The Foul Tornado: On the centenary of World War I (Outstanding Read)

To say that that the First World War was the greatest cataclysm in human history since the fall of the Roman Empire is to put it mildly. The war destroyed so many good things and killed so many good people that civilization has not recovered and probably never will. Long after it officially ended, it continued to cause millions of deaths and tragedies, most obviously during its encore performance of 1939-45. But it did not stop even then. Many of its worst consequences came during official periods of peace and are unknown or forgotten, or remain unconnected with it in the public mind.

The loss cannot be measured in cash because it was paid in the more elusive coin of faith, morals, trust, hope, and civility. The war is the reason why Europe is no longer a Christian continent, because too many churches supported it. Pointing to the poverty and scientific backwardness of the pre-1914 world is a false comparison. Who is to say that we could not have grown just as rich as we are now, and made just as many technological and medical advances, had we not slain the flower of Europe’s young men before they could win Nobel Prizes, or even beget and raise children?

The astonishing thing is that so many conservative, Christian, and patriotic people have yet to understand the damage this event did to their causes. It is at least partly because we can barely begin to imagine the world that we lost.

His first C-46 featured Nationalist Chinese stars on the wings. A later airplane had Army stars. He was a civilian pilot, like a dozen others in this outfit. He wore an Army Air Force uniform with the CBI patch but without rank insignia. He was referred to as “captain.”
He identified the C-B-I as the ‘bump on the butt” of the Allied war effort since nothing of great importance happened during the campaign. It was a temporary patch job, driven by the fall of the Burma supply road to the Japanese. One can make the argument that American, Brit and Chinese forces held over a million Japanese on the Asian mainland vs moving them to defend against the island campaign. I don’t think Japan had the marine capacity to move them and, in any case, the chow was better than what the Japanese troops on the little islands could scavenge for themselves.

Many thanks for the ping, and apologies for my three-days-late vacation delay.

A brilliant article, I think, although I suspect Hitchens of an overly nostalgic view of the stability of the staggering Austro-Hungarian empire. Franz Ferdinand was, after all, the last best hope of the thing breaking up gracefully, and had a wall full of hopeful maps to prove it. It was not to be, and the matter had to be settled in a spray of blood inconceivable to the radicals - Princip was only a tool, after all - who envisioned another Europe without considering the price carefully enough.

I am of two minds with respect to the likely results of a German victory. On the one hand, one could hardly imagine a more autocratic approach to government than that of the Hohenzollern, and how that government would have dealt with the centrifugal explosion of its Austrian neighbor is a little hard to project ending happily. On the other, it is an interesting game to imagine the victorious government of the Kaiser left to deal with the dissolution of its principal ally's empire, an exercise left to the United States some three decades hence with the dissolution of the second British Empire and the colonies of France in Indochina. It may be charity to proclaim that we did manage to muddle through it, but we are where we are. I suppose it could have been worse.

That both Germany and Russia have, as they always have, territorial ambitions in the European arena is an observation that is as painfully obvious as it is painfully cliched. The specific ambitions seem to me to reek of Great Powers ambitions: control of the Black Sea and access to the Mediterranean on the part of the Russians; on the part of the Germans, the administrative and economic domination of its neighbors from Greece to the North Sea. Both Peter the Great and Frederick the Great would have understood. This return to the Great Powers approach to geopolitics is a direct result of the fall of the Soviet Union and the oh-so-sincerely desired retreat of United States foreign policy from accused (on the part of the Left) imperialism to accused (on the part of the Right, and with cause) incompetence and disengagement. History, or more precisely human folly, repeats itself: it is the world the radicals thought they wanted and the rest of us are going to have to deal with it.

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