"The Souls of White Folk", WWI & Today

"I will not believe ... that all the shameful drama of the past must be done again today "

I just read this essay for the first time ever:
"The Souls of White Folk", by W. E. B. DuBois. 
Published in 1920, it's about the causes of World War I, which ended 100 years ago (tomorrow!)––but it is fitting for our times too--of course:
History doesn't stop and start, but keeps rolling on.

Though, with DuBois I would say,
"I will not believe that all that was must be, that all the shameful drama of the past must be done again today before the sunlight sweeps the silver seas."

A few choice excerpts:

"It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time.
No nation is less fitted for this rôle.
For two or more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred,—making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike,—rather a great religion, a world war-cry:
Up white, down black; to your tents, O white folk, and world war with black and parti-colored mongrel beasts!"

____________________________

"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.

"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 land 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.

---

"All this I see and hear up in my tower, above the thunder of the seven seas. From my narrowed windows I stare into the night that looms beneath the cloud-swept stars. Eastward and westward storms are breaking,—great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty.
I will not believe them inevitable. I will not believe that all that was must be, that all the shameful drama of the past must be done again today before the sunlight sweeps the silver seas.

"If I cry amid this roar of elemental forces, must my cry be in vain, because it is but a cry,—a small and human cry amid Promethean gloom?

"Back beyond the world and swept by these wild, white faces of the awful dead, why will this Soul of White Folk,—this modern Prometheus,—hang bound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past?
I hear his mighty cry reverberating through the world, "I am white!"
Well and good, O Prometheus, divine thief! Is not the world wide enough for two colors, for many little shinings of the sun? Why, then, devour your own vitals if I answer even as proudly, "I am black!"

--W. E. B. DuBois, "The Souls of White Folk", chapter two in Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920), at Gutenberg Books: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/15210?msg=welcome_stranger#Chapter_II

Pair with The Guardian's LONG READ (from Nov. 2017): 
"How colonial violence came home: the ugly truth of the first world war"

(Thanks to GZ at "ook?!" who posted the link to this article on her FB!) 

^Senegalese soldiers serving in the French army on the western front in June 1917. Photograph: Galerie Bilderwelt/Getty Images