Posted on 04/05/2017 4:28:34 PM PDT by SES1066
On April 6, 1917, the United States officially entered World War I, a war that changed the nation and the world forever. On April 6, 2017, thousands in attendance, as well as those watching video across the nation and around the world, will see the United States commemorate this turning point in our nation’s and the world’s history with the “In Sacrifice for Liberty and Peace: Centennial Commemoration of the U.S. Entry into World War I” ceremony, hosted by the United States World War One Centennial Commission at the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri.
(Excerpt) Read more at worldwar1centennial.org ...
I was in London in 2014 when there were multiple major public exhibitions and displays of "The Great War", including a very striking display of a sea of plastic red poppies spilling into the moat of the Tower of London complex. Every flower marked a death in that conflict.
We forget how much our country was changed by that war and its aftermaths. From the wry observation of "How are you going to keep him down on the farm when he has seen Gay Paree?", the institutionalizing of the National Government as bureaucratic masters and the very real shift from an accepted isolationism as a desirable condition to a country that cannot ignore the rest of the World, the USofA was profoundly changed to its core.
Add to that the ending of the European Monarchial governments, the sea-change of Imperial Russia becoming the Soviet Union and the expansionistic Japanese Empire becoming regionally equal with the other militaries, and the same could be said for most of the World. Just look at the mess in the Middle East and see how WW1 provided the ingredients!
WW1 could be called the 1st stage of the modern world and the echoes of those changes will reverberate for decades yet to come. While I believe that there are NO living Vets from any country, to all of them, I offer a heart-felt salute for serving their time in Hell!
The ramification of our participation in WW1 was the guarantee that we would lose the freedoms set forth at our founding...The seeds of this loss were planted during the imperialist adventures of a couple decades before.
A republic, if we could only have kept it...
Well said.
My brother has been a docent there for many years. I should go but I really hate crowds. Looking forward though to a few fly overs since we are on flight plans that routinely go down Interstate 69 AKA Metcalf Ave.
Yep.
Robert Pirsig pointed out the ramifications of WWI in his book Lila.
The useless slaughter brought an end to The Victorians and started us down the trail of “Anything goes!”.
WWI devastated Europe. Its impacts there were far deeper and broader than in the US. The useless slaughter dissolved centuries-old social structures and wiped out generations of historical continuity. Furthermore, it eroded faith in humanity’s ability to apply reason as a solution to its conflicts, and left behind a hollow absurdity instead. Nothing made sense anymore so why try to impose order on chaos?
Some of the British WWI programs (drama mini-series) I've watched via torrents are:
37 Days
ANZAC Girls
The Crimson Field
Gallipoli
Our World War
The Passing Bells
Plus they've done a large number of documentaries on the war as well.
When I was in London in early May of 2006, they were holding a commemoration and parade which featured vets of the Royal Marines. I first ran into the parade at Buckingham Palace, then walked down Pall Mall to the Horse Guard Barracks, where the parade showed up again. They had a ceremony and laid poppy wreaths at the WWI monument across from the Parade ground.
I agree well said.
I was very disappointed that our leaders in the US House and Senate did not permit the body of the last veteran of WWI to lie in state in the Rotunda. I believe Great Britain honored the passing of their WWI veteran with great dignity and respect.
I was very disappointed that our leaders in the US House and Senate did not permit the body of the last veteran of WWI to lie in state in the Rotunda. I believe Great Britain honored the passing of their WWI veteran with great dignity and respect.
My great-uncle was with the 38th Battalion, Canadian Expeditionary Forces in WWI. He was serving in France, and was wounded on September 2nd, died on September 10th, 1918. He's buried in a British Military Cemetery near Boulogne, France.
I am sorry that I did not visit Westminster Abbey. I did
visit the Imperial War Museum and spend almost all of my time in the WWI section. And as I said before,I visited our WWI museum in Kansas City, Missouri.
The father of one my friends lived in Detroit and in 1914 went over to Windsor and joined the Canada Expeditionary Force.
Some channel could also pick up one of the British or other foreign documentaries about the war.
There are plenty of programs on DVD including "World War One in Color" and "The First World War" (both from 2003).
"World War One," the 1964 CBS series narrated by Robert Ryan, is a classic and is also on DVD.
There is also "The Crimson Field" on PBS, a British drama about nurses in the war, and "Anzac Girls" an Australian offering on the same subject.
I never got to the Imperial War Museum on either of my trips to London. On my second trip in 2007, I did get to Bletchley Park. When I went overseas for the first time in 2006, before I went to London, I went to Paris so I could take a day tour to the Normandy Landing Beaches. Before we toured the beaches, we visited the Caen Memorial Museum, and later in the day we went to the Normandy American
Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, France. I’m so glad I had the opportunity to visit those places.
WW1, brought to you by that great Progressive, Woodrow Wilson, and supported, indeed demanded by the other great Progressive, Teddy Roosevelt was the greatest American blunder of the 20th Century. There was no great American interest that could not have been promoted by other, peaceful means. Rather than enter the war for national interests we sent our young men to war for nebulous naive idealism which was preached by a messianic POTUS. Without the US both sets of powers would have either exhausted themselves or found a way to agree on an end of hostilities. In the end the result was a vengeful German people, exhausted allies unwilling to take the steps to prevent a rise of German nationalism, a Japan rewarded with German Pacific possessions and emboldened to expand and seeing the European powers weakened by war, looked to move against them, and an America where dissent had been clubbed into silence by the state and a disillusioned people retreating into isolation. A bad outcome for an imperious predident’s ego.
I will make an argument that the USA specifically a US Naval War College professor was the cause of WWI - Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan.
Admiral Mahan wrote historical works that became a world wide best sellers - “The Influence of Seapower on History - 1660- 1783 followed by a sequel “The Influence of Seapower Upon the French Revolution and Empire - 1793-1812”. He was invited to talk in roughly 1890 by every country that had a seacoast and a notion that they might need a navy. His book and subsequent lectures were particularly convincing & compelling to a young monarch named Wilhelm. Who loved the sea & his yacht and was jealous of his Uncle Edward’s yacht and other boats. This Wilhelm is the Kaiser of course and so he starts on this massive fleet expansion. Prior to this the Imperial German navy was primarily a coast defense Baltic sailing service. This massive expansion with state-of-art gunnery optics, steel all better quality then what his Uncle Edward’s navy - the Royal Navy. They countered with their own building program and with growing hostility between two countries who had once been close allies and shared royal families. For example, Wilhelm was Victoria’s favorite grandchild. Edward despised Wilhelm and thought he was a spoiled uncouth brat. This naval rivalry pushed the UK closer to England’s traditional rival France and away from a traditional ally Germany.
So if Mahan had written about gardening there might not have been the German-UK naval rivalry. The UK might have been happy to let Germany duke it out with France. They’ve done it before and the UK didn’t care. So if Mahan had written a book on petunias, there would be no BEF in France, likely no submarine warfare to piss us off and the US would have stayed out of WWI.
So the US caused WWI!
Dragged into a foreign war by democrats. As usual.
One hundred years ago today, the racist warmonger Woodrow Wilson conned America into a war we had no business entering.
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