Pierre van Paassen was born in Holland but later became a Canadian citizen. He studied for the ministry but became a journalist. He writes with a social conscience born of his personal and religious values. He traveled all over the world and provides an enlightened description of events from before World War I to the start of World War II. Days of Our Years was published in 1940 and was very popular at the time. I often see it in used book stores. I have the Twentieth Printing of the Revised Edition published in Decemeber, 1942. I think the revisions only occur via the addition of a few extra chapters so any edition will suffice for the bulk of the book.
Chapter 1 described van Paassen’s youth in Holland. “From Uncle Kees I learned more history than from all the schoolbooks combined. His favorite subject was the Franco-Prussian War, the era of Napoleon III, and the Commune of Paris. That period, he used to say, was the turning point in the civilization of Europe. He described it as the beginning of the trustification of business which would, he predicted, cause the peoples, after a short time of comparative well-being, a series of bloody nationalistic wars wherein rival states would seek to eliminate each other by the most ruthless means conceivable. I must acknowledge that I never asked him how he knew all this, but I must acknowledge after all these years, that my Uncle Kees saw the future clearer than many a contemporary statesman who went on blandly holding forth the vision of poverty abolished and all classes of men enjoying the fruit of human ingenuity in a managed society.”
Chatper Two concerning World War I was an eye-opener for me, causing me to read other books that showed the same profit-making impetus to war at the expense of millions of lives. “The German people are not more barbarous than any other nation. War is not a consequence of animalistic instincts in man, but a result of profound social antagonisms which pitched vested interests against natural forces. Not only the war, but the ruin and decay which have come over every land after the war, are the outcome of the same fundamental maladjustment: the exploitation of a productive e majority by a moneyed minority.”
“ ‘Everything has been tried to set the world in the ways of peace,’ remarked Lord Cecil to me one day, as we crossed the Channel together on the way to Geneva.
Everything? Really everything? Yes, everything except the one thing that will make war truly impossible: disarmament.
But can that be done? Imagine what staggering proportions unemployment would reach in Germany, Italy, England, France, and Japan, if all the men now engaged in munitions factories, armament plants, steel mills, clothing factories, chemical laboratories, shipyards, mines, forests, and all the other auxiliaries of the war industry, not to speak of the legions in the armies, navies, and air forces of the world, should be suddenly thrown out of work? Wouldn’t that be a disaster of the first magnitude? Where would America’s precarious prosperity be on the day when that should come to pass?
No, rather than face an interruption of the profit system, the imperialist states prefer a universal armament race, even at a risk of plunging the nations into a second world war…
… But war in not an act of G_d like an earthquake or a flood. It is not an inescapable fatality. War is inseparable from the capitalist system of production. Humanity will never get rid of one till it gets rid of the other.”
“In August, 1871, when half of Paris lay in ruins and the blood of fifty thousand Communards was being washed off the pavements, the newly elected President of the Republic, Adolphe Thiers, promised the masters of Europe that the proletariat would never again disturb the peace of mind of the bourgeoisie, inasmuch as he, with his own hands, had smothered the revolutionary spirit for all time to come.”
…”The Allies, therefore, could have brought the Kaiser to his knees before the end of 1915, by instituting an economic blockade. But that would have meant giving up the choicest profits of war: the contraband commerce. Throughout the first three years of the war the Reich received an uninterrupted stream of supplies through Holland, Switzerland, and the Scandinavian countries, especially cotton, without which she could not have continued to fight for a day. This went on until America angrily protested that England, Germany’s chief adversary, was crowding her out of the European market. German capitalism had not neglected its opportunities either: right up to the beginning of 1917, the Krupp Works of Essen shipped a quarter of a million tons of steel a month through Switzerland to the Comité des Forges in France. In addition to payment in gold, one of the conditions in this deal was that French aviation was to refrain from bombarding the iron-ore mines, the blast furnaces, and the rolling mills of the Longwy district which had been occupied by Germany early in the war. … Representatives of the German chemical trust, of the Swiss copper interests, and of Vickers, Krupp, and the Comité des Forges met in Vienna at the moment when the armies were locked in a death struggle in the mud of Flanders. Their sole purpose was to devise ways and means of keeping the war going profitably.”
… “Thanks to French ore … Germany was able during four years to inundate the East and the West, on land and on the high seas, with a torrent of steel. In return for airplane motors, shipped by Germany, France gave bauxite, an indispensable ingredient for the manufacture of aluminum for Zeppelins. The dreadful barbed wire ... which became a deathtrap for the Prussian guard, was manufactured by the Draftwerke of Opel and Company, and had found its way through Holland to England. … “
…”Without transition, the imperialist war turned into a war of the imperialisms against the people. With the approval of the Allied high command a German army was rushed to the aid of the White Guards of Finland and helped to exterminate the forty thousand Socialists of Helsingfors. …
… Europe’s bourgeoisies consented to every complicity in order to maintain the established social order. The essential fact of the history of 1919 which does not figure in the official chronicles consists in the singlemindedness of the ruling classes of every country to arrest the march of humanity towards Socialism.”
Chapter 3 is called Parisian Days. “ While the eyes of the world were riveted on Geneva, where the interminable debate when on and on, few were aware that, from 1925 onward, representatives of French and German heavy industry were meeting regularly, now in Paris, then in Berlin. Both the German and French metal industry were incurring serious losses as a result of the suspension of armaments contracts, and were desperately seeking ways and means to set business in motion again. … But contact between the French and German canon makers had been established. It was never again broken. The French metal industry agreed to the rearmament of Germany as early as 1925, as being the only condition for the stimulation of the inner French market.”
… “Why should Hitler have received French, Czechoslovakian and British money …? The answer is simple. One need but read the Fuhrer’s book, Mein Kampf. In that document, the upstart party leader, with scarcely ten thousand followers at the time he wrote the book, announced that his first task upon attaining power would be to rearm the Reich. Did such a man deserve support? Armament factories all over the Continent were standing idle, dividends were sinking, stock quotations going lower and lower. And not a cloud on the horizon to give the deadly armament industry a little spurt, no danger anywhere to warrant the manufacture of a single gun! Would it not be a godsend if Hitler could come to power and make Germany dangerous once more?”
Chapter 8 discusses Palestine, particularly van Paassen’s visits in 1926 and 1929. “The transformation of Palestine is one of the wonders of our age. The all-engulfing desert has been pushed back; the wastelands have been reclaimed, and the sick soil has been nourished back to health. It is a miracle of creative love. For with that rare selfless devotion to which man has risen in great moments of history, bands of Jewish boys and girls from the squalid ghettos of eastern Europe have redeemed for the coming generations of their people what had been lost for centuries.”
In 1929 “ The Arab landlord class reasserted its stranglehold on the Arab masses and launched them in a bloody assault against the Jewish community.” The British encouraged this. “In Hulda the Jews had thirty rifles … In the month of June, 1929, the government’s inspector … told the headman of the colony, ‘I have orders to take these rifles away … The next day an Arab patrol was sent with a truck to collect the rifles by the authority of the Palestinian government. Nine days later the colony of Hulda was destroyed.”
“King Feisal, the chief spokesman for the Arabs at the Peace Conference, welcomed the idea of a Jewish National Home in Palestine … Only with the coming of the Jews did the Palestinian effendi class begin to realize that it would ultimately have to relinquish its stranglehold on the Arab peasants. Only then did the representatives of that class give to their anti-Zionist opposition the cachet of a nationalist movement … They saw that the transformation of the poverty-stricken share croppers and tenants into a prosperous industrial and agricultural community would inevitably lead to fraternization and amicable co-operation between the Jewish workers and those Arab peasant proletarians whom they had exploited for so long for their own exclusive benefit.”
“ … the British policy in regard to Palestine has fundamentally remained unchanged: the chief object was, and remains to this day, not the building of a National Home for the Jewish people, but to integrate the country in the British system of imperial defense … For Palestine is nothing less than Britain’s overland bridge to her Indian Empire.”
”The history of the seventeen years of mandatory regime in Palestine reveals an unbroken succession of restrictive measures … When the Arab mob in 1929 shouted ‘The government is with us,’ and threw themselves upon the Jewish colonies, which had first been disarmed by the Administration, they gave a true expression of the situation. I know this is a grave charge to make, but I convinced myself on the spot that the uprising of that year was deliberately fomented by the authorities.”
“The Jews want to build and develop; the British do not like to see the country, which they intend to be the military defense base of their Empire’s key position, cluttered up entirely with collectivist agricultural colonies and people with a tribe to which war and the things of war are anathema.”
“It is in the intensely pacifist sentiment which animates the Jewish people and their unshakeable determination that their collaboration with the Arab people must be founded on a basis of mutual trust and respect that we must see, I think, the crux of the entire Palestinian problem, the fundamental motive of Britain’s antagonism to the building of a Jewish National Home.
“Eretz Israel is calling its wandering children home and millions of Jews have a passionate longing to enter its gates. Let a beginning be made in taking the Jew there before it is too late and the barbarians carry out their threat to exterminate the remnant of Israel by the sword and the fire.”
Chapter Nine covers the Spanish Civil War of 1936. In the last chapters he comments on the beginnings of the Second World War. “In this sense it may well be that the new world upheaval which stands before the door is a divine instrument to sweep away a civilization that was unworthy of survival. Nothing positive is gained by a mere rejection of National Socialism, Fascism, and Communism. We must learn to understand that these movements in reality are attempting to pay off, in their own way, the immense and criminal debt incurred by democracy in allowing vast numbers of mankind to sink into ever deeper misery and in not being able to seize hold of them and inspire them with an ideal..”
