[se99tp]

President Reagan's biographer on the tragedy of WWI: "The war not only permitted the cataclysm in Germany; it also enabled the fall of Czar Nicholas II in Russia. It’s difficult to imagine the Bolsheviks supplanting the Romanov dynasty without the intervention of WWI."

[lightman]

Ping

[clintonh8r]

100 years later, the eve of the next conflagration....

[jocon307]

You know, never until this moment did I realize the wife had been killed too. Very true about Russia.

[Free Vulcan]

It’s hard to put WWI in descriptive enough terms to explain it’s place in history. Pivotal might be as close as you can get.

WWI for all practical purposes wiped the European system of monarchy off the map and paved the way for the secular nation states we see today. It helped unleash communism that brought left wing ideology out from academia and into the seat of power.

This after centuries of Christian domination of Europe in both it’s thinking and politics that produced high European civilization of legend. Everything was just wiped off the slate, and what it unleashed meant the world would never be the same.

We are still living with it’s effects today, and will likely do so for generations. The consequences of it are the gift that keeps on giving, and generally not for the good. It’s still debatable whether it might be the trigger that ultimately brings down Western civilization.

[jocon307]

I just went back and read the piece, very good. I wish they gave a credit for the picture they used. I also wish the piece was longer, and how often does one say that?

Thanks for posting this, I hope a lot of people read it!

[iowamark]

The war not only permitted the cataclysm in Germany; it also enabled the fall of Czar Nicholas II in Russia.

As well as the end of the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire.

[The_Reader_David]

In Orthodox Christian thought “the one who restrains” who must be removed before the (last great) Antichrist can be revealed was the Emperor — be it the Roman Augusti (as the Emperors East and West were called from Diocletians reforms until the Empire fell in 1453) or their successors, the Tsars.

World War I and its aftermath swept aside every possible claimant to the Imperial Throne of Rome: the Tsars of Moscow, the “Third Rome”; the Kaisers, successor to the “Holy Roman Emperors” following on Charlemagne’s attempt to revive the office of Western Augustus; and the Ottoman Sultans, who, when it suited them, styled themselves as Muslim Roman Emperors, ruling from Constantinople (it was only Ataturk’s Turkish Republic which formally changed the name of the city to the popular Turkish nickname “Istanbul” — a corruption of the Greek eis ten politas).

[CharlesOConnell]

Hilaire Beloc in Europe and the Faith http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8442 informs us that the Junkers were essentially atheistic, a bridge between the anti-Christian Kulturkampf of Otto von Bismarck and the neo-paganism of the Nazis.

[Army Air Corps]

Bump.

[Lmo56]

The assassination was not considered a very big deal at the time it happened. It was the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Berchtold who ginned up all of the problems with his impossible demands.

I have no idea why the dude wasn’t shot by Emperor Franz Joseph after the war went south - Berchtold was allowed to “retire” and lived on.

A really good read about all of the political missteps leading up to the actual start of the war is a book called “The Sleepwalkers” ...

[PGR88]

It was a disastrously wasteful affair that Pope Benedict XV publicly declared an unjust war, a mad form of collective European suicide.

It didn't have to happen, and it seems ridiculous in hindsight, but regardless - it did occur.

[gattaca]

ping