One hundred years ago this week Australia's mass-circulation papers were promoting the popular belief that the Germans were a uniquely barbarous race. But Melbourne's pacifist weekly, The Woman Voter, offered its tiny, idealistic readership this snowflake of common sense, arguing that war made fiendish Huns of us all.
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"The stories [of German atrocities in Europe] are a powerful commentary on what is entailed by thorough worship of Military Necessity.
"We do not.explain the matter by saying 'those fiendish Germans,' 'that race of Huns'. No racial explanation will avail.
"If the Germans are Teutons, so are we. Most of us are descended from Teutons who crossed into Britain while the ancestors of the present Germans remained behind on the mainland. If the stock is one which readily produces barbarities then it is a slime taint on us all. But no, the monstrous acts are not Germanism, but militarism made perfect.
"The ruling caste in German, invoking 'military necessity', has taken up the art of human slaughter ... with a business-like thoroughness.
"When military necessity is set up as supreme good, as supreme God, strange things follow. We British cried out aloud against [our enemies'] concentration camps, but 'military necessity' led us to make concentration camps of our own in the Boer War. We are today hotly indignant at the war horrors perpetrated [by Germany]. What will be our attitude, however, when our own military experts decide that the exigencies of the situation demand this, that, or the other addition to the list of military necessities?"
