Theos-Talk Archives (September 2003 Message tt00099)

On 9-11 the U.S.A. (or rather the cancerlike background power which controls that land) has begun World War III, but they will obviously not be able to stop it. 

The US army stands now in 100 states to destroy their cultures and steel their properties in the name of Jahve (cp. Jesaja 60, 10-12)

. 

News papers report now that the US Army moves in Afghanistan with the German flag (!) to prevent further troubles. According to the news this latest American trick produces serious diplomatic traffic between the involved countries. This strange news may be a good opportunity for a Theosophist to recall what the Theosophical opinion is on one of the CENTURY LIES, the truth about the former German Colonies, which were stolen in 1919 in Versailles by that race which was labeled there as the "table of the absent".

Frank

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"GERMAN COLONIZATION PAST AND FUTURE"
"The Truth about the German Colonies"

 

G. v. PURUCKER

 

THIS is a book which has just been issued by George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London, England, and has been sent to Katherine Tingley, the Editor of THE THEOSOPHICAL PATH, for review.

 

The writer of the book is Dr. Heinrich Schnee, Late Governor of German EastAfrica, and author of German East Africa in the World-War, World Policy, etc.; it carries an Introduction written by William Harbutt Dawson, author of The German Empire, The Evolution of Modern Germany, Problems of the Peace, etc., and comprises 176 pages of matter of which some 40 pages, or nearlyone-fourth, are Mr. Dawson's Intro­duction. It carries also 24 illustrations of topical scenes in Africa and Samoa.

 

One hardly knows what to say about a book like this. It is not a 'war-book'in any sense of the word; nor is it in the least degree a 'po­litical' effort. It is a calm and thoroughly dispassionate review of German colonization-efforts, particularly during the two decades of years just preceding the war, written by a man who himself had held high posts in the German Colonies and in the Imperial German Colonial Offices at home in Berlin. It contains historical retrospects connected with the peaceful acquirement by the German nation of their colonies; connected with the amazing development thatthose colonies underwent under German management before the war deprived the German people of their greatest fields of raw materials; it touches briefly but feelingly upon the astonishing work of civilization achieved by those devoted German pioneers among the blacks of Africa, and in Samoa and in German New Guinea and the German South Sea Islands; it gives manly recognition of similar work done among the backward peoples of the earth by the other great colonizing nations, especially by the better part of British colonization; and, finally, it discusses impartially and with simply un­answerable logic and data the future of the natives inhabiting the broad­sweeping empires which formerly comprised the German Colonies, and the deplorablecondition that those peoples are now in and suffer from under the so-called 'Mandate-Rule' imposed upon them, irrespective of their own wishes, by the 'Treaty' of Versailles.

 

Dr. Schnee pleads eloquently for a return to the German nation of the Colonies so unjustly taken from them by the conditions of Peace imposed upon a disarmed people in direct contravention of solemn en­gagements and promises made to that people by the spokesmen of the Allied and Associated Powers,and particularly by President Wilson in his now famous 'Fourteen Points' speech in Congress of January 8, 1918, and reaffirmed and elaborated in his supplementary 'Five Points' Address of September 27th following; and in these respects Dr. Schnee carries all before him; because by the formal acceptance of these conditions by the Imperial German Government and by the equally formal stipulations and pledges of the Allied Powers, an international contract had been established in which the good faith and respective national honor of the contracting parties was indissolubly involved on both sides.

 

>From here on, this remarkable book does not make pleasant read­ing. As the writer shows in his unemotional and dispassionate style, acknowledging German mistakes in the earliest years of colonization when lessons were learned in that work by the youngest of the great colonizing Powers, equal if not even greater and graver mistakes had been committed by the older colonizing Powers in their days of learning; but he points with justifiable pride to the extraordinary progress made in the German Colonies in civilizing the natives, to their contentment and advancement in the various arts of life under that rule; and he quotes with equally justifiable pride from the numbers of writers of other coloniz­ing nations who had written at different times, mostly from British Co­lonial officers and travelers, in terms of high commendation of the amazing progress made under German rule by both thenatives and their lands. These writers had seen and studied that rule and its results for years preceding the war and up to the outbreak of hostilities between the European peoples, and their general verdict alone, as the writer quotes it, is a crushing rejoinder to the generally prevailing opinion, due to war­time propaganda, that the German Government or people, or both, were constitutionally incapable of understanding backward peoples or ofaid­ing in their moral and physical evolution. The truth seems to be singu­larly the opposite to that idea, all testimony running strongly in theother direction.

 

Dr. Schnee writes convincingly of the grave spiritual and psy­chological error committed by some of the nations involved in the recent war in bringing into the arena of that terrible struggle between white men armies of their colored subjects; for, as he points out, where the white man was once respected and looked up to, as a superior in civilizing agencies, the coloredpeoples now have lost that feeling either entirely or in large part, believing that they are more needed by the white man than they themselves need him; and that a very sure possibility of present contempt for the white man,and of widespread insurrection against his over-rule in time to come - andthis precisely in the Colonies of those peoples who used colored troops and who systematically militarize them for wars wherever the ruling country might need them - is already an outstanding problem with which Colonial Administrators everywhere now have to deal as a grave menace to Colonial peace and prosperity.

 

Space allows no longer review of this book to be given here. Be­sides theremarkable Introduction by Mr. Dawson - one of the finest examples of the spirit of 'fair-play' and justice on which Englishmen and Britishers generally are said to pride themselves - the book holds nine chapters, of which we are content to give here merely the titles: "How the German Colonies wereSeized"; "The Myth of German 'Colonial Guilt' "; "The Alleged Militarism in the German Colonies"; "The Allied Powers and their 'Sacred Trust' "; "TheTreatment of the Na­tives"; "The Question of Slavery and Forced Labor"; "German Rule and Mandate-Rule Compared"; "What the Natives Really Want"; "The Future - The Way of Peace."

 

>From the Biographical Note appended by Mr. Dawson to the book, we learn that Dr. Schnee has been a noteworthy writer on various Colonial subjects; andthat in 1925 he was elected Senator of the German Academy in Munich; also that his home is in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

 

- The Theosophical Path, April 1927, pp.374-376, italics original; scanned verbatim et literatim by Ringding.

 



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