PROFESSOR STEPHEN BROOKE
The First World War
continues to remind us of the disorder and
instability to European life after 1918.
An instability that eventually led to
the outbreak of an even more deadly
war
just over two decades later.
PROFESSOR JOAN JUDGE
So as in Canada and other parts of the world
China was in many ways caught up in the
same
moment of radicalization and radical
rethinking. The
the most direct impact World War One
had on China
was the May Fourth Movement and this
movement was a result
the Treaty of Versailles and one of the
terms of the Treaty
was that the territory in northern China,
the territory of Shandong,
which the Germans had occupied, would not
be returned
to China, rather it would be given to
Japan.
And this was largely a result of secret
treaties that the Chinese people
themselves
and even people in the Chinese
government we're not all aware of.
The result of this secret treaty between 
Great Britain, Italy, France
and Japan at an earlier moment in the
war in January of 1917.
But Duan Qirui, in an effort to
consolidate his power in China
secretly made an agreement with the
Japanese in September of 1917
where he said if you loan me money to
strengthen my army
I will let you have free rein in
Shandong
so the five Chinese 
diplomats who went to
negotiate the Treaty of Versailles had
no knowledge of this secret treaty
but when news reached China and
particularly
very Nationalist-minded students at
Beijing University, they were absolutely
outraged.
So this protest movement began taking
force and this force culminated
on May 4th. 3,000 students 
gathered from Beijing
ultimately there were no deaths, this was
not a violent protest,
but it was one that clearly roused 
national consciousness about this issue.
Mao Zedong was not directly involved in the 
May 4th movement but he was certainly inspired by it
and the Chinese Communist Party will
be founded in 1921
and very much on the heels of the quest
for this new sense of national power.
 
 
 
PROFESSOR KALMAN WEISER
In World War One, the Jews were very much divided.
That is, they were typically loyal to the states or empires in which they lived. That was not what was often expected of them however.
And this led to a number of problems.
Some called for Jews to have
the rights of their own culture where they
live. We call that diaspora nationalism,
so let's say the Russian Empire
should be reconstituted as a federation
of nationalities of which the Jews are but one, 
and of course, there's Zionism
which main goal was for Jewish
sovereignty.
Jewish political groups sent delegates
to Paris
for the peace negotiations and they
represented the entire
ideological spectrum - from those who were
opponents of Jewish nationalism,
to Zionists, to diaspora nationalists and,
you know,
all sorts of gradations in between. The
Balfour Declaration of 1917
gives a solidity, a foundation to the Zionist 
movement that it was lacking up to this point.
From a Jewish perspective, it seems like
politically the doors are wide open.
The idea of reconstituting Eastern Europe
as states of nationalities is a possibility.
The idea of Jews having national
autonomy in smaller ethnic nation states
like Poland and Lithuania
is a possibility.
The idea of Jews having a sovereign nation
state in the Middle East, in Israel, is a possibility.
So it seems like out of the suffering of 
World War One something good came out of it.
The '20s and '30s revealed that
the situation was not going to be so.
But at least between 1918 and 1919 there was tremendous optimism.
PROFESSOR THABIT ABDULLAH
World War One is the most important
concentrated event in shaping the 
modern Middle East.
The British sought to make 
agreements with anybody
to secure some kind of an advantage in
the war. The British
promised Sharif Hussein of Mecca that
if he were to launch
a rebellion against the Ottomans, that
they would grant him an independent Arab
kingdom in Iraq and Greater Syria.
In addition to that, they had already
promised the Zionist Organization that
Palestine would become a Jewish state. 
Another promise was made to the Saudi family
if they sided with the British, they would assist them in the formation of a kingdom.
Ultimately what happened at the end of the war
was that the Middle East in fact was
divided between the French and the
English and came to be ruled almost
as colonies
through the logic of "right of
conquest".
The Arabs were able to establish a state
in Syria in Damascus.
The French were given the right to go
in, bombard this newly-established kingdom
and take it over as a colony. 
Now this left a very bitter taste
in the mouth of those who had aspired
to form a unified Arab country and
this feeling that the West is always out
to get us,
always interested in protecting the
petroleum, has never left
the mind of Arab politicians.
PROFESSOR JENNIFER STEPHEN
After the war, there was a profound sense of loss, a loss of innocence,
but the problems went deeper than that
into the very psyches of
the men who were returning from the
front. What we would now call
post-traumatic stress disorder. They called it 
"the one thousand yard stare". The men who
were seen to be suffering from shell
shock - and their numbers grew as the
intensity the battles increased - 
were more likely to be seen as malingerers,
as emotionally defective in some way, and so their solution became send them back into battle as quickly as possible
and hopefully that'll make men out of them.
This approach continued into the peace,
indeed it continued well into the Depression.
Men continued to experience delayed stress 
responses and they continued to petition the
military pensions board for some form of assistance.
The problem was this would create an
increase in financial burden on the
federal government which, in turn, would
necessitate the continuation of income
tax as a regular feature of federal financing.
You know, for us today, income tax is just
something we have to do,
PROFESSOR WILLIAM WICKEN
but it didn't exist before 1917. In 1917
it's introduced as a temporary measure to pay for the war.
During the war there were more 
than 600,000 men under arms
and they're being paid a dollar and 10 cents a day, so who's going to pay for that, right?
So initially it's war bonds, 
but that can only go so far because
the Canadian government has to pay that
back, right? So where is that money going to
come from? Well, it's going to come from
taxes and so the income tax is instituted.
Canada lost almost an entire 
generation of young men.
One in every 10 Canadian
men who served died.
One in every four Newfoundlanders 
who served died.
Its husbands, its sons, its fathers.
If you go across the country today, 
if you're in Wolfville, Nova Scotia...
if you're in Toronto, if you're in 
Vancouver, if you're in Thamesville, Ontario,
the first thing your going to notice is 
that war memorial, right?
And that war memorial every 
village in this country built in the 1920s
to remember their people, right? Their men
who were lost because it's a shared loss,
so I think it's that shared sense of 
bereavement which unites people
in a way which has never 
happened in Canadian history before.
 
