The church was more of a cheerleader for their respective nations than they were a sane voice of calm.
People went to war with the idea that heaven was on their side.
Then they found themselves is a disaster that soilders on both sides realized was a complete farce that was doing little more than chewing up people in the name of monarchies and empires.
The seeds go back to the French Revolution
WWI was the death of Europe.
And to think it all took place due to an action the Clintons consider just an everyday occurrence.
Woodrow Wilson was insane to ever allow the United States to become involved in World War 1.
The Germans, the British, and the French were on the verge of an armistice, which would have ended the conflict in a draw.
There never would’ve been a punitive Treaty of Versailles, which begat Hitler, Stalin, the Holocaust, and the death of Europe.
Woodrow Wilson forever bears this burden of shame, for sending U.S. troops to die in the sodden trenches of France.
It was a really good movie. I just saw it yesterday. Fantastic cinema that told a very narrow story without dealing directly with the big story.
I am a Christian, but I respectfully disagree with the Bishop on this as my take on WWI is different.
WWI is what happens when you have a government of the elites for the elites. Period. When governments are concerned about the health and welfare of their own people they do not go to war other than in the most dire circumstances. When the elites are worried about what is in their own personal interests or they put their pride in front of their people we end up in war. In fact, a Christian worldview and heart would demand that any leader think first of the welfare of those he/she leads.
There are times and reasons to go to war for just causes, but WWI did not come close to meeting that threshold with most involved never really understanding how/why they got there. It was a tragic war and a huge waste of young men.
Beautiful film that told a sober story. I sat there towards the end absorbing the futility of it all thinking of our own political class in DC just shaking my head. I served, but in hindsight I wonder what I served. In my heart it was the nation, my family, my (fellow) soldiers, and my community.
In my mind, I now see that it was Bush Sr., Clinton, and W and their interest were not mine or those of the average Joe/Jane.
WWI and WWII killed off the alpha male genes in Europe.
Didn’t analyze it that much. Less than Saving Private Ryan but it showed to an extent the fight in the trenches.
Didn’t walk out even thinking about it. Something was missing.
I don’t know if you can make a war movie without the smell(s). Dead horses, smell of sh*t and intestines,
overflowing latrines or burning excrement with kerosene, if any, rotting corpses, all the screams and smell of fear.
Oh, those historians. No doubt Trump was at fault, too.
There's simply no practical explanation for Catholic countries to have been killing each other for four years.
Interesting perspective and posts. Thanks.
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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.
All so depressing to contemplate. Do they even teach World War I in American history in public schools anymore?
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.
The Great War gave a Saturn V boost to trends developing at the turn of the century.
All that was left was the "social" Christianity. Which is nice but about as strong as cobwebs when the time comes when you need it.
Christianity was the state religion and the government had it's fingers all over it. That meant that the seminaries were run by the government indirectly and the pastorships and leadership positions in the church were handed out on the basis of who you were related to.
The Church was not a calling but a profession.
Most of the pastors and priests did not believe the tenets of their own faith. And they held those of the laity who did in contempt.