Posted on 01/26/2020 1:55:29 PM PST by CondoleezzaProtege
There's simply no practical explanation for Catholic countries to have been killing each other for four years.
Interesting perspective and posts. Thanks.
I think you’re on track. Austerlitz and all.
Well done, sir.
A side note...I recently read a book that, in part, detailed the build up to WWII. Prior to Pearl Harbor, the vast majority of Americans had no interest in getting involved, in large part due to the propaganda spewed during WW1. Apparently, almost everything the pols and media spoon fed to U.S. people about war atrocities committed by the Triple Alliance were largely exaggerated or totally made up. I was not aware of that. People in the U.S. were adamant about not putting their sons and husbands (and themselves) at risk. If Pearl Harbor (or something like it) had not happened, we may not have become involved until it was too late...if at all.
an orgy of violence broke out among baptised people
Oh, those historians. No doubt Trump was at fault, too.
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But was it not the aforementioned?
Your clumsy attempt at relevancy aside.
What happened in Europe is they didn't want to be warlike anymore.
I don't think we can appreciate the amount of life lost in Europe during those four years. (The loss of life among the males in France impacted census figures in that country through 1990.)
A "warlike society" may very well recover from "deep losses", but it absolutely needs time.
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Those damn Catholics. Forementioned, no less.
See the great film “Chariots of Fire” for a a commentary on the aftermath of exactly what you said in your first paragraph.
The Great War put an end to the liberal civilization under construction for centuries by the various nations of Europe.
The War gave birth to the idealized War State, which gave real purpose to otherwise insignificant human lives, and permitted society’s true leaders to emerge from the masses, and lead the world to paradise. Lenin and Mussolini were heroes of the ‘20s for vast swathes of Western elites.
The first job of a War State is to insinuate itself into private life in such a way as to destroy the existing society and reform it into creatures of the state, conditioned and malleable, unable to even imagine what life would be like without the socially destructive operations of “social welfare”, “public education”, “social benefits” and so on.
A Restoration of that civilization is possible, one hopes, although historically such a reboot did not happen in China, India, or in Classical Greece and Rome.
Spengler opines that only Western man has a truly historical imagination, so perhaps we can forestall the all-consuming totalitarianism threatening us by identifying the War State lies which have put us where we are.
An interesting point. The controlling issue in that regard would have been what result in the pre-WWI landscape of Europe had England been able to avoid the necessity of the various defense treaties, etc. that embroiled it in the struggle.
The immediate benefits: the struggle would likely have been resolved much earlier; England would not have been bankrupted; there would have been no reason for U.S. involvement.
There is the argument by some that the U.S. was a large financial supporter of England and became actively involved only when it reasonably appeared Germany might win the war. There is also the argument that the spread of communism would have been greatly impeded had Germany been a victor.
Anyone have a reading list on this point?
Odds are if Britain stayed out, even if it resulted in a German victory: No Hitler, No Holocaust, No Bolsheviks.
Of course, some different kind of evil may have emerged, but we’ll never know.
I recently visited The Imperial War Museum in London, and spent hours at the WWI exhibition, the whole time I couldn’t help thinking about what a waste it all was.
I could see the necessity of WWII, but WWI still makes no sense to me.
Which is pretty much a given if both England and the U.S. had stayed out.
Further it seems likely Germany would have evolved into more of a democracy, and an advanced one at that. It might have become a solid, stabilizing feature in Europe; it certainly demonstrated in the 1930's it had that capability.
All so depressing to contemplate. Do they even teach World War I in American history in public schools anymore?
It boiled down to Germany had a chip on their shoulder, and that Britain and France weren’t interested in allowing Germany into “the club”.
Anti-Semitism in post WWI Europe was by no means limited to German society. It was a fairly widespread sentiment throughout continental Europe. It was the combination of a punitive, revanchist peace, an economic depression exacerbated by that punitive peace, and widespread Anti-Semitism that allowed Hitler and the Nazis to attain power in Germany.
Based on the Treaty of Brest-Litvosk that Germany imposed on the Russian Bolshevik government and other stated war aims, it seems likely that a German victory would likely have resulted in a punitive peace being imposed upon France. The depression probably would still have occurred, and there was a good bit of anti-Semitism prevalent in France. I think it’s likely that something similar to a Nazi party might well have arisen in France had Germany won. Maybe it wouldn’t have had a crazy, megalomaniac like Hitler leading it, so maybe such a French regime would not have engaged in the same evil as the Nazis, but I do think France would quite possibly have fallen prey to a similar ideological force.
And to think, this was a war between siblings and cousins of one big pot of royalty, too!
And each was the religious figurehead for their nation.
By 1914, the established European state churches were nothing but corrupt tools of their respective regimes.
This essay asks a question, implies a moral judgment against the men who held the guns; but just doesn’t bother to posit any possible answers. In doing so, it impugns the lowly soldiers who had to do the killing once the elites had set this enormous catastrophe in motion. It was not the conscripts and volunteers in the trenches who abandoned their faith; as always, it was the elites who sat by and watched after they had sent them into the pits of hell on the battlefield.
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