The Boer War and its Humanitarian Critics
David Nash argues that opposition to the Second Boer War began the tradition of peace politics that has flourished through the twentieth century.
Writing in the 1930s, George Orwell was convinced that the military and those associated with it had become essentially anathema to British public and cultural life. But such naked suspicion and mistrust of the soldiering profession had not originated overnight, and, arguably, had been produced by a series of ambivalent military episodes which had served to discredit the institution. Similarly, the philosopher Karl Popper, writing in the 1960s, believed that the experience of the South African War in particular, had had a lasting effect on British public opinion. Repugnance at what war had become, stimulated by the experience of this conflict, he argued, had definitely affected Britain’s attitudes in 1914 and in the inter-war period had laid the foundations for the policy of appeasement.
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