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“Kaiser’s aggressive Prussian militarism,”

is a nice revisionism except for the fact that war was celebrated and welcome in every western country. French were eager to pay back the Germans, people were convinced it will all be over in few month. It was a bloodletting too, something that broke back of the French as a nation (never to recover), bankrupted British empire and Germany, pushed Russia over the brink and into communist abyss.

Pacifism/appeasement was a direct result of having one generation of people wiped out. France lost over 4% of its total population, to compare.. if scaled to current US population it would be over 13 million killed. Add to that about 10% of population wounded.. (that would be around 30 million in current US population) think about it..

Someone here a few years back told a tale of visiting a small town somewhere in the British Isles.

The town had a memorial to those lost in the Great War. Carved in stone were the names of about 200 men.

Also carved in stone on the same memorial, a few decades later, were the names of those men lost in WWII.

All four of them.

The Great War had wiped out the entire adult male population of that town.

quoting VDH: "“Kaiser’s aggressive Prussian militarism,”

from dimk: "is a nice revisionism except for the fact that war was celebrated and welcome in every western country. French were eager to pay back the Germans..."

Sorry, pal, but that's really stupid talk -- a combination of German propaganda and abysmal western education. In fact, the Great War was started by German leadership pushing Austria against Serbia, declaring war on Russia, and then invading Belgium and France.

France & Belgium declared war on no one, invaded no one. Britain was the only ally to declare war on Germany in 1914, and then only after Germany invaded neutral Belgium.

The long-lasting German effort to shirk blame for starting WWI is, of course, highly understandable. But it's simply not true, and we should not accept it.

See Fromkin: "Europe's Last Summer".

from dimk: "...pushed Russia over the brink and into communist abyss."

"The war" did not "push Russia over the brink," Germany did -- in a "sealed train," sending the Communist "baccillus" into Russia in order to achieve with politics what they could not militarily: Russian surrender.

The German high command not only "infected" Russia with Lenin, they supported him financially until he succeeded. Their pay-off, of course, was the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.