Thorstein Veblen:
"The Twilight Peace of the Armistice"
Editorial
THE OLD ORDER AND THE NEW

The Dial. A Fortnightly (New York)
Vol. LXVII (July 12 to November 29, 1919)

No. 803, Nov., 15, 1919, p. 443.
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[443]

THE ELEVENTH NOVEMBER is A DAY DEDICATE TO the white boutonniere of peace. But 
the particular Peace to which this day is specially dedicate is the twilight 
peace of the Armistice, which is of a peculiar and distinctive character. It is 
peace, but it is not marked by any degree of tranquility or good will, nor has 
it displaced martial law. It is in good part made up of alarms and 
recrimination, of intrigue and hostilities, and it is hedged about with fire, 
famine, and pestilence. It is a peace of a very special character, peculiar and 
distinctive. The twelve months which have elapsed since the Armistice will show 
a larger expenditure for military operations and a larger total of warlike 
atrocities than any recorded twelve months of war, prior to the Great War of 
which this Peace is the aftermath. It was a peculiar peace in its inception, in 
that it was concluded in order to engage in a fight; and it has been a peculiar 
peace in its further course, in that it shows a steadily rising tide of 
quarrels, armaments, hostilities, expenditures, bankruptcies, and violations of 
international law, throughout these twelve months of its prosecution hitherto.

In view of this comfortless state of things it may be worth while to stop and 
take stock of the circumstances which precipitated this peace of intrigue and 
atrocities upon the civilized nations; what was bargained for and what has been 
got. The elder statesmen who negotiated the peace have faithfully observed the 
punctilios of secret diplomacy, and have given no sign as to what the bargaining 
was all about; but the past twelve months have brought much circumstantial 
evidence to the surface. So it is fairly plain now that it was a negotiated 
peace, in the nature of a compromise with the Central Powers, negotiated hastily 
to avert a collapse of the German military organization; such as would 
unavoidably have followed on a further three-months prosecution of the campaign 
on the western front. This hasty, and, in a sense, premature, conclusion of 
hostilities could scarcely have been other than designed by the high political 
command which had the bargaining to do. It left the German military 
establishment standing in a passably serviceable state, and it left also the 
German Imperial organization virtually intact under a perfunctory mask of 
democratic forms. Among the Guardians of the established order there appears 
plainly to have been a growing realization first voiced by the Lansdowne letters 
that the vested interests of property and class rule in the countries of the 
Entente must for their own benefit make common cause with the like interests in 
the countries of the Central Powers if they were successfully to make head 
against their common enemy the increasingly uneasy underlying population on both 
sides. A prostrate and completely discredited German military establishment, 
such as another three months would have left, and a broken and emptied imperial 
organization, such as the same three months would have left with such an outcome 
of the war the German states would have gone Red and would have been fit to make 
trouble for none but themselves. Germany in that case would have been of no use 
for stabilizing things on the basis of the status quo ante, and the status quo 
ante has always been the object of the elder statesmen's affections and 
solicituds. Guardians of the Vested Interests, the elder statesmen sorely needed 
the bulwark of a practicable German Empire to serve as a bar against the spread 
of Bolshevism out of Soviet Russia, and they likewise needed the active use of a 
practicable German military establishment to defeat Bolshevism by fire, sword, 
and famine, in and out of Soviet Russia. Therefore it would not be expedient to 
break the Central Powers utterly, by another three months advance on the western 
front. The policy with regard to Soviet Russia became the acid test of Entente 
politics, in war and peace. The line of incentives which under this acid test 
brought the war to its premature termination, and which has continued to drive 
the policies of the Allied Powers and direct their maneuvers during the past 
twelve months, appears to be almost wholly comprised in the proposition that 
Bolshevism is a menace to absentee ownership. It is another, and hitherto an 
open question, how near the elder statesmen are likely to realize their sanguine 
hope of subduing Soviet Russia by use of a subservient German military 
establishment.
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