Première Guerre mondiale

The First World War appears in Noam Chomsky’s discussion not as a noble contest between just causes but as a warning about how propaganda and elite conformity can turn populations toward mutual slaughter. Its significance lies in the contrast between mass mobilization and the dissent that challenged it: a country that had been pacifist could be made vengeful, yet people were not compelled to follow that course.

A precedent for mass mobilization

Chomsky invokes the war as a comparatively distant example, one that can be examined without the immediate passions of the post-September 11 moment. He rejects the idea that either side was fighting a noble war in defense of the highest ideals. Nevertheless, soldiers on both sides marched eagerly toward mutual carnage, encouraged by intellectuals and by political forces across the spectrum, from right to left. The example makes his concern concrete: appeals to noble purpose can mobilize people for violence even when the cause itself does not warrant that claim.

Dissent and its costs

The apparent breadth of wartime agreement had important exceptions. Chomsky says there were so few that they could almost be counted, and names Rosa Luxemburg, Bertrand Russell, and Eugene Debs among prominent figures imprisoned for questioning the righteousness of the enterprise. Their imprisonment marks a cost of dissent, while their presence prevents the period from being presented as a story of unanimous consent. Mobilization was powerful, but opposition existed and challenged the terms on which the war was justified.

Propaganda and the American turn

Chomsky attributes the transformation of a pacifist United States into a furious anti-German society to Wilson’s propaganda agencies and the fervent support of liberal intellectuals. He adds that most of the purported barbaric crimes used to inflame the desire for revenge had been invented by the British Ministry of Information. In his account, propaganda did not simply accompany the shift: it helped make vengeance seem warranted by presenting fabricated atrocities as fact.

The warning for later crises

The First World War example supports Chomsky’s broader warning that intellectuals and media institutions often rally behind power in a crisis and encourage the public to join them. He applies that pattern to the Gulf War and to the later conflict surrounding Serbia, where he says the convergence approached hysteria. The historical parallel is not an assertion that each crisis is identical; it is a reminder that a public can be urged toward destructive action through manufactured consensus. Chomsky also insists that this outcome can be resisted: popular struggles of recent years, he argues, have had civilizing effects, and no one is obliged to rush into catastrophe simply because authorities give the order.