Condemned to repeat it - WWI
An excellent essay by
Margaret MacMillan at the Brookings Institute.
A long read but worth it.
The Rhyme of History
Lessons of the Great War
Earlier this year I was on holiday in Corsica and happened to wander into the church of a tiny hamlet in the hills where I found a memorial to the dead from World War I. Out of a population that can have been no more than 150, eight young men, bearing among them only three last names, had died in that conflict. Such lists can be found all over Europe, in great cities and in small villages. Similar memorials are spread around the globe, for the Great War, as it was known prior to 1940, also drew soldiers from Asia, Africa, and North America.
World War I still haunts us, partly because of the sheer scale of the carnage�10 million combatants killed and many more wounded. Countless civilians lost their lives, too, whether through military action, starvation, or disease. Whole empires were destroyed and societies brutalized.
But there�s another reason the war continues to haunt us: we still cannot agree why it happened. Was it caused by the overweening ambitions of some of the men in power at the time? Kaiser Wilhelm II and his ministers, for example, wanted a greater Germany with a global reach, so they challenged the naval supremacy of Great Britain. Or does the explanation lie in competing ideologies? National rivalries? Or in the sheer and seemingly unstoppable momentum of militarism? As an arms race accelerated, generals and admirals made plans that became ever more aggressive as well as rigid. Did that make an explosion inevitable?
Or would it never have happened had a random event in an Austro-Hungarian backwater not lit the fuse? In the second year of the conflagration that engulfed most of Europe a bitter joke made the rounds: �Have you seen today�s headline? �Archduke Found Alive: War a Mistake.�� That is the most dispiriting explanation of all�that the war was simply a blunder that could have been avoided.
The search for explanations began almost as soon as the guns opened fire in the summer of 1914 and has never stopped. Scholars have combed through archives from Belgrade to Berlin looking for the causes. An estimated 32,000 articles, treatises, and books on World War I have been published in English alone. So when a British publisher took me out to lunch on a lovely spring day in Oxford five years ago and asked me if I would like to try my hand at one of history�s greatest puzzles, my first reaction was a firm no. Yet afterward I could not stop thinking about this question that has haunted so many. In the end I succumbed. The result is yet another book, my own effort to understand what happened a century ago and why.
It was not just academic curiosity that drove me, but a sense of urgency as well. If we cannot determine how one of the most momentous conflicts in history happened, how can we hope to avoid another such catastrophe in the future?
A good read -- she brings up the parallels between pre-WWI and today. They are chillingly similar.
I disagree with her thesis that the cure is a stronger world government. I do not see this as being a successful endeavor ever given the corruption that inevitably rots any bureaucracy. We would be much better served with a world full of prosperous strong nation-states. Root out the corruption and demonstrate by example what can be done with minimal government intervention.
Our own
Tenth Amendment sums it up nicely:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
We would be too busy making money to go to war...
Posted by DaveH at December 22, 2013 11:10 AM