Posted on 11/11/2018 3:52:51 PM PST by Rummyfan
In the end, the guns fell silent at the appointed hour: 11 a.m. on the 11th of November, the 11th month of the year 1918. For four brutal years Europe -- and much of the rest of the world -- had been first drawn into and then fully involved in the most ferocious conflict in history up to that time. A war that began almost accidentally, with the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the Balkan backwater of Sarajevo, soon morphed into a domino-toppling series of alliances and ententes, from which no nation or empire emerged unscathed. Nineteenth-century battlefield tactics collided head on with the mechanized warfare of the 20th; millions of young men were blown to pieces, had limbs severed, were blinded, crippled, driven mad as they crouched in the trenches, waiting for the orders to go over the top, and charge into certain death for King, Kaiser, and Country.
When the war ended -- with an armistice, not a peace -- German troops were still occupying swaths of France. Romanov Russia, which had fought on the side of the British and the French, had cratered and, in a sequence of revolutions, would soon enough be in Bolshevik hands. The Hapsburgs, too, would vanish, with Austria reduced to a rump province of what would become the Third Reich, and the Kingdom of Hungary losing two-thirds of its territory. The "Sick Man of Europe," the Turkish Ottoman Empire, which had fought Russia on the side of the Germans and Austrians, was sundered and split up into some of the artificial states, like Iraq, which bedevil us yet today. Poland gained its independence from Russia, only to lose it again 21 years later, and thus occasion World War II.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
I thought the headline was about the US in November, 2018 as the people finally rebelled against the corruption of the election system. Oh, wait; not yet.
Ping.
Thank you for posting.
The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand didn’t start WWI.
The fake news media was alive and well even then.
They started it at the behest of their financial oligarchy overlords.
Sound familiar?
So a war that really did kind of start by knee jerk reaction and stupidity led to thee USSR, the FAKE countries drawn up that have given us so much trouble, like Iraq, and the icing on the cake, Hitler.
Seems like WWI had a LOT more casualties LONG after the war was over.
too bad the Archduke didn’t take a different street that day!
Ending the mass murder orgy committed in the name of the monarchist globalism variant of 100 years ago.
My late Father was just a little over a year old that day in Nov. 1918. He would grow up to fight in WWII.
My father was born in September 1918. US Navy World War II.
As I have noted elsewhere, no fewer than five dynasties fell in or about 1918: the Hohenzollern in Prussia, the Wittlesbach in Bavaria, the Romanov in Russia, the Ottomans in Turkey, and the Habsburgs in Astro-Hungary. Those between them were, with the now absent Bourbons and the Stuarts and the Spanish Habsburgs and others nearly too numerous to mention, the principal movers in all of the blood and pain suffered between 1618 and 1918. What is left is the apparatchiks, the nomenklatura, and that peculiar manifestation of statist ruling classes that is called, in the United States, Deep State and in Europe, the Government. The fall of the dynasties has left us with would-be rulers no less ambitious, power-obsessed, and murderous than the old ones. But this time - perhaps as a consequence of technology - this time it isn't going to be on any 300-year cycle. We're at the 100-year point now, and it may, regrettably, be time to tighten the seat belts for another rough ride.
He was supposed to, the royal party had expected trouble. But, nobody told his driver.
Gavrilo Princip’s group had given up on their original ambush plan and dispersed, and he was eating lunch when the Archduke’s entourage appeared. His attack was a literal spur-of-the-moment action.
Good freaking grief.
So it’s wholly possible that a BAD twist of events led to this war and the disasters it spawned.
You couldn’t make a fictional history novel more unbelievable.
But that’s just the way things go down sometimes.
I thought I did recall reading or hearing what you told me, but it was probably on the history channel 15 years ago and the distilled spirits have distilled my memory!
Thanks for that. My Father, born July 1917, was a bombardier on a B-24, Pacific Theater.
Filthy politicians.
Bump
Bump
Ping.
Worth the time to follow the link to the full article; excellent analysis of the past and a stern warning for the future.
From the link:
“But here we are. Germany, reunified although still smaller than it was in 1914, is once again the powerhouse of central Europe. Russia, under its latest czar, remains a resentful, suspicious outsider, drinking its past glories and nursing its overwhelming inferiority complex. In Turkey, Erdogan smokes the pipe dream of a recrudescent “caliphate,” with the former Roman Empire eastern capital of Constantinople (”Istanbul” is merely the Turkish form of the old name) as its centerpiece, with Rome again in its Islamic sights. The Race for Africa, which formerly pitted the British, French, Belgians, and Germans against each other, has been abandoned to the Chinese. And Marxism — whether cultural or economic — has once more risen from its grave to sink its vampiric fangs into the precious necks of young Americans hypnotized by its illusory attractions by three generations of Frankfurt-drilled college professors.”
Tears to my eyes. Thanks for the Ping.
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