Amazon Review
If someone less distinguished than Jesus College, Oxford, fellow Niall Ferguson had written The Pity of War, you could be forgiven for thinking the book was out for a few cheap headlines by contradicting almost every accepted orthodoxy about the First World War. Ferguson argues that Britain was as much to blame for the start of the war as Germany, and that, had Britain sacrificed Belgium to Germany, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution would never have happened. Germany, he continues, would have created a united European state, and Britain could have remained a superpower. He also contends that there was little enthusiasm for the war in Britain in 1914; on the other hand, he claims the war was prolonged not by clever manipulation of the media, but by British soldiers’ taking pleasure in combat.
The centenary of the Great War has not really been that big of a deal here across the pond but in Britain and the Continent they have been furiously digging up the graves of old resentments and rehashing old injuries. Curious....
I think it would have been in everyone’s interest, if no one had gotten involved in WW 1. I don’t think it accomplished much, except to get millions killed.
A lot of people forget that WWII was an intra family feud. Kaiser Wilhelm was Queen Victoria’s grandson. There’s a story that the Queen staged a parade of the British Fleet to intimidate the visiting Kaiser from attempting to build an overseas empire. The Kaiser’s reaction was to later say “I must have a fleet like Grand Mama’s!”.
Counter-argument from Professor Gary Sheffield:
The same Niall Ferguson behind McCain and Romney?
There are only two options for victory: Beer, wings, and westernization of the degenerate muhammadan hoard, or genocide of the same bunch of imbeciles.
Whatever it takes to stop the slaughter of the innocents is moral.
Musselmen beware.
The U. S. made a huge mistake getting involved. WWI changed the world for the worse in most every way.
It’s hard to imagine German dominance over France ending worse than the post-war history did.
The big error from which everything else flowed was the progressives’ “captive nations” fantasy. Many examples abound.
Who can doubt the the Turk knew how to sort out the Arabs? How can the Eastern European microstates compete with Germany and Russia? Even today, in the Western fantasy of a unitary, imaginary “Ukraine” within its present borders there is nothing but smoke and bloodshed.
We need an Emperor in Vienna, and a Sultan in Constantinople, along with a Czar in St. Petersburg.
And the Dodgers in Brooklyn.
Then, there will be peace.
!
Prof. Ferguson fails to address the Treaties in force in 1914 where Great Britain was a signatory.In a rewrite of history Great Britain gets the blame and the fun loving Germans get a pass.
Remember:-Letter from Kaiser Wilhelm II to the Emperor of Austria in the early days of the war, in which the German Emperor wrote:
“My soul is torn asunder, but everything must be put to fire and blood. The throats of men and women, children and the aged must be cut, and not a tree or a house left standing.
With such methods of terror, which alone can strike so degenerate a people as the French, the war will finish before two months, while if I use humanitarian methods, it may prolong for years. Despite all my repugnance, I have had to choose the first system.”
The Germans learned from Shermans march to the sea.
I’ve a lot of respect for Mr. Ferguson, but this one is a little silly.
Since at least the Glorious Revolution of 1688, it’s been THE cornerstone of British foreign policy to prevent the Continent being dominated by a single power.
This is for the fairly obvious reason that Britain is an island. It’s historically been protected against invasion by its fleet.
The fleet-building capacity of the Continent, if united, was much greater than that of Britain. But as long as the Continent was divided, Britain could defeat any likely invasion fleet.
Unite the Continent, spend five years building a fleet, and the RN could be utterly overwhelmed.
Solution, prevent the Continent from uniting. Thus Britain’s traditional opposition to Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon and Kaiser Bil.
Looking at the posts there are a lot here who know more about the beginning of WWI than some. But there has not been any mentions of the “conspiracy theories” of how we got involved.
Here is one from a conspiracy web page.
http://www.barefootsworld.net/fs_m_ch_08.html
“WARBURG, PAUL: New York City. German, naturalized citizen, 1911. was decorated by the”Kaiser in 1912, was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Handled large sums furnished” by Germany for Lenin and Trotsky. Has a brother who is leader of the espionage system of “Germany.”
“Strangely enough, this report, which must have been compiled much earlier, while we were at war with Germany, is not dated until December 12, 1918. AFTER the Armistice had been signed. Also, it does not contain the information that Paul Warburg resigned from the Federal Reserve Board in May, 1918, which indicates that it was compiled before May, 1918, when Paul Warburg would theoretically have been open to a charge of treason because of his brother’s control of Germany’s Secret Service.”
There are so many conspiracy theories about how big bankers got us into WWI that it would take a library to list all of them.
How much is true I don’t know.
I think Der Furer would argue his Two Front strategy in WWII is the biggest Boner in modern history...
Though electing Dumbass Hope-n-change boy twice may ultimately win out on both...