The Souls of White Folk” is an excellent read and you can get to it by clicking the link on this page:https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1681-web-du-bois-the-souls-of-white-folk
Here is the paragraph the quote comes from for context:
"Let me say this again and emphasize it and leave no room for mistaken meaning: The World War was primarily the jealous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting darker races. As such it is and must be but the prelude to the armed and indignant protest of these despised and raped peoples. Today Japan is hammering on the door of justice, China is raising her half-manacled hands to knock next, India is writhing for the freedom to knock, Egypt is sullenly muttering, the Negroes of South and West Africa, of the West Indies, and of the United States are just awakening to their shameful slavery. Is, then, this war the end of wars? Can it be the end, so long as sits enthroned, even in the souls of those who cry peace, the despising and robbing of darker peoples? If Europe hugs this delusion, then this is not the end of world war,—it is but the beginning!"
I learned very little about World War I in school. Thank you very much to anyone who can comment on the historical accuracy of all this.
I wanted to share some other paragraphs from this essay supporting this same idea in case you're interested:
First:
"Whither is this expansion? What is that breath of life, thought to be so indispensable to a great European nation? Manifestly it is expansion overseas; it is colonial aggrandizement which explains, and alone adequately explains, the World War. How many of us today fully realize the current theory of colonial expansion, of the relation of Europe which is white, to the world which is black and brown and yellow? Bluntly put, that theory is this: It is the duty of white Europe to divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe's good. "
Another quote:
"Thus the world market most wildly and desperately sought today is the market where labor is cheapest and most helpless and profit is most abundant. This labor is kept cheap and helpless cause
the white world despises "darkies." If one has the temerity to suggest that these workingmen may walk the way of white workingmen and climb by votes and self-assertion and education to the rank of men, he is howled out of
court. They cannot do it and if they could, they shall not, for they are the enemies of the white race and the whites shall rule forever and forever and everywhere. Thus the hatred and despising of human beings from whom Europe wishes to extort her luxuries has led to such jealousy and bickering between European nations that they have fallen afoul of each other and have fought like crazed beasts. Such is the fruit of human hatred."
And a third quote:
"The fateful day came. It had to come. The cause of war is preparation for war; and of all that Europe has done in a century there is nothing that has equaled in energy, thought, and time her preparation for wholesale murder. The only adequate cause of this preparation was conquest and conquest, not in Europe, but primarily among the darker peoples of Asia and Africa; conquest, not for assimilation and uplift, but for commerce and degradation. For this, and this mainly, did Europe gird herself at frightful cost for war.
The red day dawned when the tinder was lighted in the Balkans and Austro-Hungary seized a bit which brought her a step nearer to the world's highway; she seized one bit and poised herself for another. Then came that curious chorus of challenges, those leaping suspicions, raking all causes for distrust and rivalry and hatred, but saying little of the real and greatest cause. Each nation felt its deep interests involved. But how? Not, surely, in the death of Ferdinand the Warlike; not, surely, in the old, half-forgotten revanche for Alsace-Lorraine; not even in the neutrality of Belgium. No! But in the possession of and overseas, in the right to colonies, the chance to levy endless tribute on the darker world,-on coolies in China, on starving peasants in India, on black savages in Africa, on dying South Sea Islanders, on Indians of the Amazon-all this and nothing more. "
Thank you and Happy New Year to you.
I'll address one limited point, and that is in my mind DuBois has myopia regarding colonialism ("colonial aggrandizement") because he assumes colonialism is only about Africa or Asia.
From almost the beginning of the war scholars saw that Germany's European ambitions had all the hallmarks of colonialism without having to leave European soil.
We look back and see Imperial Germany and see just one nation. But if you're a Prussian landowner in 1909, "Germany" to you as a Prussian landowner is partially comprised of colonies located in Europe -- even if you don't call them that.
What might be instructive here is the Prussian Settlement Committee, started during Frederick, which
So to Imperial Germany, it was hardly a settled matter that their European-continent colonies were their's to keep and, as the Allies later proved, they weren't.
In one of my favorite books, German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Postwar Germany , (ed. Volker Max Langbehn, Mohammad Salama) they describe that in a perverse sense it was precisely Germany's preoccupation with a racially homogenous nation that put their overseas aspirations on the back burner while simultaneously bringing forward European areas (or, we might say, victims). In the First World War this ends up being Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Southeastern Europe and then, later, again Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Southeastern Europe. A buzzword here might be Mitteleuropa
Nietzsche has this long rant in Dawn essentially explaining that Germans who are thinking about living abroad, or looking to colonize Africa, lose their Germaness. He thinks it's a good thing, and has some pretty racist things to say about bringing in "Asiatics" to calm down the 'European beehive.' Point being, for me he's a good example how Imperial Germany had a schizophrenia about its overseas colonies that is hard to comport with what DuBois is saying.
Perhaps put a slightly different way, it's not a coincidence that the Holocaust was perpetrated against European peoples. Scholarship has emphasized the continuity of Imperial German ambitions, the pressures the state faced, and the actions and pressures faced by Nazi Germany. In A Sonderweg through Eastern Europe? The Varieties of German Rule in Poland during the Two World Wars it teases out how Germany's preoccupation was not necessarily with colonial rule in the two sausage factories they owned in Tanganyika but instead with how Germany would solve longstanding questions of what to do with racial minorities and the colonized peoples within the new "modern" Germany.
This is not to say the conflict didn't have overseas implications, or that Imperial Germany wouldn't exploit non-European peoples, but there is a 'mistaking the forest for the trees' when DuBois correctly identifies that Imperial Germany and Austria-Hungary felt an almost existential challenge from the assassination of Ferdinand, and he even ties in "a right to colonies," but overlooks that the colonies had already been acquired in the sense the Balkans were to Austria-Hungary and Germany as India was to the British Empire.