“Perhaps World War One isn’t over”

Austin Bay makes the case.

12 Replies to ““Perhaps World War One isn’t over””

WW1??? How about the Romans? Or The Greeks.Or Atilla.Or the Neandrthal who took down a Cro-Magnon,but also mated with a homo sapians? We are fubared beyond all of nature until we learn to get rid of nanny state emotions.And long before that happens,the star-nosed shrew will be a top predator.Nature does not suffer fools.

“In summer 1914, political instability, institutional decline, fear and bitter grievance gripped Europe. In 2014, the same afflictions vex the globe.”
Yeah, but they weren’t flat broke in 1914, they had a mighty web of close strategic alliances, and they still had a sense of honor that made them answer the call of duty to those alliances.
(those guys in 1914 would put a gun to their heads and blow their brains out if they dishonored themselves and failed as miserably as today’s politicians do every other week)
Not so today. Nope. Hearts of coal and feet of clay, today…tomorrow too looks like from my not-so-lofty perch.

Bismarck, 1878: “Europe today is a powder keg and the leaders are like men smoking in an arsenal” … “Some damned fool thing in the Balkans will set it off.”

Character doesn’t exist in our political classes anymore,replaced by self-interest.

“Perhaps World War One isn’t over; it is just entering another phase.”
The poorly thought out 1919 peace negotiations, in particular regarding the ME, created artificial countries, and now we are seeing, as he says, another phase being played out.

Yeah I suspect that the Post WW2 border revisions in eastern Europe….Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus will persist as an irritant much like the Post WW1 border revisions in the same area were the causus bellum for WW2.
WW2 began when that old German battlewagon shelled Danzig (Gdansk).
I call attention to such bizarre situations as former Konigsberg(Kaligrad) is Russian territory isolated from Russia by Bellarus…..
And the Argentines claim the Falklands? The Pali’s claim all of Palestine west of the Jordan…..
The Versailles delegates were as clueless as OBAMA….

They called it “the War to End All Wars”.
An overblown sense of grandiosity coupled with a tragic lack of imagination.

A general axiom I always rely on:
Never trust the opinion of anyone who views history as a conspiracy theory.

Bingo.
Now the tribes of the middle east are fighting it out and the result will be the redefinition of the artificial ‘countries’ created after WWI.
The Kurdish independence movement is taking advantage of the ISIS action and declaring independence from Iraq, believing they can stop ISIS, something the Iraq army has been unable to accomplish. Turkey is trembling at the prospect as they have a large Kurdish minority within their borders.
We are, indeed, living in interesting times.
There is thousands of years of history in the region those in wet-behind-the-ears North America cannot begin to understand.
Happy 147th on Tuesday, Canada, BTW.

Actually, none of the combatants of 1914 was under any obligation under any pre-existing agreement to go to war. They all figured war was the necessary course in the circumstances. The only country with any treaty obligation to go to war was Italy, which declined to go to war until the following year, and then went against her allies.

“Actually, none of the combatants of 1914 was under any obligation under any pre-existing agreement to go to war.
1882 Fourth Triple Alliance- Alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy.
1905 Treaty of Björkö- A secret mutual defense accord between the German Empire and Russia.
The word ‘none’ may not mean what you think it means.

And, neither of those agreements obligated Germany to got to war in the circumstances. You clearly have no idea what they said.

12 Replies to ““Perhaps World War One isn’t over””

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