Posted on 03/14/2026 10:58:26 AM PDT by ProgressingAmerica
Rudyard Lynch, host of “WhatIfAltHist,” explains how World War I turned Western civilization against honor culture and paved the way for the bureaucratic states of the 20th century. In the aftermath of mass mobilization and industrialized trench warfare, Woodrow Wilson’s vision of the global technocracy began to take shape, coming into full force after the even greater devastation of World War II. The organic, honor-based social order of the old world gave way to a managerial system that wields power by creating its own reality.
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Some of you are fond of promoting the fake ideal that we live with the Civil War and/or its aftermath in profound ways today.
We do not. The Civil War came, it went, and it was influential for a decade or 3 tops. After that, CW lost all relevance whatsoever. It’s just a footnote in books, nothing more.
We live with the aftermath of World War I and we have lived with this boat anchor for over 100 years. Progressivism is America’s Cancer.
The current order is based upon WWII and the US plan.
It is not. The entirety of FDR’s schemes were extensions of Wilsonian managerial machinations and have precious little difference from them.
I guess the author of the video looks at the history from a US point of view. He could just as well have used the history of the EU. The “father of the European Union”, Jean Monnet, was very anti-democratic and pro-managerial. He meant that the WWI was due to the popular forces in Europe pre-WWI, and therefore to avoid a repetition the major countries, or Europe in its entirety, would have to be ruled by professional bureaucrats. This is why - according to my view - the EU can never be reformed. It is built on a very anti-democratic base.
One does not have to know that much history to see how weird Monnet’s world view was. Prior to WWI how much power did the parliamentary parties in Austria, Russia, Germany wield? Even Britain entered the war without even a single debate in the House of Commons. No, the one primal catastrophe of the Western world, WWI, was not due to popular demand (although once the war was declared there were initially some patriotic demonstrations in most of the involved countries), but to inept handling of a political crisis by the people in power.
To understand how much the shadow of WWI still affects Europe one only needs to look at the constitution of the European Union. To a very large extent it is a copy of the League of Nations(!!). Not that many Europeans have any inkling of that.
Also, the first industrialised war made it necessary to shape the managerial states, given that during 4 years so much of the production had to be run in a way to keep the war effort going. And once the bureaucracies had been formed those who ran them were never letting go after the war. That is unfortunately the inheritance we still live with.
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