“For Germany, the Nov. 11 armistice did not mean peace like it did in France and Britain.”
The Brits committed a mass murder by enforcing a starvation naval blockade against German ports for about 8 months after the war. The low estimate is that 100,000 civilians died. The poverty lead to the street fighting.
Even worse, the British and French retribution in the Armistice was a primary causal factor of the failure of the Weimar republic and the rise of the 3rd reich. The demands for immense financial reparations was one of the big reasons Weimar Germany began unleashing the printing presses. It’s aftermath lead to the cold war.
WWI and the crazed loons of Europe’s handling of it is the primary cause of most of the misery in the world today. From the middle east and Saudi Arabia, to the Germans sending Lenin into Russia, to the ascendance of the Progressives here in the USA, to the creation of an FBI, to WWII macro and micro, to the utterly disrespectful treatment of the Japanese ally at Versailles, the beginning of debasement from gold into fiat currencies, the unleashing of Soviet communism... you name it. It all came from the aftermath of WWI.
Although, in fairness, the terms of of the Versailles Treaty were no harsher than what Germany planned to do to France when it won.
However, I’ve often made the rest of the points you make in your post- sending Lenin into Russia and the carving up of the middle east into irrational and perpetually warring ‘nations’ that bore no resemblance to tribes or history, to that most damaging president we ever had, Wilson’s ascendancy and turning a Japan that should have been a natural ally into a hostile...
Sto Lat, Polska!
I still think things might have been better off had Britain (and subsequently the US) had stayed out of the conflict. Germany wasn’t going to threaten the British Empire, and if France went down, so what?